India’s army deputy chief alleges direct involvement of Beijing in conflict with Pakistan, raising alarm over deepening adversarial alliances.
India’s army deputy chief Rahul Singh on July 4 said that China provided Pakistan with “live inputs” during a violent four-day conflict two months ago, highlighting the adversarial powers at play.
India on May 7 launched military strikes—known as Operation Sindoor—against Pakistan over territorial disputes in Pahalgam, which triggered a sharp escalation from both of the nuclear-armed countries. A cease-fire was announced on May 10, temporarily cooling political tensions.
Speaking on lessons from the conflict, India faced three adversaries, said Singh at a defense event on Friday. While Pakistan was “in the front,” from behind, China’s communist regime was “providing all possible support,” he said.
“Pakistan was getting live inputs of our deployment from China,” said Singh. Apart from feeding live operational data, “81 percent of the military hardware with Pakistan is Chinese.” Another factor in Beijing’s support was to “test its weapons against other weapons, so it’s like a live lab available to them,” he added.
Singh said China was employing the stratagem of “killed by a borrowed knife”—a way of attacking an enemy using a third party in the 6th-century Chinese book Thirty-Six Stratagems. “He would rather use the neighbor to cause pain than getting involved in the mud-slinging match on the northern border.”
Apart from China, “Turkey also played a very important role in providing the type of support that was there: Bayraktar, of course. … We saw numerous other drones also coming in, landing in the face of war during the war, along with trained individuals who were there.”
The bilateral relationship between Beijing and Islamabad stretches back to 1950, shortly after the Communist Party seized control of China, with Pakistan being the first Muslim nation to recognize China in the United Nations. Since the 1960s, China’s regime has demonstrated its close strategic alliance by modernizing Pakistan’s military capabilities.
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By James Xu
