India’s Chicken Neck, the narrow stretch of corridor connecting Siliguri to the seven sister states in the North East, has been a geo-strategist’s nightmare.
All the worst case military and tactical scenarios are computed on the basis of hostile state or non state actors seizing it to cut off the North East from India – the lurid fantasy of Greater Bangladesh cheerleaders as well motley Jihadists in the subcontinent. This is the same Chicken’s neck that Sharjeel Imam talked about twisting in 2019.
Post partition, India has been a prisoner of geography in the east, first due to East Pakistan, and then Bangladesh. Contraband smuggling, illegal refugees, and social upheavals due to tensions between the locals and immigrants, have been a marked feature of India’s eastern borderlands.
The imagery of Chicken’s neck in our minds, since we first read about it in high school textbooks, has been one of cartographic determinism, existential vulnerability, and historical trauma.
Geography imposes constraints and lays down options and choices, but it is never a fait accompli. It also offers pathways.
Often the choice between being proactive and reactive, pre-emptive and tardy, and hedging options with due diligence and preparedness on one hand, and falling to despair on the other, is all about a planned approach.
Himanta Biswa Sarma, the Chief Minister of Assam, recently posted on X about Bangladesh’s equivalent of Chicken’s neck in the Rangpur region as well as near Chittagong.
Bangladesh, which is surrounded by India on three sides and by the Bay of Bengal on fourth, where naval fleets are stationed, is more vulnerable geographically than India can ever be.
Our fixation on the country’s vulnerabilities only precludes us from recognizing our strengths. As the ancient Chinese master strategist Sun Tzu said in the classic Art of War, a war is won in the mind before it’s waged.
Strategic confusion, complacency, ambiguity, inaction, and undervaluing strength leads to fear psychosis,, denialism, and self-flagellation, which is like a dead-end.
Dusted History Lessons
The first chapter in Foreign Minister S Jaishankar’s ‘The India Way’ is titled ‘Lessons from Awadh’: The Dangers of Strategic Complacency.
Dr. Jaishankar evokes the imagery from Satyajit Ray’s epic ‘Shatranj ke Khilaadi’ about looming defeatism, escapism, not being able to perceive threats, and then accepting everything as pre-ordained, the religious expression of fatalism and love of destiny.
Nothing can be a more vivid illustration than this movie set in the late 1850s Kingdom of Awadh, which the British Viceroy Lord Dalhousie is determined to annex, no matter what. The aristocratic scions as well as the public are too consumed in their own private intrigues, leisure, and squabbles to even fathom the implications of such a move. This is the lesson from Awadh!
William Howard Russell, the reporter who gained fame by his coverage of the Crimean War, was the only foreign correspondent who reported on the 1857 munity. Russell was entranced by Lucknow, the capital of Awadh, describing it as ‘more extensive than Paris and more brilliant’.
No amount of cultural sophistication, aesthetic finesse, princely sensibilities, or artistic patronage, can save the day if there’s a lack of cognizance about threats. History is a testament to declines and falls of empires due to myopia, resistance to change, not detecting early warning signs, and failing to recognise the lurking hazards.
“The default option of playing defence reflects a mindset that does not comprehend external events well, leave alone appreciate their implications”, writes Dr. Jaishankar.
East Pakistan 2.0?
Since the fall of Sheikh Hasina, and the return of the Jammatis, Dhaka, a country of contested identities, historical amnesia, and delirium, is clawing back to pre-1971.
Hafeez Sayed’s recent statement that his Jammat-ud-Dawa activists were operating on the ground in Dhaka alongside protesters to exact revenge from India for cleaving Pakistan’s eastern flank in 1971, should leave no room for doubt or second thoughts regarding Islamist entryism, infiltration, and capture.
The Jammat’s student wing is said to have ties with banned terror outfit Harkat-ul-Jihad, the South Asia affiliate of Al Qaida.
Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda minister, on the eve of thumping electoral victory in 1933 said, 1789, the year of French Revolution and collapse of the ancien regimen, has now been forever erased from history.
Islamo-Nazis in Bangladesh always wanted to turn back the clock to pre-1971. They are bracing towards the goal. The question is India clear-sighted enough to accept this new reality? High time to heed our own lessons, practise what we preach, and walk the talk.
