The New Silk Road and Hindutva’s Shadowed Anxiety

It is one of history’s rarer ironies that where once the valleys echoed with the sentimental refrain of “Hindi-Chini bhāī bhāī”, there now stands inscribed the formidable testament of two nations hailed as “all-weather, iron brothers.” This transformation was no mere accident of diplomatic convenience; rather, it was woven from the intricate tapestry of shifting global interests, the restless clockwork of regional dynamics, and the subtle manoeuvres of great powers. Two states—distinct in temperament, divergent in civilisational mould—found themselves, by the slow alchemy of circumstance, drawn side by side, their strategic aims converging across the towering passes of the Himalayas. Thus began a saga that has outstripped the loftiness of the mountains and the fathomless depths of the oceans themselves.

In the theatre of world politics, some relationships are seemingly forged under the compulsion of circumstance, but time, with its unsentimental craftsmanship, hardens them into precedents for generations. If today the relationship between China and Pakistan is styled as a fraternity of steel, its foundations lie not merely in shared interests, but in a history shaped by Western cartographic contrivances, imperial legacies, and the fog of Cold War diplomacy. At the dawn of the 1950s, Beijing’s heart inclined naturally toward Delhi; yet by the following decade, that ardour had cooled, and Pakistan—then a close ally of the United States—emerged unexpectedly as China’s more suitable partner.

In the post-colonial moment, when new states were labouring to define their identities, China arose in 1949 as the People’s Republic, the outcome of a titanic revolutionary struggle. India occupied a conspicuous place in Beijing’s early diplomatic imagination. If, upon the horizon of the 1950s, China sought a face in the mirror of Asian fraternity, that face was India’s: the companion of Panchsheel, the herald of peaceful coexistence. Newly triumphant Communism found in India—still the standard-bearer of the Non-Aligned Movement and, in Soviet eyes, a balancing presence—a seemingly dependable interlocutor.

Thus in 1954, China and India signed the Panchsheel Agreement, and the world applauded this budding kinship. The newspapers, rallies, and diplomatic communiqués of the time resounded with the confident chorus, “Hindi-Chini bhāī bhāī.” China, in its diplomatic idiom, spoke for the first time of a “shared Asian destiny” with India as its natural companion. Yet, behind closed doors, another story was quietly taking shape. Over Aksai Chin and Arunachal Pradesh, the faded British lines—half-remembered artefacts of imperial drafting—had already become the scaffolding of incompatible national dreams. To China, these regions were historically extensions of Tibet or Xinjiang; to India, they were inseparable portions of Kashmir and its northeastern frontier.

Pakistan, at the time, sat firmly in Washington’s geopolitical lap, a dutiful member of SEATO and CENTO. American influence upon its foreign policy hung over it like a distant, shimmering mirage in the desert. Yet few could foresee how swiftly this landscape would shift—how allies would become adversaries, and adversaries partners—how the dream of Asian fraternity would unravel, and how those who chanted “Hindi-Chini bhāī bhāī” would be revealed, as a Pakistani idiom puts it, as those “who hide a dagger under the armpit while chanting ‘Rām Rām’ with a smile.”

Old wisdom reminds us: “There are no eternal alliances in the world, only eternal interests.” So, the coming decade placed its seal upon that principle. The first deep fracture in Sino-Indian warmth followed the Dalai Lama’s flight to India in 1959—an act Beijing considered a diplomatic affront. China’s leadership began to suspect that the India it had regarded as a brother was instead a meddler in its internal affairs, cloaked in the garb of sanctimony.

The disputes over Aksai Chin, the McMahon Line, and Arunachal Pradesh deepened the fissures until they hardened into an unbridgeable chasm. Border skirmishes, once an aberration, became routine, culminating in the brief but consequential war of 1962. That conflict not only interred the dream of Sino-Indian fraternity but unsettled the geostrategic balance of the subcontinent. It also imparted to China’s strategic temperament a new clarity—and, for Pakistan’s leadership under Ayub Khan, it exposed with painful sharpness the illusion of American support over Kashmir: a classic instance of “a moment’s error becoming a century’s burden.”

This was the turning point when China realised that India, far from being the custodian of Asian harmony, had become a geopolitical rival, inching closer to the United States. And so Beijing turned toward Pakistan—India’s perennial adversary—as the potential lodestar of a new strategic alignment.

Was this new fraternity China’s initiative or Pakistan’s diplomatic foresight? In truth, the bond matured symbiotically. Pakistan was among the earliest Muslim states to recognise the People’s Republic in 1951. Even as it joined American-led treaties, the Ayub administration quietly initiated a “balanced foreign policy,” gradually carving out space for China as a strategic partner. Trade, cultural exchanges, diplomatic coordination—and eventually military and geostrategic cooperation—followed, forming a crescendo that still reverberates in our own time. Andrew Small, in The China–Pakistan Axis: Asia’s New Geopolitics, observes that while Beijing once dreamed of Delhi, the sobriety of reality steered it toward Islamabad.

The 1963 border agreement further cemented this partnership. Pakistan ceded the Shaksgam Valley—some 5,180 square kilometres situated between Gilgit-Baltistan and Xinjiang—providing China with a secure land corridor and granting Pakistan the proximity of a rising Asian power. For India, the agreement was a diplomatic thunderclap, heralding a strategic realignment that would haunt Delhi’s calculus for decades.

After 1971, Pakistan played a pivotal role in securing China’s rightful seat at the United Nations. When India conducted its nuclear test in 1974, China condemned it as a destabilising act and acknowledged Pakistan’s security concerns as legitimate—later extending discreet support to Pakistan’s nuclear programme.

Kashmir: where the dreams of three giants collide
Kashmir has long been viewed through the narrow prism of Indo-Pak rivalry, yet the geography reveals a triadic entanglement. According to Rongxing Guo, India controls 45.62%, Pakistan 35.15%, and China 19.23% of the region. As Myra MacDonald notes in White as the Shroud, British boundary policy in Aksai Chin was nebulous at best, the area remaining an ambiguous space in the imperial cartography—a vagueness that still festers in the strategic friction among the three powers.

China’s hold over Aksai Chin clashes with India’s claim over Ladakh. Pakistan’s administration of Azad Kashmir and Gilgit-Baltistan remains contested by India. And China regards Arunachal Pradesh as Zangnan, or southern Tibet. In the words of ISPR’s Lt. Gen. Ahmed Sharif Chaudhry, Kashmir has become an international question involving “three states”—India, Pakistan, and China—its moral resonance akin to that of Palestine. This recognition has introduced an entirely new lens to international diplomacy.

By the 19th century, as British rule tightened its grip over the subcontinent, its interest lay less in the remote frontier wastelands and more in the arteries of commerce and internal stability. The barren tracts bridging Tibet, Xinjiang, and Ladakh seemed so devoid of immediate imperial value that multiple boundary lines were drafted—Ardagh-Johnson, McCartney-MacDonald—yet none attained settled international status. Now, in the haze of history, those forgotten borders yearn to reassert themselves.

The British, with their characteristic nonchalance and a penchant for political ambiguity, bequeathed to this region a tangled legacy whose thorns today pierce three nations alike. China—whose Communist government assumed power in 1949—proclaimed with crisp clarity: “None of our officials has ever concluded any border settlement with any Indian representative; these lines, therefore, are no more than cartographic fictions.”

Where interests intertwine, ideologies recede into the background. The origins of Pakistan–China friendship lay not in doctrinal harmony but in a geopolitical vacuum—an emptiness shaped by India’s imperial hauteur, America’s narrow strategic calculus, and the Soviet Union’s habitual obfuscation. From that vacuum emerged an alliance which began upon the narrow footpaths of diplomacy and has now stretched across the wide plains of commerce, defence, statecraft, and—most strikingly—into the grand arc of CPEC.

Today, Sino-Pak relations have risen to an unprecedented altitude through the China–Pakistan Economic Corridor—a project exceeding sixty billion dollars. This corridor is not merely a caravan route of trade; it is the very spinal column of China’s Belt and Road Initiative, that vast geopolitical tapestry envisaged to bind fifty-two nations into a single mercantile thread, an enterprise whose anticipated cost surpasses two and a half trillion dollars. Beijing has long proclaimed that nations are not subdued by the sword but won through the commerce of friendship; and Pakistan, in turn, finds in CPEC a lifeline of economic revival, energy security, and regional connectivity. For China, it forges a terrestrial artery from Gwadar to Khunjerab, and thence to the Middle East and Africa—an opening of oceans through the mountains.

History’s wheel never halts; yet its tracks, once carved, do not fade. The friendship once built upon the brittle parchment of Panchsheel crumbled to dust, while the covenant nurtured in sincerity, mutual interest, and strategic clarity has endured—strong as forged steel, compliant to all seasons. Who made the first overture—China or Pakistan? History answers with a simpler wisdom: necessity made the call, China advanced, and Pakistan clasped the extended hand. When the enemy of one becomes the adversary of the other, the friendship that emerges may begin as political convenience, but its endurance turns it into the prudence of history.

The relationship between China and Pakistan has transcended the arithmetic of interests; it has become a confluence of worldview and geography. What began with the exchange of frontier maps now stands as a shared diplomatic narrative, a united strategic posture, and a harmonised foreign policy—an evolution from a point of contact to a philosophy of partnership.

Yet the question arises: Why has this Sino-Pak partnership robbed Prime Minister Modi and his ideological comrades of their sleep and their composure? The primary reason lies in the unabashedly expansionist doctrine of the Sangh Parivar—a vision of Akhand Bharat that casts every shore touched by the Indian Ocean as an extension of Indian destiny. Coupled with this is the dream of Greater Israel—a cartographic monstrosity imagined by extremist ideologues—projected to encompass swathes of Muslim lands, ultimately merging the boundaries of Zionist and Hindutva ambitions. It evokes the spectre of Henry Kissinger’s old designs for a world order reshaped by geopolitical alchemy rather than human consent.

The world has always been weighed upon the scales of power. Where once imperial banners billowed across continents, today the gleam of political office dazzles the eyes. In former times, monarchs flattered their subjects with promises of celestial bliss; now the apostles of democracy intoxicate their people with the opiate of nationalism. The game is unchanged—only the pawns have been replaced, the moves remain the same.

A new visage of warfare has emerged. The bazaars of politics are as fevered as ever, with the single difference that where swords once clashed, television screens now echo with slogans. Gunpowder no longer roars; narratives do. Prime Minister Modi—ever the consummate tactician—has all but purchased the nation’s media with lavish state patronage, forging what the world mockingly now calls the “Godi Media”.

Wars seldom end; only the vocabulary evolves. Today’s conflicts are not those where soldiers aligned with spears in open fields. Now the weapons are crafted first, and the theatres of war drafted after. The arms industry has become the octopus of our time—each tentacle entwined with a nation’s budget, a soldier’s life, a mother’s son. The Military–Industrial Complex is that ravenous beast which thrives not upon victory in war but upon the permanence of war itself. A distinguished British intellectual friend once remarked to me: “Of all the powers on earth, none is greater than the war-mafia. Governments rise and fall at its pleasure.”

If statesmanship is a virtue, why must it ride upon the shoulders of falsehood? For leaders like Modi, nationalism is a sacred cloak beneath which lie the unseemly motives of power. His political guru Chanakya’s first injunction rings unmistakably through his policies: When the economy falters, inflate the drums of war. Modi adheres to this dictum with unwavering zeal. An unemployed youth who begins to question, a mother who asks why the hospitals are barren, a labourer who laments the price of bread—each poses a threat to the citadel of power. The antidote is simple: conjure a new enemy. Sometimes Pakistan, sometimes China, sometimes even Nepal—anything to drown the people’s questions beneath the tumult of fear.

Thus, Modi—armed with the Chanakyan trinity of war, power, and media—deploys this triad to keep a restless populace subdued. The media, purchased at princely rates, stands ready to brand any dissenting voice as treacherous. A young man asks, “Where are the jobs?” A mother cries, “Why are the wards empty?” A labourer protests, “Why is bread unaffordable?” And the Godi Media replies with Pavlovian precision: “The nation is in danger!”

This media, once a herald of truth, has devolved into a mouthpiece of the state. Patriotic jingles, martial choruses, and talk-shows that anoint dissenters as traitors now guard the gates against truth itself. Those who speak out are derided as the “Tukde Tukde Gang”, “anti-nationals”, and “enemies of the motherland.”

When a people cannot obtain bread, they are offered hymns of sacrifice. “We shall starve but
never bow!”—a chant not of courage, but of despair. The government proclaims, “If the nation survives, all will be well.” But the hungry masses answer, “The nation endures, but we do not.” A cold hearth cries out against the tyranny of such governance.

National honour is a noble sentiment, but when invoked to trample basic rights, it becomes a chain—around the ankles of the people, and a ladder to the citadels of power. Islam, in contrast, teaches that governance is not merely the defence of borders but the safeguarding of human dignity, justice, knowledge, health, and livelihood. The Qur’an reminds us:
﴿ اَلَّذِيْۤ اَطْعَمَهُمْ مِّنْ جُوْعٍ وَّاٰمَنَهُمْ مِّنْ خَوْفٍ ﴾
“It is He who fed them against hunger and granted them security from fear.” (Qur’an 106:4)
When rulers can offer neither sustenance nor safety nor the liberty to speak the truth, they cease to be leaders and become custodians who have betrayed their trust.

If politics is service, it does not tremble before questions. If governance is rooted in truth, it does not imprison the truth-tellers. No nation can be run on the crutches of a sycophantic media; for when governments are sustained by slogans, the people become fuel for falsehood. Those governments that condemn their citizens to hunger, inflation, and despair are eventually impaled upon the thorns of history. And when media sells its conscience, politics becomes deception, and the public succumbs to silence, then the whip of time descends upon the stage—its lash the inexorable law of moral recompense. For when a poor child sleeps hungry, his tears do not disappear; they flood the foundations of unjust regimes.

More than seventy years of unburied Kashmiri corpses, widowed women, orphaned children, and mass graves are assembling a tribunal of history—one before which no tyrant shall find escape.
Let Modi understand truth is not what the Godi Media proclaims; truth is what the oppressed and dispossessed cry out from the valleys of Kashmir.