Chimera

“I think it is hardly a matter of us stopping anything right now,” Tiwari, the Indian Ambassador in Moscow replied as he stood in the office of the Russian Minister. “If anything, you should be spending this time with my counterpart from Beijing perhaps. They did start the war, after all.”

For his part, Bogdanov knew he could only carry his concern across to the Indian ambassador so far. After all, Moscow was under no threat from the war. In fact, it was profiting handsomely from it.

New-Delhi was in crisis talks with the Kremlin for new emergency contracts for artillery shells, missiles and aircraft to replace usage and losses. Beijing was trying to do the same, but it was worse for them given their much higher losses in ‘difficult-to-replace’ items such as Su-27s, Il-76 transports. India had taken losses in aircraft as well but for the Indian side the greatest need of the hour was replacement for spent Brahmos missiles, R-77s, anti-radar missiles and other airborne weapons. The land forces needs were even more staggering.

So both the Indian and Chinese embassy staffs in Russia were hard at work to secure instant contracts. All of which was either being paid for up front or on very generous credit lines favoring Moscow. In case of India, other such deals were also underway in Washington to provide additional spares for aircraft such as the C-130Js, C-17s and P-8Is which were being used daily and continuously as well. And money was flowing. All in all, there was little incentive in either Washington or Moscow for any serious intervention to halt the war…

Until the Indian and Chinese naval forces went berserk against each other’s commercial shipping, that is.

Over the last two weeks, the world economy was getting affected at ever increasing rates as commercial shipping had to be diverted away from well-established routes in the ocean. Foreign personnel had been evacuated from both India and China in the last week. And that affected companies worldwide. Once that threshold metric was achieved where the benefits of the emergency defense deals were offset by the overall losses in other sectors of the economy, the thought processes worldwide had changed.

There was also a military and media aspect to it.

Unlike other wars, the frontlines in this war were hard to reach by the media on either side. Targets being struck were in remote regions of Tibet far from western media coverage. On the Indian side the logistics were so clogged with military traffic that effective discerning of the current state of the conflict was impossible.

The fact that the war was spread over two-thousand kilometers and hundreds of thousands square kilometers of the ocean did not help. The only people who knew how the war was really going were in the military and government on both sides. And the media outlets were forced into a situation where they were dependent on press handouts from New-Delhi, Beijing, Washington and other locations.

Social media was adding to the chaos as well. With disparate pieces of information coming in from differing sources, the effect was chaotic. Rumors of nuclear weapons being used were rampant and causing mass panic in the major cities of India despite government claims to the contrary.

The ripple effect of all this on the world economics were significant. Businesses in both India and China were being shut down as people moved away from the urban areas in anticipation of what was to come…

Bogdanov looked Tiwari straight in the eyes.

“Mr. Tiwari, I think the time for games is over. I stand here not as your enemy but as a friend and as an official representative from the Kremlin. I have been instructed to ask you as to what it will take for your government to terminate hostilities.” The time for informalities was over.

“I have no instructions for negotiations from New-Delhi, Minister Bogdanov,” Tiwari replied. “But if I were to venture and express my personal opinions, I would say that Beijing started this war following a brutal repression program on the Tibetan populace more than a year ago now. They failed to crush the Tibetan bid for freedom from oppression. Beijing then tried to blame India for it and failed again. They then proceeded to attack my country with perhaps the most massive conventional arms campaign since the Second World War. And they are about to fail on that as well.”

Tiwari sighed, shook his head and continued: “If I was to say anything at all, sir, I would say that they are getting everything they deserve at this point!” Tiwari’s voice was laced with robustness and clarity of thought. After all, he had not been assigned to Moscow offhandedly.

Of course that confidence and clarity also stemmed from the state of the war. Like Beijing, New-Delhi and even the Kremlin had assessed that China was on the verge of losing the conventional war against India. But it was also the logical extrapolation of that assessment that Beijing was being pushed into a corner.