July 22, 2024: India has made a rapid switch from importing many of its weapons from Russia to obtaining them from Western manufacturers. This included several joint-production agreements where American and French firms negotiated agreements with India to produce Western defense equipment like jet fighter engines, helicopters and diesel-electric submarines.

Between 2019 and 2023 India purchased 9.8 percent of worldwide arms imports. Russia supplied 36 percent of these weapons, France 33 percent and the United States 13 percent. This was a big change from the past, when Russia provided 76 percent of the weapons for the five-year period ending in 2013. They declined to 58 percent by 2018 and 36 percent by 2023.

India has grown increasingly dissatisfied with its military capabilities compared to China. Both countries have been involved with a series of border disputes for over a decade along the Chinese border on the shore of Pangong Lake in the Ladakh region. India and China recently agreed to halt their operations on the border. Both sides declared victory but China was the actual winner because now a thousand square kilometers of additional Indian territory along Panglong Lake is under Chinese control. In China the state-controlled mass media treats the Ladakh situation as a minor matter in which Chinese security forces decisively dealt with another case of Indian border misbehavior. The unrestricted Indian media considers Ladakh a major event. This disparity in news coverage is a side effect of the Chinese SSSN (Shove, Stop, Stands Fast) tactics. This Chinese approach has once again prevailed, as it has so many times in the recent past.

China expressed no interest in retreating but was willing to negotiate. With the cold weather arriving in India was in no position to refuse. China believes they will prevail by repeating their SSSN in other disputed areas and push Indian forces out of all the contested territory along their common border. SSSN is slow and it would take decades to grab all the Indian territory claimed by China. As long as China maintains a stronger military than India and can keep more troops near the disputed border areas, India will not feel confident to defend forcefully, risking a large-scale battle on the border.

While both nations have about the same population, the Chinese economy is nearly five times the size of India’s. This economic disparity is of great concern to India. For decades India practiced a form of democratic socialism that nominally allowed free enterprise but under a heavy layer of regulations. There was also competition from state-owned firms that were badly managed but subsidized by the government. These policies crippled Indian economic growth for decades. This was made obvious when neighboring China, which had practiced a stricter form of socialism in which no private enterprise was allowed, changed their economic policies in the 1980s.

The Chinese then sort of legalized free enterprise, and with fewer restrictions than in India. The Chinese model put great emphasis on economic growth and within a decade was delivering 10 percent or more GDP growth each year. Indians sought to emulate China in the 1990s. That eventually paid off, with GDP doubling in the last decade from $1.86 trillion to the current $3.75 trillion. This made India the fifth largest economy, recently surpassing Britain and France. The rest of the top five are the U.S., China, Germany and Japan. Chinese GDP growth is slowing although in the last decade it nearly doubled from $9.57 trillion to $17.52 trillion. But for once the annual Indian GDP growth has been faster than in China, where GDP growth rates have been declining over the last five years.

Three decades of spectacular economic growth resulted in the Chinese GDP becoming over fourteen times larger than it was in 1989. In that same period the U.S. GDP doubled. After World War II India had a larger GDP than China but never felt the same urgency as China to modernize and expand the economy. Actions have consequences and, in this case, it means China can push India around on their mutual border. China believes that India's corrupt and inefficient educational system and higher levels of government corruption will prevent India from ever catching up with China economically, or militarily.

Another reason for this Chinese sense of superiority is that India is still haunted by the last battle with Chinese forces back in 1962. In a month of fighting, starting on October 20th, India lost 7,000 troops, with 57 percent prisoners, the rest dead or missing, compared to 722 Chinese dead. China declared a ceasefire that India accepted. China actually advanced in two areas, a thousand kilometers apart, and ended up taking 43,000 square kilometers of Indian territory.

The source of the 1962 war and current border disputes are a century old and heated up again when China resumed control over Tibet in the 1950s. From the end of the Chinese empire in 1912 until 1949, Tibet had been independent. But when the communists took over China in 1949, they sought to reassert control over their lost province of Tibet. This began slowly, but once all of Tibet was under Chinese control in 1959, China had a border with India and there was immediately a disagreement about exactly where the border should be. That’s because, in 1914, the newly independent Tibet government worked out the McMahon line border with the British, who controlled India. China considers this border agreement illegal and wants 90,000 square kilometers back. India refused, especially since this would mean losing much of the state of Arunachal Pradesh in northeastern India and some bits elsewhere there and all along the new northern border.

India, as a democracy with a free press, has a public discussion of Chinese tactics and possible Indian responses. China also tries to take advantage of the Indian media freedom by buying favorable coverage in the Indian press. This is done via bribes, offers of investments or loans, and economic concessions within China. Military strategy in China, since ancient times, has placed emphasis on having a powerful military but using it mainly as a threat and giving enemies an incentive to accept bribes and allow China to get what they want. Yet India has rarely been seen as an enemy of China. There is nothing valuable on their mutual border which for thousands of years has been along high mountains and thinly populated lowland jungles. Neither India nor China had any incentive to raise large armies to threaten each other.

Because of this background, the border disputes of the last 70 years are seen by Indians as inexplicable and by Chinese as overdue restitution for centuries of humiliations inflicted by Western invaders. India, ever since it emerged from centuries of British colonial rule in 1947, insisted that India and China shared a background of oppression by the West. China sees India as trying to perpetuate Western crimes against China. To most Chinese, Indians look and sound like Westerners therefore India must be an enemy of China. India has come to accept that the Chinese are obsessed with making India pay for real or imagined wrongs inflicted by Western imperialists and see nothing wrong with using ancient Chinese imperialist methods to get their way. Suddenly British imperialism is not the worst thing that could ever happen to India. China is seeking to provide something much worse and much closer.

The latest phase of this ongoing campaign began earlier this year when China revived its border war with India over Pangong Lake, which is largely in Tibet and connected to Chinese claims on Kashmir territory. This is the longest lake in Asia and part of the 134 kilometer- long lake, at 13,862 foot elevation, extends 45 kilometers into the Indian Ladakh region. China is using its usual SSSN tactics to slowly move the border into territory long occupied by India. The portion of the lake shore in dispute has no native population. The only people who visit the area are soldiers from India or China.

Indian efforts to get China to negotiate a more permanent settlement of border disputes are not working. This is again demonstrated as India fails to get negotiations going that will settle the Pangong Lake dispute once and for all. The Chinese will issue vague press releases but they will not negotiate a final settlement. Even when they negotiate a deal the Chinese tend to see these permanent agreements are temporary ceasefires.

Because of all this India believes it is essential to upgrade its military with more effective weapons. They evolved into co-production agreements with the United States and France so that more capable weapons could be co-produced inside India.