Normally, I do not pay serious attention to reports and articles on China carried by The Hindu of Chennai. But I did take notice of an article titled Does Beijing Really Want To break Up India? carried by The Hindu in its Op-Ed page on August 17, 2009, for two reasons. Firstly, it tries to cast in a negative light the Chennai Centre For China Studies, which has been closely monitoring the Chinese language press and bringing interesting, significant or worrisome writings to the notice of the Indian readers. I have been given to understand that in recent months the Chennai Centre has been blacklisted by the Chinese authorities and I was intrigued to notice that the article reflects some of the arguments used by the critics of the Centre in China.
The second reason is that this article tries to cast doubts on the credibility of an article titled 'China Should Break Up The Indian Union', written by Shri D.S.Rajan, of the Chennai Centre on August 9, 2009.
This article has been written by Shri Ananth Krishnan, who has recently taken over as the Beijing correspondent of The Hindu. One does not know his background and credentials as a China analyst. It is important for the readers to have some idea of the credentials of Shri Rajan. Before the Sino-Indian war of 1962, the government of India was largely dependent on the media monitoring agencies of the UK and the US for monitoring and analysing the writings and broadcasts of the Chinese language media. After the war, the government of Jawaharlal Nehru realised that it was unwise to totally depend on the Chinese media monitoring and analysis services of the West and decided to build up our own capability. In the years following the 1962 war, a crash drive was undertaken by the government to recruit and train a group of young people fresh from the universities in the Chinese and Japanese languages and make them responsible for monitoring and analysing the Chinese and Japanese language media.
Shri Rajan was one of those thus recruited and trained by being sent abroad for improving his proficiency. Shri Rajan, who is now 67 years old, had spent about 35 years as a Chinese analyst by monitoring writings in the Chinese and Japanese language media. Of these 35 years, he had spent three years in Hong Kong when it was a British-administered territory, three years in China and six years in Japan in two spells. During his service, he was associated with the visits of a number of Chinese delegations to India as well as with the visits of a number of Indian delegations to China.
Shri Rajan's article has eight paragraphs. The first paragraph gives Shri Rajan's comments on the web site which carried the article. The last paragraph gives Shri Rajan's assessment of the article. The remaining paragraphs are a gist of the contents of the article. The first paragraph on the background of the Chinese article says: