Defending neck

China’s possible strategy to cut Siliguri corridor The defence of the thin “chicken’s neck” territory-connecting the seven Indian North-eastern States to West Bengal and the rest of India called the “Siliguri Corridor”- lies in the Chumbi Valley of Chinese-held Tibetan Autonomous Region that is contiguous to the Indian States of Sikkim and Arunachal Pradesh. The Chumbi Valley is flanked on either side by Sikkim on its west and Bhutan on the east. Nepal shares a common border with Sikkim and Chinese and Indian armies are face-to-face along the whole of Arunachal Pradesh. The Siliguri Corridor is an area so constricted that it is amazing that after the debacle at the hands of the Chinese (who made a penetration as deep as Tezpur in Assam in 1962) there is little to show preparations have been made to defend it. It is through the dagger-like formation of the Chumbi Valley that the Chinese People’s Liberation Army can launch an operation to block the Siliguri Corridor and thus delink the whole of the North-east from the rest of India in one massive swipe. It is in the Chumbi Valley, therefore, that the defence of the strategically critical corridor lies. India cannot afford to allow any Chinese presence inside the narrow corridor for even a day let alone the two months it took to clear the Pakistan Army intrusion in Kargil in 1999. It is a luxury India cannot afford because complicating factors (unlike as in Kargil) include the several insurgencies that have either been encouraged and instigated against India almost from the moment of the attainment of independence from British colonialism up to and inclusive of the current breakaway attempts by the Barua faction of the United Liberation Front of Asom. Disadvantages for India China can do to India what India did to Pakistan in 1971 by delinking the former East Pakistan from West Pakistan and helping to create the sovereign independent nation-state of Bangladesh. The Chinese will have an opportunity to create seven different Bangladeshs’ in north-east India. Among other disadvantages that India faces in its defensive posture vis-a-vis China is that many of the infrastructure projects of roads and bridges, belatedly initiated, have been delayed by the difficulties of the terrain and the inadequacy of heavy lift helicopters to deliver civil engineering material to the building sites. Terrain cutting has thus not been an easy task and projects are behind schedule by several years. Given China’s growing belligerence stoked in large part by the renewed Tibetan unrest within the Tibetan Autonomous Region (and that of the Uighur Muslims in Xingjiang province) marked by self-immolations by Buddhist monks and laymen a la South Vietnam in the 70s, it is very likely to lay the blame for its bad governance in Tibet at India’s doorstep for being home to the largest Tibetan refugee population. By the very nature of its geography the Siliguri Corridor is indefensible with static obstacles and firepower. As experience has shown the sustained patrolling by the Indian Army, paramilitary forces and the West Bengal police not to mention the protection forces of the Indian Railways-a broad guage and a meter-guage line pass through it-criminal and anti-national activity is rampant. For example when Bhutan decided to crack down on ULFA and other Indian insurgency group camps in southern Bhutan some years ago, nearly all of them managed to escape into Bangladesh and Myanmar with the Indian security forces unable to do anything about it. More recently drug and arms peddlers and Maoists from neighboring Nepal have misused the Siliguri Corridor for their own nefarious ends to bring contraband inside Indian territory. Just about 100 km long the corridor is as narrow as 14 km at one point and widest at 33 km at another. Defending it within an internal security concept will not work against a conventional military force of the type the Chinese can deploy from the north of the Chumbi Valley which is well supplied by a network of roads. The fact that Bhutan lies to the east of the northern limits of the Siliguri corridor creates a dicey situation for India. The use of Bhutanese territory for the defence of the corridor will attract Chinese punitive action against Bhutan. To ensure Bhutan’s sovereignty, territorial integrity and neutrality, India cannot do anything to jeopardize its very existence. The Chinese will lean on Sikkim where it has suffered humiliation at the Nathu La pass in 1987 for provoking a confrontation. Yet the defences at Nathu La could be either bypassed or overrun by wave upon wave of unremitting attacks as is the PLA’s traditional tactic. The emerging Nepal factor is also disturbing for India given that there is talk of not allowing recruitment of Gorkhas for the Indian Army. This is clearly a China-dictated agenda. It is very likely that the Maoists of Nepal will extend support to the Chinese to penetrate Indian defences in the west by acting as a Fifth Column on their own or facilitate Chinese infiltration behind Indian lines in north Bihar. Remaining choices The only choice for India for a credible defence of the Siliguri corridor and hence the whole of the north-east region is to ensure that it is able to monitor the Chinese movements in the Chumbi Valley. As part of military maneuver and tactics the Chinese will have to use the top of the funnel that is the Valley, as a “forming up place” for the PLA preparatory for an attack into the Siliguri Corridor. It is unlikely that the Chinese will give away the game plan by any large-scale movement of additional troops and either use the turnaround of troops returning from rest and recreation to begin a momentum intended to carry them into the corridor by hitting Indian defences along the way. One indicator of the Chinese intention will be the strength of the battalions that are permanently posted in the funnel of the Chumbi Valley. An assessment of what that number can do in an assault into the corridor needs to be prepared and updated. India must always retain a 4:1 advantage over whatever Chinese troops that are posted permanent in the Chumbi Valley. This is because the Chinese will be rolling down from the high ground and stopping them would be problematic given the normal ratio of 3:1 in favor of the defenders to be able to ensure that the attack is repelled as many times as it is launched. Indian artillery must be so placed as to dominate the whole of the Chumbi Valley. There must not be any of the finicky sentimentality that was the basis for Brigadier John Dalvi’s failure to use the two three-inch mortars available with him to try and stop the Chinese even as they were attacking Indian positions in 1962. His rationale, given in black and white in his book “The Himalayan Blunder”, was that he did not want to endanger the lives of his own men by shooting mortars close to their positions. The consequence was that he landed a prisoner of war in a Chinese camp without firing a shot in anger. India will have to ensure that in the course of any Chinese attack the Indian Air Force will automatically and in keeping with a pre-planned game plan bombard the forward edge of battle as soon as the alert of a Chinese attack is sounded. Not using the IAF was one of the reasons for the debacle of 1962. So as not to give China an excuse to broaden the war frontage the IAF must concentrate its bombardment only within and around the Chumbi Valley with the intent of reducing the Chinese attackers as soon as possible and breaking up their forward momentum. However, things may not be as open and shut as this. The Chinese may prefer to begin their attack on the Siliguri Corridor by an airborne assault by its Special Forces. These may be inducted not by a direct flight towards India but through an oblique flight either east-west along the Line of Actual Control or in the opposite direction from the Nepal side. To ensure that it is not caught unawares of Chinese air activity there ought to be in place a permanent airborne warning and command system (AWACS) aircraft doing a 180 degree reconnaissance of the airspace over Sikkim, Bhutan and Arunachal Pradesh to prevent any pre-emptive strike by Chinese Special Forces anywhere along the Himalayas with particular concentration in the Chumbi Valley.