Pinaki Bhattacharya, Senior defence correspondent
The fortnight had been tumultuous. A series of stories by an Indian news agency about Chinese military intrusions into what is claimed to be Indian territory inflamed the news circles. Soon the television news channels began yelping with a threat from China, magnified hundredfold. Official denials from New Delhi fell on ears, long programmed to ignore anything that challenged the make-believe, with expected results.
The situation led to a stinging rebuke to the Indian media by the China Daily in Beijing. But the situation had an inexorable dynamic of its own. If the Indian Minister for External Affairs described the boundary with China as most ‘peaceful’ and ‘incident free,’ a leading national daily front-paged a story that two Indian border policemen had been injured in gun battles with the Chinese on the eastern frontier.
All the stories quoted unnamed sources, which meant no one was ready to publicly own up to the sensational headlines. If it did seem that there was a design in this drumming up of war hysteria, the journalists who covered the government agencies dealing with national security (including this writer) were at a loss to find the hidden hands.
For, the official government spokespersons were foaming in their mouths repeating interminably the standard line: that these reported intrusions were normal. They held the Line of Actual Control drawn after the 1962 war was a geographical abstraction at many places, thus enabling both countries to claim same territory as their own. As a result an aggressive border patrol in those areas could be called an intrusion by either country.
The Indian Ministry of External Affairs went a step further. Not only did they dub the borders with China most ‘peaceful,’ but they reminded the country that the two countries have pledged to maintain peace and tranquility on all the border areas, including those that are contested.