Monday, July 29, 2013

China does a mini-Kargil

The objectives are big

China has sent a complement of 50 troops 19 km into Indian territory in the DBO sector in the middle of the strategically-significant Depsang Bulge. The sector is at an altitude of 17,000 feet. Protracted discussions have just begun. China claims the territory as its own; India is busy finding ways to secure a retreat of Chinese troops. The development reflects poorly on Indi's so-called China experts.

China has been frantically developing its national power with economic acitivity, expansive military infrastructure and technology build-up. On the contrary, India has been a meek reactionary hobbled by  lack of foresight and diffidence in the name of caution.

A comprehensive study done by the Eastern Command two years back had brought out that China was ready to initiate its conspiracy against India. The report clearly enunciates the Chinese ‘External Calm and Internal Intensity’ strategy that will not be aimed at achieving any military gains but to  to humiliate India, undermine its rise and dent its position.

The present local position held by the Chinese troops is 30 km south of Daulet Beg Oldi. Daulat Beg Oldi and its airstrip are located just south of the great Karakoram pass; it offers India a means to snap the road route between China and Pakistan and guard the eastern gates to the Siachen glacier. Thus it can, if China holds on, be interdicted.

Zorawar Daulet Singh, an expert on China-India military relationship, says, “The Ladakh incident has been provoked by the Chinese to bring about a new operating environment on the border and draw Delhi’s attention to the tactical level.” It sounds plausible when one analyses China's demands.

On one side, China is setting conditions to stop construction activities at Daulat Beg Oldi and at Chumar where a helipad is being built, and for some tin sheds at Fukche to be dismantled. What has miffed China is the Indian steps to better its infrastructure. Infrastructure development has been in the media for decades. It’s not that we are doing it secretly. Now, once China has completed its infrastructure build up it aims to hinder Indian side of infrastructure buildup.

Border patrols have increased from both sides as China increased its number every year. This is an extension of what was being tested for years. It can be termed as a mini Kargil. Although it was not an off-season intrusion, it was well planned and caliberated. There are clear signs that the Chinese are gradually adding up to the symbolic escalation as they started with tents, increased their numbers, added flags and they will keep waiting for Indian reactions and then will accordingly keep adding to the provocation. No country will throw its soldiers in and this is least possible from a country like China which plans its moves with great care.

If we draw a parallel with the war zone campaign, then this move by China is quite clearly akin to  ‘External Calm and Internal Intensity’. The primary aim here is to lull the adversary into lethargy and inactivity, exactly like it happened before 1962. The slogan ‘Hindi Chini Bhai Bhai’ sums it up the best. As in 1992, the army had drawn a precise analysis of 10 years of the Chinese plan ahead. In Indian army relocation plan and dual tasking official document of Indian Government had led to ending the posture taken during Operation Chequerboard. This operation was launched during General K Sundarji’s time when China had tried to grab a post in Sumdorong Chu. Gen Sundarji had deployed troops in an offensive posture and which had resulted in China backing off. But after the Army’s relocation plan this posture was discontinued. It might have been a wise decision then as it was based on operational information that China was not ready to fight a war for the next 10 years as it was to focus on building its economy and infrastructure. But the analysis that no fight would take place till 2002 also meant that China would be ready for action after 2002. What was our response apart from changing the posture? Did we engage in improving infrastructure and operational capacity? India has not bought artillery guns for two decades, Our air defence has holes, helicopters are lacking, tanks are night blind. Our field formations do not have proper practice ammunitions. The list is long even if we do not talk of the approved strategic roads after the Kargil Committee Report. We have awakened late and started proper allocation in 2010 which will take another 10 years to develop. So, since 1992 poor appreciation and bad military management have hobbled India. TSI, through its sources, has learnt that almost 30  to 40 per cent of the army’s vehicles do not have fuel to run them. In August 2012, an executive order was issued that no new vehicle would be bought.

Ironically the defence Budget increases every year but does not take cost escalation and inflation into account. A senior officer informed TSI that for nine years the utilization of Capital expenditure has been the maximum 9 percent of the allocation. “The first half of the year is wasted in delaying the files and then executive orders are issued and the allocations are blocked,” he adds.

From August the weather will make any troop movement impossible. China had tried the same strategy with Japan but met with strong resistance. It also used pressure tactics with Vietnam and the Philippines and is now doing the same with India. India not only needs to discuss issues with China in clear terms but also focus its priorities and build its national power in a synergized manner. Otherwise, it will only have to capitulate to the smart moves of the adversary.

Dr Dibyesh Anand, associate professor, Westminster University and an expert on China, believes there is relative paucity of neutral and non-nationalist scholarship from the mainstream Indian media, which prevents a dispassionate analysis and gives space to hawks who fit this event into the older lens of bad China/good India/impotent Indian government.  He says: “The way out is to temper down the tension, and ensure serious conversation between Beijing and Delhi without the media baying for each other’s blood,” says Dr. Anand.


From Neecha Nagar to Miss Lovely

Indian cinema’s association with the Cannes Film Festival goes back a long way. As the world’s largest film producing nation inches its way back into the reckoning on the Croisette, here is a historical overview of what has gone before

India’s association with the Cannes Film Festival goes back all the way to its first edition in 1946. That year, Chetan Anand’s Neecha Nagar, loosely adapted from Maxim Gorky’s The Lower Depths, won the Grand Prix along with ten other titles. Eleven films were given the top prize because Cannes was seeking to make up for the hiatus of the War years.

Legend has it that the Cannes event was originally supposed to kick off in 1939 because the Venice Film Festival awards were “rigged” – Jean Renoir’s superb Grand Illusion was passed over for two utterly undeserving films – one made by Goebbels’ propaganda ministry, the other by Benito Mussolini’s son. Politics has remained a constant factor for Cannes ever since.
 
In 1946, Neecha Nagar was in great company. Among the films that were awarded in Cannes’ inaugural edition were David Lean’s Brief Encounter, Billy Wilder’s The Lost Weekend and Roberto Rossellini’s Rome Open City.

Until the mid 1990s, India was a constant presence on the Croisette and several films from the country competed for top honours at the festival. Then, the world’s largest film producing nation dropped off Cannes’ radar. It rankled because Cannes has always mattered. 

As the multi-talented French creator Jean Cocteau once said, “The Festival is an apolitical no-man’s land, a microcosm of what the world would be like if people could contact each other directly and speak the same language.” At the festival, everybody does indeed speak the same language – the language of cinema. For 11 days, Cannes turns into the movie capital of the world and no nation that fancies itself as a force on the global stage can afford to miss out on the action.

Since the curtains went up on the festival – the first Palme d’Or (Golden Palm) was handed out to Delbert Mann's Marty in 1955 – Cannes has recognised the best filmmakers of the world with its trophy.

Run your eyes through the list of filmmakers that have won the Grand Prix/Palme d’Or over the years: Roberto Rossellini, Vittorio de Sica, Orson Welles, Federico Fellini, Luis Bunuel, Luchino Visconti, , Michelangelo Antonioni, Lindsay Anderson, Robert Altman, Joseph Losey,  Martin Scorsese, Ermanno Olmi, Volker Schlondorff, Akira Kurosawa, Andrzej Wajda, Constantin Costa-Gavras, Wim Wenders, Shohei Imamura, Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Soderbergh, Mike Leigh, Abbas Kiorastami, Emir Kusturica, Chen Kaige, Coen brothers,  Taviani brothers, Quentin Tarantino, Lars von Trier, Michael Haneke…

This list is by no means complete, but it’s a veritable who’s who of the men who have shaped the contours of modern cinema. Unfortunately, only a solitary woman director – Jane Campion for The Piano, 1993 – has ever won the Palme d’Or and that is one imbalance that the Cannes Film Festival would be keen to rectify.     

What separates Cannes from other festivals is its constant edginess. Even as it celebrates Hollywood glitz and glamour, it revels as much in showcasing the auteurs and the in-your-face upstarts, and in spotting and pushing new talents from around the world. You love some of the films, you hate others, but you can rarely ever completely ignore anything that the Cannes selectors pick.

The last Indian film to compete in Cannes was Shaji N. Karun’s Swaham in 1994. Another Malayalam film, Murali Nair’s Arimpara, made the Un Certain Regard cut in 2003, a year after Bhansali’s reworking of Devdas had a special red carpet screening at the Grand Lumiere.

But India was blanked out year after year by the globe’s premier film festival until it made a comeback with Vikramaditya Motwane’s Udaan breaking into  Un Certain Regard in 2010. Yet, Indian filmmakers, big and small, land in Cannes’ buyer-seller space with movies in a bid to access the growing Diaspora as well as tap new markets. .

But for those saddened by the dwindling global esteem for the quality of Indian films, it is a tad painful to see relatively small filmmaking nations that were once way behind India in terms of international exposure - South Korea, China, Iran, Thailand, Taiwan – being ‘officially’ celebrated in Cannes every year.

 In 1954, Bimal Roy’s Do Bigha Zameen bagged a Grand Prize, while Ray’s epochal Pather Panchali was adjudged the Best Human Document in 1956. As many as 17 Indian films were in Competition during the first two decades of Cannes. Besides Pather Panchali, these included Ray’s Paras Pathar and Devi, Bimal Roy’s Do Bigha Zameen, Biraj Bahu and Sujata, V. Shantaram’s Amar Bhoopali and Shevgyachya Shenga, Prakash Arora’s Boot Polish (for which Baby Naaz won a Special Mention in 1955), and Moni Bhattacharjee’s Mujhe Jeeno Do.


In the 1970s and 1980s, too, Indian cinema figured frequently in the Cannes Competition with films like Mrinal Sen’s Ek Din Pratidin (1980), the Jury Prize-winning Kharij (1983) and Genesis (1986), MS Sathyu’s Garam Hawa (1974), Shyam Benegal’s Nishant (1976), Ray’s Ghare Baire (1984).

Two Indian films came tantalizingly close to winning Cannes’ top prize. One, of course, was Pather Panchali, which is today listed on the festival’s official website at par with the 1956 Palme d’Or winner, the French documentary Le Monde du Silence (The Silent World), made by legendary oceanographer Jacques-Yves Cousteau and Louis Malle. It was felt the French film pipped Ray’s debut work for of its technical brilliance – it was one of the first films that used underwater cinematography to capture the depths of the ocean in colour.


The other was Mrinal Sen’s searing critique of urban middle class mores, Kharij, which, in 1983, was up against a film of the quality of Shohei Imamura’s The Ballad of Narayama. While the latter was given the Palme d’Or, the jury, headed by American writer William Styron, adjudged Kharij the second best by bestowing the Jury Prize on it. In 1983, Cannes had a particularly strong Competition line-up and the runners-up finish for Kharij was no mean achievement. Among the films that Sen’s entry upstaged were Robert Bresson’s L’Argent and Andrei Tarkovsky’s Nostalgia.

In the late 1980s, two Indian films did the nation proud – Mira Nair’s Salaam Bombay won the Camera d’Or (for the best debut film screened in the festival across all its sections) in 1988 and Shaji’s Piravi bagged the best film prize in Un Certain Regard in 1989. In 1999, Murali Nair’s Marana Simhasanam, screened in Un Certain Regard, won the Camera d’Or.  
   
But the last two decades have seen a complete washout, with no Indian name making it to the list of 20-odd films that compete each year for the Palme d’Or although a special screening of a documentary celebrating the popular strain of Hindi cinema, Rakesysh Omprakash Mehra’s Bollywood – The Greatest Love Story Ever Told, was hosted by the festival in 2011.


Source : IIPM Editorial, 2013.
An Initiative of IIPM, Malay Chaudhuri
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