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 | Myths and realities in India-China relations Subramanian Swamy Chairman, CNR, and former Union Minister of Law &Justice India and China are neighbours, with the a billion-plus each in population making them two most populous nations, together accounting for 38 per cent of the world population, with the fastest growth rates in GDP for large economies, and which have become the second and third largest economies globally today. Thus, how India and China bond together in the future is crucial for global order. And how they interact with the US will determine the international trends of the foreseeable future. For at least two millennia, and till about three hundred years ago, these two nations were considered by the then prevailing criteria as the most developed countries of the world, accounting for about 50 per cent of the world’s GDP. However, due to similar experiences with foreign aggression, imperialism, and internal orthodoxy, India and China underwent a two century long decline whereby by mid-twentieth century, the two nations became the world’s poorest. Despite being neighbours and having flourishing economies over centuries, the two nations till 1962 neither ever went to war, nor took advantage of the local civil wars. This is most extraordinary and unprecedented era of neighbourly peace in world civilisational history. Contrast this with what happened in Europe West Asia, and North Africa. The two peoples traded goods, exchanged visitors, borrowed ideas, and generally respected each other at the ruler and ruled levels, till foreign invasions and imperialism cut off the normal interactions and the relations became frozen. It was revived only in 1950, but that soon fizzled out by 1959. War for the first time after millennia followed in 1962. It took a lot of efforts thereafter to restore some modicum of good relations, in which this writer, with the encouragement of the Shankaracharya of Kanchi Mutt, Sri Chandrashekharendra Sarasvati, played some role in shaping. When the Janata Party government came to power 15 years later in 1977, the then Prime Minister Morarji Desai asked me to go to China to explore if normalization of relations would be possible. He chose me to go first, despite peer jealousies and objections in the party, because I knew Mandarin, had researched and taught courses (at Harvard) on China, and also because, as Morarji told me, I viewed China, “without wearing rose-tinted glasses”. My initiative in September 1978 produced enough of a thaw for Morarjibhai to clear the way for the then external affairs minister Vajpayee to make a trip in February 1979, which was the first by any Indian minister since 1960. But the outcome of the visit was, alas, scuttled by mishandling the fallout of the Sino-Vietnam war that was launched when he was there, and thus Vajpayee had to cut short his stay in China. In 1981, the then Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi, sent my good friend and then external affairs minister PV Narasimha Rao to request me to visit China again, and in a back-channel format obtain some clarifications about China’s attitude to re-opening of relations with India, as also on China’s intentions about some extremists leaders of AASU who were planning to visit China clandestinely to obtain weapons. In April 1981, I did visit Beijing and was received by Deng Xiaoping. It was during that meeting that he announced that China’s Foreign Minister Huang Hua would go to India, and that China was open to a negotiated settlement on the Sino-Indian Border Dispute. Border delineation discussions began thereafter and are still continuing on preliminaries! Deng Xiaoping also conceded my then three year pending demand for re-opening of the Kailash-Manasarovar route in Tibet but only for Hindu pilgrims (China’s condition)!. I led the first delegation of 20 pilgrims in the freezing cold weather of September 1981, and since then Hindu pilgrims in batches are continuing to go without any hitch even today. In 1988, Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi finally cut the “Gordian knot” in his wide-ranging talks with Deng Xiaoping by declaring that the Border was, in parts undemarcated and in parts disputed, thereby putting on hold (not undoing) the consequences of the 1962 Parliament Resolution. Undoing, however, can be possible only by a new Resolution in Parliament for which the time will come if there is a satisfactory end of the Border Dispute. After this landmark visit, Prime Ministers Narasimha Rao and Deve Gowda also contributed by signing agreements for various confidence building measures. In 2003, as Prime Minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee visited China and re-iterated India’s commitment to regard Tibet as an inalienable part of China. That commitment had already been made by Jawaharlal Nehru, and formalized in a treaty in1954. Was the re-iteration to build further confidence in the relations? I am not sure since I have not been able yet to fathom it. But Vajpayee’s re-iteration means now, his then cabinet minister Arun Shourie’s recent polemics notwithstanding, that in India there is bilateral political commitment to regard Tibet as a part of China. This commitment may be disappointing but it has been given legitimacy. It would require an audacious break with the past or an extraordinary paradigm changing event to alter that reality. Since 2007, the relations between India and China have begun to cool. Outside government, but in the penumbra of officialdom, there is now a developing hysteria about our heading for war with China, or more precisely, about China planning to attack India. This hysteria mystery needs to be unraveled because neither can we ever be complacent about China’s capacity to inflict damage to us, nor should we have a fevered imagination about China’s alleged evil intentions to harm us. Both dimensions of our attitude to China are dangerous. As a China-watcher of long, I am curious as to how this huge bilateral consensus, that was built over three decades, regarding the desirability or possibility of good relations with China, is evaporating so fast. Who are the catalysts in this, what are the dynamics behind this change of this attitude, and how will it end suo moto: in war or something else? Is this projected Chinese threat real or just a myth? We need therefore to separate the myths and realities in our relations with China. Some myths are frightening which therefore need to be exploded, and some realities are potentially so dangerous that we can ignore them only at our peril. The most frightening myth in currency today is that China and Pakistan will co-ordinate an invasion of India, and balkanize the nation, or at the very least destroy our economy. This is expected no later than 2012, as precise as that! This we are hearing in the think-tanks of Delhi which are populated by former officials of the government. This mythical scenario is, however, bogus because, first, China and the rest of the world learnt by the events of 1962, and by subsequent unconnected events, that if anything, the Indian people unite and India nationally consolidates when attacked from abroad. This Chanakya had noted as the concept of Chakravartin. Second, with Tibet and Sinkiang simmering, attacking India is not a one-way street or a picnic. On our borders and contiguous areas, moreover, the Indian airforce is far superior while the terrain on our side of the border provides a much shorter and friendlier supply chain. China’s is very long and through relatively more hostile terrain. Invasion, therefore, cannot be in the mind of the rational Chinese strategist. Most these inflamed reports and surrounding hysteria in India is, therefore, because the propagators have been brought up on the British Imperialist version of our history, which is namely that India is a sitting duck for anyone who wants to invade the country. The most potentially dangerous reality of the Sino-Indian relation today is India’s abdication of vital national interests for domestic political survival of ruling coalitions in power. For example, India’s nonchalance towards pro-Indian elements in Nepal helped Maoists, who lean to China, to usurp power in that country because that is what one coalition partner of the UPA had wanted. Again China was the beneficiary in Sri Lanka because another partner wanted to help the LTTE. To counter China some in India are advocating strategic bonding with the US. This too is not in our national interests because the US will then make us another Australia or Japan—that is, a concubine. That too will suit China, because the bottom line in US-China relations at present is that China has a veto over US actions in South Asia. Unless we can change this bottom line, the US partnership is not going to mitigate our hysteria about China. We can of course take steps to change this bottom line, but that is a subject for another occasion. In the meantime, China has us ringed in like a circus lion. It does not need to invade us when we are in such a state of impotence. Shorn of the myths and realities, the appropriate China policy for India therefore is to match Chinese military capacity by concrete action (e.g., by spending 7 per cent of GDP on defence) but be conciliatory in words. Or more brutally, be prepared for war but work for peace and good neighbourliness. At present, we are doing precisely the opposite. The author, a Harvard-trained China scholar and CNR Chairman, and has made significant contribution in promoting India-China relations since 1978 Posted on : 9/13/2009 Mail this article to your friend |