China: 'Don't be in a hurry for a solution'

'Don't be too much after legacy that it should be solved in my lifetime.'
'It is not going to be solved, because you are not dealing with just any other country, you are dealing with a civilisation, a cultural nation.'

The approach of 'I should solve this dispute in my lifetime' won't work in the India-China border issue, Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh leader Ram Madhav said on Tuesday, arguing that any "hurry" in finding a solution to the long-standing wrangling won't help in dealing with a "cultural nation" such as China.

Launching a book, China Bloodies Bulletless Borders by Colonel Anil Bhatt (retd), detailing the troubled India-China relationship since the 1962 War between the two nations, Madhav said one should not make it an "issue of legacy" as no one knows will solve the issue eventually.

"Do you know the great border dispute between the then Soviet Union and China was solved by a thoroughly drunken leader called Boris Yeltsin? Now, who would have imagined that Yeltsin would finally resolve that issue? He did. It went to his credit," said Madhav.

"Don't be in a hurry for a (India-China border) solution .. Don't be too much after legacy that it should be solved in my lifetime. It is not going to be solved, because you are not dealing with just any other country, you are dealing with a civilisation, a cultural nation," he added.

Then Russian president Boris Yeltsin and then Chinese head of state Jiang Zemin in November 1997 had put an end to a long-running border dispute between the two countries.

Talking about China and its war tactics, which the RSS leader traced back to the country's ancient treatise The Art of War by Sun Tzu, Madhav said one should not understand China by its actions but by the "thinking behind its actions".

"You have to understand China not from the incidents that you have encountered, but by understanding the thinking of them -- the 'middle kingdom.

"That we (China) are between the heaven and the earth, we are the middle kingdom, where you cannot be on par with me and definitely not above me," explained Madhav, who has also authored Uneasy Neighbours: India and China after 50 Years of the War.

He argued that while Indians are trained in a very "romantic and idealistic culture" where even in war strategy we recall the single-minded focus of Arjuna (one of the five Pandava brothers in the epic Mahabharata), China on the other hand believes in having five targets in a go instead of one.

"When we talk about war strategy, we recall Arjuna's single-minded focus on the eye of a bird on the branch of the tree. But Sun Tzu says: If you have a target, never make that as a single target, attack in five places.

"So they will engage in building dams, they will also engage you at the border... and they will also talk to you," he said, underscoring that "proactive diplomacy together with strong ground posturing" is the way to deal with China -- just what India did during the recent Dolkam episode and Galwan clashes.