Hello Defence Lovers! In this article, we are going to discuss a very interesting topic. recently there was a report that the Indian army is going to use Tibetology to counter Chinese Influence. Although that’s a proposal that is yet to be accepted. In this article, we will try to understand what is Tibetology and how its study will benefit the Indian army.
What Is Tibetology
Tibetology is the study of things related to Tibet, including tibetian history, religion, language, culture, politics and the collection of Tibetan articles of historical, cultural and religious significance.
Why Tibetology Is Important?
For winning a battle, one must understand the psychology of one’s enemy. Here in our case, it’s the People’s republic of China (What an ironic name though). There is a specialty of communist countries that these countries are very secretive in nature. Very little information about these communist countries is available in the public domain. Rather we can say these countries never reveal any important information in public, which democratic nations reveal generally. Thus for a country like China, It is very difficult to predict what their next action would be.
Army officers are generally well versed with Pakistan. But similar expertise on China and the Chinese psyche is lacking. Officers who really understand China are very few in numbers. Tibetology fares even worse. These deficiencies need to be plugged
An Army officer to The Times of India
If we talk about our useless neighbor ( the land of terrorists), we have fought four wars with them and defeated them. It was possible not only because of our braveheart soldiers but also because of our leadership. Pakistanis are not culturally very much different from us, thus their psychology was not very different from us. Thus it was easy for our leaders to figure out how they might have thought and plan accordingly.
But if we talk about the Chinese, we do not have any cultural similarities with them. They are completely different from us. Thus how they think, how they feel, what matters for them, what doesn’t matter for them, what their insecurities are, etc is very difficult to predict.
Understanding China
In the present scenario India is too dependent on a very limited set of military officers and retired diplomats who have served in China, very few and limited intelligence officers and few mandarin speaking Indians.
We need to accumulate sensitive information on how the Chinese Communist Party works internally, which leaders are against India and which leaders are in favor of peace with India. Thanks to Xi Jinping’s aggressive stance, there must be some internal rivalry for power in the communist party. These vulnerabilities must be discovered and exploited.
Indian army officials will be sent to various institutes all over the world, to various think tanks to gather more information and to get a better understanding of China. India might hire experts from various think Tanks in Us who have already put significant effort in study of China.
Historically Tibet was never part of traditional China. It was forcefully occupied by the greedy PRC in the 1950s. we need to gather information on how the Chinese government has changed the population diversity of Tibet over the years. We have to understand and analyze the internal matters of Tibet and China. Since China actually does not share any real boundary with India, Tibet becomes very important as It might act as a buffer in the future.
Although withdrawing the recognition of Tibet as part of China can be risky as it might provoke China for a full-fledged war. We must as of now invest in understanding China and its people. That would definitely boost our capabilities to contain China and its military aggression.
