Asia’s naval arms race is heating up again; India has joined Japan and China by launching an aircraft carrier to aid its mass of troops and weaponry along the border with China and Pakistan.
China and Japan have both launched carriers, and China has started work on its first large aircraft carrier. Now India has launched its own carrier, called the Vikrant. The Vikrant is the first aircraft carrier built in India, and its launch prompted at least one Chinese newspaper to demand the construction of more carriers in China.
India Deploying Massive Force to Chinese Border
The carrier race is only the latest escalation in the potential conflict between Asian powers. India recently approved the deployment of 50,000 soldiers to its border with China and Pakistan in Kashmir. The troops are combat forces equipped with such state of the art equipment as CJ-130J Hercules transport planes that could carry an invasion force into Chinese territory.
The conflict between China and India is potentially dangerous because China has occupied 38,000 square miles of Indian territory in the Himalayas since the 1960s. China and India actually fought a war back then that ended in a humiliating defeat for India. The Chinese claim that India is occupying part of their territory in Arunchal Pradesh. That’s not true; Arunchal Pradesh was occupied by the British and was never part of the Chinese Republic.
The Indians are also staging a large-scale military buildup in their state of West Bengal, which is also near the Chinese border. In other words, thousands of heavily armed troops are facing each other across the Chinese and Indian borders and nobody is paying attention.
What’s worse is that the U.S. government seems to be doing little or nothing to defuse this situation. Instead, it’s turning its back, possibly because American companies profit by selling weapons and equipment to India. The CJ-130J transport planes the Indian army uses are made in the United States by Lockheed Martin.
This situation bears watching even if the U.S. media is pretending it doesn’t exist. This massive military buildup is similar to the one in Europe in the early 1900s that preceded the outbreak of World War I. The situation is even more dangerous because a very unstable nation with a large and very capable army—Pakistan—is also involved.
Source: StoryLeak
