NY-based Pinoys: India or China?

“I have never advocated war except as a means of peace.”

—Ulysses S. Grant

By Alex P. Vidal

SOME New York-based Filipinos think most of their kababayans in the Philippines will side with India in the event a full-scale conflict with China will escalate into a major war.

“It could even spark a third world war,” feared Renato, 66, a retired cop from Quezon City who now lives in the Woodside in Queens.

If asked to choose, many Filipinos will side with India because they are familiar with their culture and because of their “generosity”, Renato explained.

“Many small-scale business owners and ordinary Filipino vendors borrow 5-6 from Indian nationals. May pakinabang tayo sa India (we can always rely on China),” Renato said. “On the other hand, China is now the whipping boy of the world because of the COVID-19 (traced to have originated from Wuhan).”

“But the current leadership in the Philippines won’t allow it to happen,” quipped Bernard, 65, a retired employee of the Philippine Coconut Authority (PCA) in Mandaue City.

Bernard said: “President Duterte is beholden to China in many aspects; and should a global war erupts as a result of the feud between China and India, he will rally the Filipinos to take the side of China.”

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Bernard, however, stressed that “it would be safer for the Philippines to be neutral. But if push comes to shove, we should side with India.” 

Bernard cited the Treaty of Friendship signed between the Philippines and India on July 11, 1952 five years after India’s independence in 1947.

Tirso, 71, a retired college instructor from La Carlota City, Negros Occidental, who lives near the newly renovated Elmhurst Park, agreed with Bernard.

He pointed to the “joint venture” between former President Ferdinand Marcos and Indian industrialist Aditya Vikram Birla, as the start of the “close ties” between the Philippines and India.

“The joint venture resulted in the establishment of Indo-Philippine Textile Mills, Inc. (Indo-Phil), then the largest Indian investment in the country,” Tirso pointed out.

He said Indo-Phil currently employs thousands of Filipino workers and supplies some 40 percent of Philippine domestic demand for yarn.

The Philippines and India signed a trade agreement on May 29,  1979, recalled Tirso, father-in-law of a 53-year-old Pinoy bartender and COVID-19 survivor. 

Rafael, a civil engineer and former chess champion from Pangasinan, cited China’s “bad public relations” with the Philippines to be the reason why Filipinos will side with India.

“China has been bullying the Philippines in the dispute of the Panatag Island. China instills fear in the Filipinos who think the Chinese government is dead-set to invade our territory and govern us,” lamented Rafael.

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Since early May 2020, tensions between Indian and Chinese troops have simmered in the remote, high Karakoram mountains that separate India’s northern Ladakh region from the alkaline desert of Aksai Chin, which is claimed by India but controlled by China and abuts its Xinjiang province.

Former Indian Army officer and strategic analyst Ajai Shuka explained that it is a forbidding landscape of cold deserts, snow-capped peaks, sparse vegetation and freezing temperature about 14,000 feet above sea level. 

“On Monday evening, in a brutal hand-to-hand battle, Chinese soldiers killed at least 20 Indian soldiers with wooden staves and nail-studded clubs, in the severest escalation of the dispute on the Sino-Indian frontier in decades,” Shuka wrote in the New York Times.

He stressed that British colonial authorities bequeathed India a border with China that was neither delineated on a map nor demarcated on the ground. 

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Shuka wrote: “After China invaded Tibet in 1950 and the two Asian giants sought to formalize their frontier, the territorial dispute emerged. The Sino-Indian border dispute involves about 13, 500 square miles in Ladakh and Aksai Chin and about 35,000 square miles in the northeastern Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh, which China calls South Tibet.”

The border dispute flared into a war in 1962. 

China won conclusively but retreated after a cease-fire to what were broadly its prewar positions. 

“That de facto border, which is called the Line of Actual Control, is patrolled by both armies. Occasional unarmed clashes have taken place over the years despite five agreements aimed at reducing the risk of 

combat,” wrote Suka.

China has reportedly built a network of roads and tracks on its side of the Line of Actual Control, but the Chinese military has consistently objected to India’s far slower but steady improvement of borderland infrastructure.

(The author, who is now based in New York City, used to be the editor of two local dailies in Iloilo)