New Delhi: The next battle with China may be over a different ‘Line of Code’
What if the next war over Arunachal Pradesh is not fought on a mountain, but on a motherboard? The signs are on the wall. At the recently concluded India AI Summit, Lt. Gen. Dinesh Singh Rana, commander-in-chief, Strategic Forces Command, spoke of India using AI to anticipate and foil a Chinese incursion into the Line of Actual Control (LAC).
This is an important development. At patrol routes, ridgelines, satellite images show villages appearing overnight where none existed before. The Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) has documented over a hundred of these new Chinese settlements along the LAC. This encroachment is described as “salami slicing”. In other words, steps too minor to provoke war. Yet, cumulatively it shifts the status quo. That is what was visibly stopped.
The non-military invisible wars run on silicon and spectrum. Ajai Chowdhry, co-founder of HCL and the man currently anchoring India’s National Quantum Mission, said, without mincing words: “China is not reliable.” This isn’t just a geopolitical stance; it is a business reality.
To make his point, Chowdhry invoked the ghost of the British East India Company to frame the current risk. To understand what this looks like today, begin by looking at the ‘Chop’. In Chinese business, the ‘Chop’ is a physical stamp that carries absolute legal authority. A big story of how it was invoked was when the UK-based chip giant ARM tried to fire its Chinese CEO in 2022. He simply kept the stamp, seized the assets, and effectively hijacked the company.
There is a lesson there for India. In any joint venture that does not invoke 100% technology transfer, the CHOP can be used. So, Chowdhry makes the case that if we allow Chinese hardware to power the 5G towers and sensors embedded in those border villages, “We may hold the land, but they hold the ‘on’ button.”
India’s response until now has been to commit ₹76,000 crore into the India Semiconductor Mission to build domestic capability. And Press Note 3, a set of guidelines on foreign investments, have clarified that neighbouring countries now require case-by-case clearance for investments.
Why does all this matter? Because the clock is ticking on our digital privacy. Today, our military and bank data is protected by encryption. Think of it as complex mathematical locks that would take today’s most powerful supercomputers thousands of years to pick. But a new era of ‘Quantum’ computing is coming. These machines do not work like normal computers; they operate on the laws of subatomic physics, allowing them to solve those mathematical puzzles in mere seconds.
While many think this ‘Q-Day’ is at least a decade away, Chowdhry warns it is likely just two to five years. This has given rise to a predatory intelligence strategy: ‘Harvest Now, Decrypt Later’. An adversary ‘harvests’ our encrypted data today such as emails, troop movement orders, bank records. And simply stores them in massive data warehouses. They are waiting for that powerful quantum computer to arrive. The moment it does, every secret sent over the last five years becomes an open book. They aren’t listening to today’s chatter; they are building a library for the future.
This makes the National Quantum Mission (NQM) less of a scientific luxury and more of a defensive survival kit. To counter this, India is moving toward ‘Quantum Key Distribution’ (QKD). It uses particles of light to send keys. Because of the laws of physics, the moment someone tries to observe or intercept these particles, they change state. This instantly alerts the sender and renders the key useless.
But what we know is that India has a long way to go. While China is investing $15 billion here, India has committed just $670 million over eight years. Transitioning a nation’s backbone infrastructure such as its banks, electrical grids, and defence communications, can take up to three years after it is built. That is the kind of time in which wars are lost.
What India has seen is a 500-km trial work in the Rajasthan Sector; the task now is to ensure the Eastern Command isn’t left operating on a ‘legacy network’ that an adversary has already mapped out.
We cannot afford to be gullible. HT has written consistently on hybrid espionage and raised questions on the presence of suspicious activity along the borders. As the Indian Army moves into its “Year of Networking and Data Centricity,” we must realise that a border is only as secure as the chips that monitor it.
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