| |
India in China: Going
beyond chow mein
By Sultan Shahin
NEW DELHI - Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari
Vajpayee's five-day China visit, starting on Sunday, has
set off bitter controversy between a belligerent
pro-American lobby fearful of Chinese designs and a
peace lobby consisting of opposition secular and
communist politicians and intellectuals pleading for the
premier to take his opportunity to mend fences with
China and accept an overall border settlement through a
package deal offered by the Chinese leadership, apart
from developing trade and other ties.
These
sentiments are best represented by two headlines of
opinion pieces giving divergent views in the largely
circulated newspaper the Hindustan Times: "Beware the
dragon's designs", says one, but the other advises
"Climb over the wall". Both the camps, however, feel -
one hopes and the other fears - that the visit may not
go beyond the prime minister consuming more chow mein
and Peking duck than his health permits, as he is fond
of Chinese food, plus a joint declaration using
high-sounding words showcasing the "historic" importance
of the trip but in reality leading to little progress.
The feeling emanates from a perception that even
though Vajpayee needs a breakthrough in Sino-Indian
relations badly, having failed to achieve any success on
any other front, with elections only months away, he is
surrounded by people, both bureaucrats and politicians,
who will not allow him to forge ahead. Observers have
not forgotten the Agra summit with Pakistani President
General Pervez Musharraf in July 2001, in which a
breakthrough agreement is believed to have been reached
between the two heads of government and their foreign
ministers, but was later scuttled by Hindutva (the
philosophy of Hindu predominance) elements, leading to
recriminations that continue to this day. Vajpayee's
latest peace initiative with Pakistan has also been in
effect foiled by people around him. After five years of
non-performance, his government is now perceived, in the
words of columnist Prem Shankar Jha, as "rudderless".
This despondency is also caused by a
near-unanimous view among analysts of all hues that
India doesn't have a China policy as such - indeed, it
doesn't have a foreign policy with well-defined aims and
objects - and that governments merely react to events or
short-term political needs. Both former prime ministers
Rajiv Gandhi and P V Narasimha Rao, for instance,
visited China in 1988 and 1993 respectively and came
back with so-called historic agreements, which in effect
meant nothing. One observer in fact dismisses the coming
visit in the Hindustan Times contemptuously: "The PM,
being a smart and seasoned politician, perhaps realizes
better than anyone else that next year may not see him
in political power or physical fitness which he enjoys
today. So why not have a family picnic at government
cost and Chinese hospitality when the sun still shines
brightly?"
China, on the other hand, is credited
with a well-crafted India policy, as indeed a
well-designed foreign policy with a clear view of its
long-term strategic goals. Analyst Pravin Sawhney
summarizes a widespread Indian view: "As an acknowledged
regional power preparing for a global role, China's
approach towards India is a mix of four elements. These
are to ensure through a 'strategic partnership' with
Pakistan that India remains a subregional power, to
permit no political or diplomatic concessions, to keep
the core border issue diffused, and to utilize the peace
so obtained to build national power, including military
power. In Sun Tzu's words: 'to defeat the enemy without
a battle'. Beijing has been more than successful in
accomplishing these objectives."
Admiration for
Chinese mandarins also engenders fear. How the enigmatic
Chinese will take advantage of the aimlessness of Indian
politicians is a constant unknown. Hawkish Brahma
Chellaney has many admirers in the ruling Hindutva camp.
He claims to have penetrated the inscrutable Chinese
mind: "The 1988 and 1993 accords supremely suited
Beijing's strategy of seeking to change Indian
perceptions about China without conceding any ground to
New Delhi and yet continuing to quietly contain India.
The result was that with the Indians lulled by the
'peace' overtures, the Chinese opened a new flank
against India by setting up eavesdropping and naval
facilities along the Burmese coastline. Today the
Chinese are building a naval base at Gwadar, Pakistan,
and working to swamp Indian interests in the Maldives.
The Chinese navy is positioning itself along sea-lanes
vital to Indian security and economy.
"For the
old apparatchiks who constitute the new leadership in
Beijing, Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee's impending
visit to China is an opportunity to further Chinese
interests. They believe that Vajpayee wants to show
success at least on the China front because of the
little headway he has made with his initiatives with
Pakistan since Lahore and the slow progress on building
an Indo-US strategic partnership, which was to be the
centerpiece of his foreign policy. So the Chinese have
intensified their now-familiar 'peace' spiel. That this
lingo represents only cliched ad lines to sell something
less innocuous is apparent from what they have conveyed
to Indian officials for ensuring a major 'breakthrough'
during Vajpayee's visit - India abandoning some of the
cardinal principles on which its bipartisan policy
towards China is built. Having watched Vajpayee's policy
pendulum swing from one end to the other on Pakistan,
Beijing believes it could use his yearning for a
successful visit to alter the fundamentals of India's
China policy. It is dead wrong in its calculations.
"If anything, the Chinese are providing valuable
training to Indians on how to talk peace but
aggressively pursue national interests. Clearly, the
Chinese want peace with containment, a win-win posture
that permits them to maintain direct strategic pressure
and mount stepped-up surrogate threats."
Even
though the Vajpayee visit has been on the anvil for some
time, its timing has become the subject of speculation
in both camps. Chellaney explains why: "His decision to
visit at a time when foreigners are shunning China
because of the SARS [severe acute respiratory syndrome]
epidemic may be read by his hosts as confirmation that
he is desperate to score some foreign-policy success.
More broadly, the visit is part of a pattern of
diplomatic zealousness that has seen India making all
the first moves and first visits since Mao [Zedong]'s
death. As if India had to pay obeisance to the
self-perceived Middle Kingdom, the first visits at the
president, prime minister and foreign minister level
were by Indians. In fact, Vajpayee has the dubious
record of ignoring warnings of Chinese designs and
making the first foreign minister-level visit in 1979,
and then cutting short his tour after China attacked
Vietnam for the same admitted reason it invaded India in
1962 - 'to teach a lesson'."
There are other
analysts, however, who seem to think the present visit
offers Vajpayee an opportunity and a challenge to prove
his leadership. If he shows vision and guts, they think,
he will "forge strong ties with China and return as a
hero".
The main problem Vajpayee will face,
however, if he decides to settle the boundary dispute,
is one of his own making. He had pushed for parliament
to resolve to recover every bit of territory "lost" to
the Chinese in the 1962 war. The then Chinese premier
Zhou Enlai offered a permanent status quo as a solution.
But Vajpayee and other Hindu nationalists would not hear
of it. They vowed to recover every bit of territory.
A former advisor to External Affairs Minister
Yashwant Sinha, when the latter was holding the finance
portfolio, Mohan Guruswamy, comments, "That status quo
is pretty much what exists on the ground today. It is
not within our power to alter it, nor does it seem to be
in China's power to alter it. For either side to be able
to do so will require military and political resources
well beyond what is available now. The ends are so
meager that no cost justifies them. For India it is the
Aksai Chin, a barren, desolate, cold and windswept
desert high up amidst the mountains. Then prime minister
Jawaharlal Nehru said it was so useless that 'not a
blade of grass grows'.
"That resolution [to
recover lost territory] still hobbles us. But what is
worrisome is that he [Vajpayee] seems to have had little
change of mind. Quite clearly, the Chinese are not about
to give back Aksai Chin and abutting territories, over
which our claims are quite tenuous if not dubious. The
time has come for him to backtrack. Good sense and
common sense both dictate that sticking to unreasonable
and unsustainable colonial positions doesn't make for
better neighborliness. But given his history and the
company he keeps, can he do it?"
It is a measure
of the sea-change that has taken place in the Indian
attitude toward the territory lost to China in 1962 that
responsible people can express opinions that would have
been considered subversive and anti-national not long
ago. An entire generation has grown thinking that
India's chief national goal was to recover territory
from China. That people from this generation are willing
to admit that the 1962 war was not entirely a case of
Chinese aggression and that we, too, had made mistakes
is indeed remarkable.
Analyst V V Paranjpe is
even more daring in calling for peace on realistic terms
and rejecting the Hindutva thesis of fearing the dragon.
He writes a rejoinder: "Chellaney's main worry seems to
be China having designs on India and that it will extort
valuable concessions. One may well ask: What designs can
China possibly have on India? Territorial, economic,
military or political? China has a much larger territory
than India's and if China had wanted to occupy Indian
territory, it could have easily done so when the Chinese
troops entered India in 1962 and occupied territories in
the NEFA area [North East Frontier Area, now called
Arunachal Pradesh]. But within a month, China withdrew
all its troops to the north of the McMahon Line claimed
by India but not recognized by China. Economically and
militarily, China is far ahead of us and does not need
to get any advantage from us. The only advantage that
China might seek is political.
"If India and
China come together, they will be a powerful global
force to stem the tide of American unilateralism.
Second, China today faces a threat from Islamic
terrorists in its western back yard and may want to
forge a common bond with India. Is there anything wrong
about it? China has opposed Indian political moves in
the past, but India should blame itself for it. For
several decades, India had frozen relations with China
and when the latter tried to seek understanding, the
former rudely rebuffed her. It was only then that China
started opposing India's political moves [such as
membership of the United Nations Security Council] and
forging a full-scale relationship with Pakistan.
"Our main grouse today is about a Sino-Pak
collusion. We have vainly tried to rope in the US to
contain Pakistan but without any result. Still we put
all our eggs in the American basket and continue to woo
the US despite the BJP's [ruling Bharatiya Janata
Party's] realization of American 'double standards'.
Would not improving our relations with China provide a
better alternative to restrain an isolated Pakistan and
win Chinese support to our many other political
objectives?"
Paranjape displays even greater
courage in tackling the border issue: "Chellaney has
talked about 22 years of futile border talks with China.
He is evidently unaware of the facts of our border case.
The border issue arose because we were trying to force
China to accept a borderline that was unilaterally
decided by the British. Even the British were careful in
not pressing it too hard, but we proved to be more
stubborn advocates of the British legacy. Even then, the
Chinese wanted to resolve the issue through
negotiations. But India declared that the borders were
not negotiable and China must accept our claims in toto.
That gave rise to the border dispute. We refused to
enter into any discussions with China. The border
dispute is, thus, of our making.
"When this line
failed, India adopted the diversionary tactic of
determining the line of actual control - a totally
meaningless exercise. India never once suggested any
alternative solution to the border problem, while
Chinese did twice. Once, when Chinese prime minister
Zhou Enlai came to Delhi and suggested a compromise
solution. We had then rebuffed him. A second time in
1979, when Vajpayee went to Peking and met Deng
Xiaoping. Vajpayee, under the clutches of MEA [Ministry
of External Affairs] bureaucrats and without a mind of
his own, refused to even listen to Deng's idea of the
package deal. Today, if the Chinese are resurrecting the
idea, we should accept it. In actuality, the border
dispute has virtually ceased to exist. India and China
have both got what they wanted. China has occupied
Aksaichin, which was never under our control, while
China has tacitly accepted our rule over NEFA and the
border is peaceful. China is presumably asking us to
legalize this reality through a package deal. Is
anything wrong in that?"
Apart from these two
groups of people who support or oppose the settlement of
border disputes and normalization of relations with
China, there is a third group of observers who think
that instead of focusing exclusively on such thorny
issues as long-festering border disputes, Indian and
Chinese leadership should try to tackle first more basic
day-to-day problems and encourage people-to-people
relations to create an atmosphere conducive to the
solution of more difficult problems. "The stark reality
today," says C Raja Mohan of the Hindu newspaper, "is
that more than five decades after becoming modern
states, India and China don't have simple things that
neighboring states should put in place - settled
boundaries, good fences, border trade, tourism, and ...
frequent high-level political contact. Covering up this
pathetic situation on their borders by tilting at global
windmills is a gigantic self-deception that New Delhi
and Beijing have often engaged in.
"Messrs
Vajpayee and [President] Hu [Jintao] should instead
focus on problem-solving and expanding functional
cooperation. If the two leaders are looking for one big
idea that can encompass many small mutually beneficial
steps towards cooperation it is building a bridge across
the Himalayas. Mutual distrust and rivalry that have
hobbled relations between India and China for the last
so many decades are rooted in the Himalayan range. An
unresolved boundary dispute, China's refusal to
recognize Sikkim as part of India, and Beijing's fears
about New Delhi playing the Tibet card have made the
Himalayas an impenetrable barrier between the two
nations.
"The leaders in Beijing now say that in
the millennia of civilizational interaction India and
China have fought each other only a brief 1 percent of
the time in the latter part of the 20th century. But
that short confrontation has choked off historic trading
routes, religious pilgrimage and cultural interaction
between the people across the mountain range developed
over thousands of years. Dismantling these barriers put
up in the last few decades could electrify the Himalayan
region and provide a better context for bilateral
relations. And that is within the grasp of Mr Vajpayee
and his Chinese hosts.
"New Delhi and Beijing
cannot create an Asian century on the shifting sands of
mutual distrust and lack of even minimal cooperation on
their frontiers. There will be many other issues such as
trade and mutual investment, China's support to
Pakistan, and the prospects for cooperation on global
issues in play during Mr Vajpayee's visit to China. But
nothing is more important at this stage in Sino-Indian
relations than taking the first firm steps towards
building a bridge across the Himalayas."
There
is little doubt in anyone's mind that Vajpayee means
business. He wishes to solve or at least make some
progress in resolving tricky foreign-policy issues such
as India's relations with China or for that matter with
Pakistan, as well as domestic issues such as the
unseemly and unnecessary dispute over the demolished
Babri mosque. But he has set a sort of record of always
caving in before his colleagues in the Hindutva camp and
the bureaucrats who run India's permanent government.
This has disappointed his admirers and given rise to a
lot of cynicism. The Chinese leadership, therefore, will
have to give him a lot of help if they have made a
strategic decision to normalize relations with India.
(Copyright 2003 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All
rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com for
information on our sales and syndication
policies.
|
| |
|
|
 |
|
