How India and China go to war every day – without firing a single shot
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.
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.
But when have we journalists ever let details like that come in the way of a great headline? If we did, we would see the PLA Daily piece wraps up by pointing out three major flaws of the BrahMos system that render it ineffective. “Limited practical impact”, as it puts it. Also, the opinion piece appears at the bottom of the PLA Daily’s page 5. The government’s stance on important issues is reserved for the comment section at the bottom of Page 1. The PLA Daily is primarily aimed at defence personnel and others connected to the security field. The target readership is purely internal. Which is why, the supposed threat can’t even be found on the PLA Daily’s English site, which is where it plays up its messages targeted at an external audience. But again, minor details.
Details are a luxury in the 24x7 news cycle. Not only do journalists now have to produce more, reader response to their work can be instantly evaluated, unlike in the old days when you would be the toast of the newsroom if you elicited a letter to the editor two weeks later. As journalist and media scholar Marvin Kalb writes in the foreword to the Media and Foreign Policy, “The correspondent, as well as the diplomat, is denied the opportunity for reflection. Both are part of the new, global loop of information, their fortunes intertwined. They are pressured to react quickly, in some cases. ‘live’.”
Bombarded with content all day, the hapless reader, too, is denied the opportunity for reflection. So in the hurry to retweet the headlines, no one notices that at every stage of this particular news loop, the sources to the key stories are all unidentified. Neither has the Indian government declared the deployment nor has the Indian Army issued a press release telling the Chinese to mind their own business, nor has the Chinese government threatened an escalation.
Probably India will really deploy the BrahMos and revive high-altitude landing facilities. Probably China will really retaliate with its own weapons or troops deployment, who knows. But if I were a military planner, I wouldn’t bother. I would simply summon a journalist to a dark alley, deliver the ‘scoop’, go home and watch him fight my war on the evening news.
Debasish Roy Chowdhury is the deputy editor of This Week in Asia