Is the new Indian government led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in the grip of a throttling pincer diplomacy covertly launched by Pakistan and China together?

Is the new Indian government led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in the grip of a throttling pincer diplomacy covertly launched by Pakistan and China together?

This can be the worst strategic nightmare for India, if true.

One can expect Pakistan to do a mosquito-like irritating act as any flamboyance shown by Pakistan would at best be just irritating. It wouldn’t cause even a proverbial storm in a tea cup. But China joining in at this point of time and that too at a time when India-Pakistan relations have plummeted to a new low should trigger an alarm.

The million-dollar question is: have Pakistan and China joined hands to make things difficult for the Modi government? Are they synchronizing their diplomatic moves to put pressure on the new Indian government, that too at a time when Chinese President Xi Jinping is just weeks away from his maiden official visit to India?

This is what seems to be happening precisely if one deconstructs the strategic developments in the past few days.

I, for one, would wish that it is not true. But then one must not test the depth of the waters with both feet. That is precisely what this exercise is aimed at.

Here are the unsettling facts.

On Sunday, 17 August, Chinese troops entered deep into Indian territory – 25 to 30 kms – in Burtse area in Ladakh (Jammu and Kashmir), the same area where they had ingressed 16 kms last year during the UPA regime.

The Chinese provocation had then lasted three weeks. The BJP, then in the opposition, had hauled the UPA government over coals for its alleged weak-kneed foreign policy towards China.

Hours after the Chinese move, denied by army spokesman SD Goswami, Pakistan High Commissioner in New Delhi Abdul Basit meets Kashmiri separatist leaders, an event which triggers a hard response from India of canceling the 25 August foreign secretary-level talks with Pakistan in Islamabad.

An appropriate question in this context is why Basit would be so adamant on meeting the Kashmiri separatists even after India gave him a blunt message “Either you talk to the separatists or you talk to us”.

After all, Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif not in India on 25-26 May for attending Modi’s swearing in. That time too speculation was rife that he might meet Kashmiri separatists, an unwritten, unspoken drill that almost became a custom whenever any Pakistani leader visited India during the UPA regime.

But Sharif did not oblige the Kashmiri separatists then. Instead, he behaved exactly like a guest that India wanted off him and went back home with only goodwill gestures, sans any provocation. Even after he returned home when stories appeared in Pakistani press that he was sore with his India trip and that he felt shortchanged, Sharif ensured that a formal statement is issued on his behalf explaining that all such reports were mere speculations and simply not true. Even in this statement, Sharif did not utter the K word.

So, the material question is how can the Pakistani envoy in India do what Sharif himself did not do just about ten weeks ago? How could the Pakistani envoy meet the Kashmiri separatists now when the top boss of his government had refused to do so? What has changed between then and now?

But apparently something very important has changed between then and now.

It can be two things. The Pakistan Army, which had stalled for days clearance for Sharif’s India visit to attend Modi’s swearing in and had budged only when Sharif’s brother and Punjab chief minister Shahbaz Sharif had reportedly urged Rawalpindi to allow the trip, has now determined otherwise and decided to take on the Modi government.

Two, the Pakistan Army, now almost perennially bogged down in domestic law and order situations because of homegrown terror outfits, may have got the prerequisite backing from China, their best bet against India.

This is something that would never be officially corroborated by either Pakistan or China. But then this is something that the Indian government cannot afford to push under the carpet.

There will be no formal answers to this question. But there will definitely be indications, howsoever subtle and feeble.

India will have to decode these signals and prepare itself accordingly in the near future.

The writer is FirstPost Consulting Editor and a strategic analyst who tweets @Kishkindha