The Art of Insurgency

Before we begin, to those who have been living with their heads buried under the sand I suggest you look up these terms in the internet - Uyghur suppression, Hong Kong protests, Taiwan, South China sea.

There is no such thing called fighting dirty as all is fair in war. Case in point would be David vs Goliath. David brought a ranged weapon (a slingshot) albeit a crude one to a sword-fight, which is sort of unfair but then again who said anything about fairness during a battle. India vs China is also a similar predicament.

Perhaps we should take a leaf out of Pakistan's playbook and should start a subtle war of attrition. To put it bluntly we should bleed China by a 'thousand cuts'. (No!.. app bans are not going to do anything.) Fomenting internal trouble is guaranteed way of weakening a country, especially if that country is a more powerful opponent. China has not been the best of neighbors and mind you China is not a saint when it comes to stirring up trouble, they are suspected to be in bed with the Maoists. Supporting insurgent movements has its own plus points as India has learned from it's alleged experience in Balochistan and one of them is cultivating intelligence assets inside hostile territory. This is especially important in the case of China as the quality of intelligence inputs coming from our assets inside China, if there is any, is absolutely poor (R N Kao, India's only spymaster would be turning in his grave) which we got to know the hard way when the Galwan situation unfolded.

Our intelligence and military apparatus should take notice of the advantages of clandestine and 'black' operations so that India can acquire a psychological and unconventional edge over the Chinese war machine.