Splitting India since 2005

An old strategy

From The Financial Times:

Indian academics are up in arms over what they regard as provocative incitement of the country’s demise by a Chinese essayist.

“China can dismember the so-called ‘Indian Union’ with one little move!” claimed the essay posted last week on China International Strategy Net, a patriotic website focused on strategic issues. The writer, under the pseudonym Zhanlue (strategy in Chinese), argued that India’s sense of national unity was weak and Beijing’s best option to remove an emerging rival and security threat would be to support separatist forces, like those in Assam, to bring about a collapse of the Indian federal state.

“There cannot be two suns in the sky,” wrote Zhanlue. “China and India cannot really deal with each other harmoniously.” The article suggested that India should be divided into 20 to 30 sovereign states.

English reports about the essay all attribute it to ‘Zhanlue’. None of them mentions that the essay has been floating around the Chinese Internet for years.

The earliest posting of the essay I’ve been able to find is dated September 30, 2005, with no author attribution. The entire essay is pasted into a comment on a Baidu forum post, linked below. This is almost certainly not the first posting of the essay.