Whoever thinks China and India aren’t getting on, may need to get off the news for a while.
The two countries may be at odds on a lot of things, from a troubled border to ocean navigation rights. But when it comes to their media, they are a picture of collaboration – obsessively following and reporting each other, and in the process creating perennial news loops the likes of which are seldom seen between two states not at war.
Take the current sniping over BrahMos missile. It began with a Times of India
scoop on August 3 that India was deploying the supersonic cruise missile in its Arunachal Pradesh state, which China claims as its own. Peppered with impressive military jargon like “trajectory manoeuvre and steep-dive capabilities for mountain warfare”, the report cites an unnamed Army source as detailing how the missile co-developed by India and Russia has “nine times more kinetic energy than sub-sonic missiles” for “greater destructive potential”.
Such militaristic reportage of India’s preparations for its coming war with China has become increasingly common in Indian media in recent years and is treated with a degree of circumspection by serious students of the region’s geopolitics. But it can be disturbing stuff if you are a Chinese defence commentator or journalist. More so because your own government is telling you nothing and your only clue to China’s India policy is the unruly Indian media.
Two weeks go by, in which time Indian papers have reported how Chinese papers are asking India to stay out of the South China Sea row and focus on the economy, which is spun with great relish as a sign of Beijing’s nervousness. To help matters, soon another triumphant Times of India story declares
India builds a ‘China wall’ with tanks in Ladakh, jets in northeast, detailing India’s moves to activate landing facilities in Arunachal.
Again, the source is an unnamed Army officer. But riled up enough by now, an analyst at the
PLA Daily, the People’s Liberation Army’s mouthpiece, decides to put in his two fens. India is ‘nervous’, the expert from the PLA Navy’s Engineering University writes. The decision to deploy BrahMos could trigger “counter-measures” by China, he warns.
