> Kashmir, Pakistan, China, Sri lanka
replyChina doesn't belong on this list. Nehru's government was aggressively pro China. China returned the favour by invading Tibet and then attacking India [1].
If Mao hadn't done that, we'd probably be living in a Sino-Indian world order today. (India and China have surprisingly few fundamental geopolitical overlaps, the Himalayas neatly partitioning their spheres.)
They had some recent border scuffles, I think, on the level of pulling faces at the foreigners or something like that. Yeah, here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020%E2%80%932021_China%E2%80%...
replyHmm, so in eastern Kashmir, in fact. Versus Tibet!
China's invasion and annexation of Tibet (versus making it a bufffer state) set the geopolitical board. There was a world in which China and India could have peacefully co-existed, and the historical record shows India trying for that before China attacked.
replyIndia never attacked Pakistan. Every war was started by Pakistan. India took over vast swathes of Pakistan in 1971 but unilaterally returned all the land. Kashmir is integral part of India. India didn't attack china, China attacked it.
replyYour turn.
Returning the land doesn't make 1971 ok. There are no excuses for sri lanka and sikkim. The 2019 strikes on Pakistan seem unwarranted from the outside. I'll conceed China's claims India was the aggressor are very questionable.
replyFrom Wikipedia on 1971 war: "The war began with Pakistan's Operation Chengiz Khan, consisting of preemptive aerial strikes on eight Indian air stations." India has never started a war. Period. In 2019 again Pakistan attacked first through it's terrorist proxies. In Sri Lanka Indian forces only killed LTTE who were Tamils of Indian origin. Nothing ever happened in sikkim.
replyThe conflicts with Pakistan always do start with Pakistan, but the response is always disproportionate, and seeds future similar conflicts. Its not starting a war. The Sri lanka conflict is not so simple. If you invade a country that doesn't consent to you being there, but only kill a non-governmental group while there, and then leave, I think that is essentially a war. Likewise when you set up fake referendums to annex Sikkim that is just conquest by other means. India has not behaved as badly as many other powers, but that foes not mean we shouldn't point out where it missteps.
replyCannot reply to the comment below, so I'll comment here.
replyI see you had shifted the goal posts from being aggressor to "disproportionate response". My original comment said India has never been the aggressor and thanks for finally agreeing to that. I will not comment on the response being disproportionate or not, because that is just an attempt to derail the original conversation.
Yeah after reading more on each of the Pakistani conflicts it does seem that the immediate cause in each case was Pakistan. You made me change my mind on that one. I'm sure the whole thing is far more complicated than anyone who didn't live through the split could understand, but it does seem India is not the aggressor in any of those cases. Sri lanka seems like India's equivalent to Afghanistan or at worst Gaza, so relatively speaking it isn't on par with Ukraine for instance. Sikkim I don't fully understand, but it seems analogous to conquest.
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