How sane is the buildup?

The massive China-India confrontation on frozen heights that will get colder and windier by the day confirms that ancient Asian cultures are as incompetent as Western counterparts in resolving disputes. 

Tens of thousands of men, equipment to keep them alive and warm, and arrays of military aircraft, howitzers and rockets have evidently been assembled in the mountains of Ladakh. 

Google enables us to scan this terrain where India and China assert conflicting claims and where Pakistan, currently allied to China, is a third party. 

A closer examination of the map and of history will tell us that the three countries are fighting on lands belonging to communities whose links with Beijing, New Delhi or Islamabad are slender at best. 

Officially and politically part of China, the large regions of Xinjiang and Tibet that abut Ladakh have for decades been restive about the control that distant Beijing has established over them. Officially and politically part of India and, from August 2019, one of its “union territories,” Ladakh was a province until a year ago of Jammu & Kashmir, which for decades has been restive about the control that New Delhi has been exercising over it. 

The passion for “every inch of Chinese territory” evidently nursed by people in cities like Beijing, Shanghai, Chongqing and Guangzhou, and expressed the other day by China’s defence minister when (in Moscow) he met India’s defence minister, Rajnath Singh, is absent, we know, in the men and women of Tibet and Xinjiang. 

In all probability, the latter are far more interested in the autonomy they are allowed or denied by Beijing than in the centimetre-by-centimetre demarcation of the “Sino-Indian” border on Ladakh’s mountains, lakes, glaciers and valleys. 

Likewise, we know that the passion for “every inch of Indian territory” articulated by Indians in places like Mumbai, Kolkata, Delhi, Lucknow and Ahmedabad, by every TV anchor and guest in these and other Indian cities, and by every prominent Indian politician, is not reproduced in the hearts of the people of Jammu, Kashmir and Ladakh. 

These latter people are far more interested in the freedom they have, or don’t have, to speak or write, and in a more honorable relationship with New Delhi. 

The eyeball-to-eyeball line-up of the armed forces of China and India is thus occurring on grounds (and heights) whose inhabitants across large areas on both sides nurse anxieties and hopes very different from what the media unceasingly blares in large cities in India and China. 

For the communities of Ladakh, Kashmir, Tibet and Xinjiang, the Great India-China Confrontation is an uninvited spectacle and a crushing load. 

It is also a large-scale environmental threat to a region whose vulnerability to earthquakes, landslides and floods has for years been the subject of warnings by geologists and climatologists. 

The local people don’t want the massive encounter. The earth and water around them -- the mountains, lakes and rivers -- don’t want it. 

But the world’s most populous countries, bearers of ancient civilizations and modern dreams, seem to want it. 

Why does commonsense elude great nations?