State Affairs

You want to know why the entire country is hyperventilating over a book that hasn't even hit the shelves yet? You want to know why General Narayan's Four Stars of Destiny is being handled like a live grenade with the pin pulled? It isn't because of some boring operational secrecy or some map coordinates that might upset a bureaucrat in the Ministry of External Affairs. No, the panic is far deeper and far more pathetic than that. The furor exists because this book threatens to dismantle the single most expensive and carefully curated lie of the 21st century: the myth of Chinese military supremacy. For decades, the world has been fed a steady diet of propaganda, bought and paid for by Beijing and regurgitated by spineless Western think tanks, that the People's Liberation Army is an invincible, futuristic war machine that will inevitably roll over anything in its path. They have sold us the image of a dragon that breathes fire, a technocratic superpower that plays 4D chess...