Implosion (58 page)

‘India–China relations are complex and require careful management. There is need for firmness but also prudence. The Chinese are sometimes contemptuous of India but at times there is a respectful wariness. This is matched by our own ambiguous posture on China. This is likely to continue,’ says Shyam Saran, a former Indian foreign secretary.

Nehru’s Dream

Nehru idealistically saw India and China as parallel civilizations that could work together and did not realize till it was too late that this clashed with China’s ambition to achieve regional supremacy. On the ground, his attitude may have been indicated by the size of the 30-acre plot allocated for China’s embassy compound on Shanti Path, New Delhi’s diplomatic boulevard, which is bigger than any other country’s. ‘He didn’t understand China,’ says Jagat Mehta, who was a young Indian diplomat in the 1950s and later became foreign secretary.
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‘He thought that anti-imperialism would smother nationalism but it didn’t’, so the two countries lacked the common bond that Nehru envisaged. Mehta says that Nehru did not consult his officials sufficiently: ‘He lacked in that he did not know how to ask questions, and we in the civil service did not have the courage to tell him’.

In what must have been the biggest mistake of his foreign policy, Nehru was persuaded to turn down an offer from China in 1959–60 to settle the disputed Himalayan border. Based on what is known as the McMahon line, it had been drawn up by Britain and agreed with China and Tibet in 1914. China now rejects that agreement because it does not accept that Tibet, which it annexed in 1950–51, was a sovereign country qualified to settle border disputes.

Initially, Nehru’s strategy of friendship appeared to be working and he signed the Five Principles of Peaceful Co-existence with China, known as the Panchsheel Agreement, in 1954. But Nehru went too far and appeared, in Chinese eyes, to be patronizing Chou en-Lai, the premier, when he introduced him in 1955 at an international conference of African and Asian nations in Bandung, Indonesia. Relations soured and Nehru, by now himself feeling patronized, is said to have told India’s ambassador to Peking in 1958: ‘I don’t trust the Chinese one bit. They are a deceitful, opinionated, arrogant and hegemonistic lot’.
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Relations steadily worsened, especially after the flight of the Dalai Lama from Tibet to sanctuary in India in 1959.

There were also increased Chinese incursions along the border, which culminated in its troops walking into what is now the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh (then called the North-East Frontier Agency) at the strategically sensitive Buddhist monastery town of Tawang in 1962. Four devastating (for India) weeks later, in what was never formally declared a war, China withdrew from all the land that it had occupied to the current disputed Line of Actual Control.
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China could have marched as far as it liked into India because it would have faced little resistance, so ill-prepared were the defences, but it had taught India a lesson and that was enough. People in Tawang still talk of the sudden invasion, the panic among Indian forces, the burning of bridges and houses by the retreating army, and the relative good behaviour of the invader.
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The invasion coincided with the Cuban missile crisis. ‘Just as Mao Zedong started his invasion of Tibet while the world was preoccupied with the Korean War, so he chose a perfect time to invade India, as recommended by the ancient strategist Sun Tzu,’ wrote Brahma Chellaney.
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‘The attack coincided with a major international crisis that brought the United States and the Soviet Union within a whisker of nuclear war over the stealthy deployment of Soviet missiles in Cuba. China’s unilateral ceasefire coincided with America’s formal termination of its naval blockade of Cuba, marking the end of the missile crisis.’

Zhou Enlai, communist China’s first and longest serving premier (1949–1976) who was admired internationally as a charming and urbane but also tough statesman, said at the time that his aim was ‘to teach India a lesson’. As Brahma Chellaney put it on the 50th anniversary of the defeat, ‘such have been the long-lasting effects of the humiliation it imposed that China to this day is able to keep India in check’.
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China in Charge

From 1962, China has left India metaphorically dangling on the end of a rope. ‘It has been their policy since 1962, to restrain India, partly through support for Pakistan – that policy began long before China’s economic opening up but it has been especially hostile in the last two years since the US-India nuclear agreement,’ Brajesh Mishra, a retired diplomat who was national security adviser and principal secretary to Prime Minister Atal Behari Bajpayee from 1998 to 2004, told me in 2009.
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Mishra had been posted to Beijing as charge d’affairs to open a diplomatic mission in 1969 when China was beginning to relax its international isolation. At a diplomatic event in Beijing in May 1970, Mao Zedong unexpectedly turned to Mishra and said, ‘How long are we going to go on quarrelling like this. Let us be friends again’.
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India posted an ambassador in 1975, and Atal Bihari Vajpayee went on a visit as foreign minister in 1979. But there was no real breakthrough till Rajiv Gandhi visited Beijing as prime minister in December 1988. ‘The high point of the visit came when Deng Xiaoping smiled and shook his hand for eight and a half minutes in the Great Hall of the People in full view of the world’s cameras to signal the start of a new era in India-China relations,’
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says Mani Shankar Aiyar, who was with Gandhi. Deng called Gandhi ‘my young friend’.
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Since then, China has played at alternately confronting and co-operating with India. It teases with friendship, with trade, with border talks that make little progress, and occasionally with international co-operation on multilateral issues such as climate change, banking reform and anti-piracy ship patrolling in the Gulf of Aden. Simultaneously, it taunts with warnings and incursions on the border, tripping India up in international forums such as the Geneva-based Nuclear Suppliers’ Group where India wants to become a member.

Border Dispute

The border dispute has been exacerbated by China’s lack of confidence about the security of Tibet. It calls Arunachal Pradesh ‘Southern Tibet’ and basically refuses to settle the border with India unless India hands over Tawang, which it occupied in 1962. Tawang lies in an area that was administered remotely by Buddhist monks from Tibet till it was annexed into British India in 1914. It was here that the Dalai Lama first fied in 1959, and the monastery town has become a focal point of the two countries’ differences.

Talks in the early 1980s and 1990s did not produce an agreement, despite some optimism at the time though no lives have been lost in confrontations on the border since an Agreement on the Maintenance of Peace and Tranquillity in 1993 that was followed by new ‘confidence building measures’. The mood changed in 2005 when China became far more strident after India’s co-operation agreements with the US that included defence and sales of armaments. China then hardened its demands, claiming in particular that Arunachal Pradesh is not part of India, and objecting when Manmohan Singh visited the state during campaigning for assembly elections in 2009. It has refused visas to Arunachal people, including official visitors, and condemned India’s increased militarization and highway construction activity in the area. In tit-for-tat measures late in 2012, China launched passports with maps showing Arunachal (and Aksai Chin, the second disputed border area in the Ladakh area of Jammu and Kashmir) as part of its territory, and India printed its own version of maps on visas issued to Chinese nationals.

Throughout these years, China ‘has used Pakistan as a cat’s paw to keep India distracted,’ says Shyam Saran.
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China uses Pakistan as a ‘proxy’ – for example, by helping it to develop a nuclear bomb to counter India’s capability. Pakistan is its primary customer for conventional weapons and the two countries’ defence and industrial co-operation includes co-production of fighter aircraft and jet trainers, air-to-air and other missiles, frigates and battle tanks according to a US Pentagon report in May 2013.
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China’s support for Pakistan runs alongside assistance from the US, which has its own Afghanistan-oriented reasons for helping. Between 1982 and 2011, the US provided $13.5 bn in economic aid and $17 bn in military assistance to Pakistan which included fighter aircraft and other weaponry.
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The US is in effect therefore condoning the nuclear and military supplies that China gives to Pakistan – it has sometimes told Beijing that it knows about Chinese missile companies’ sales (revealed by WikiLeaks
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), but has apparently done nothing to stop the trade. There are however limits to how far China will go. It surprised Pakistan by not being supportive during its Kargil near-war with India in 1999, presumably realizing that to have done so would have upset the equilibrium with the US, and may have escalated the confrontation into an unnecessary crisis. China is also wary of Pakistan-based terrorists’ possible links with Muslims in its restive western Xingjian province.

The messages from China come from different sources which often conflict with each other. In August 2009, a Chinese strategic issues website was claiming China could ‘dismember the so-called “Indian Union” with one little move’.
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It said that ‘there cannot be two suns in the sky – China and India cannot really deal with each other harmoniously’.
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The following March, a westernized Beijing adviser called at a Delhi conference for China and India to see their disputed Himalayan mountain border ‘not as an insurmountable barrier’ but as a ‘bridge linking these two ancient civilizations together, for mutual benefit, and for mutual enrichment’.
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In April 2012, after India launch-tested an AGNI V missile with a 5,000-km range that could strike Beijing or Shanghai, China’s Communist Party-owned
Global Times
newspaper warned aggressively that India ‘would stand no chance in an overall arms race with China’.
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China knows that India will not over-react to whatever happens because Delhi realizes it is unlikely to win an argument, and is also aware it might have problems gaining diplomatic support from other countries in a dispute. ‘Overt tensions with China only constrain our foreign policy choices vis-à-vis other powers,’ wrote Kanwal Sibal, former foreign secretary, in December 2012.
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India Encircled

China has encircled India with a ‘string of pearls’
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by establishing its presence in neighbouring countries – not just its traditional targets of Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh and Myanmar, but also Sri Lanka and the Maldives archipelago in the Indian Ocean. Activities range from military, infrastructure and economic aid to intelligence cooperation and encouraging anti-India activities (as it has also done, directly or indirectly, in India’s north-eastern states).
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In Nepal, a key buffer country, there is constant rivalry for internal political and economic influence, and China is reported to be making territorial inroads across its border in the north of the country.

Problems possibly created, or at least accentuated, by China have emerged in the Maldives. This tiny nation of some 1,200 islands is generally regarded internationally as a serene tourist destination, but it is facing a tide of Islamic conservatism that is creating social and political instability and makes it open to diplomatic meddling. China opened a mission in Male, the capital, in March 2012, and the country’s president, Mohamed Waheed, met Wen Jiabao in China a month later, when $500m aid was agreed. Towards the end of 2012, the government cancelled a long-term build-and-operate airport contract with GMR, the Indian infrastructure company.
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That happened just after China’s defence minister, Liang Guangli, visited the islands. Mohammed Nazim, the Maldives minister for defence, national security and transport, who handled the airport, had also just been to Beijing. This showed a distinct pro-China tilt by the Maldives following a change of its government. Previously the islands had relied on Indian assistance, as was well illustrated in 1988 when Indian troops quickly quelled a coup attempt by Sri Lankan Tamil mercenaries.
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Unsurprisingly India, which is rarely adept at handling its neighbours, failed to deal smartly with the airport situation and the contract was lost, which was widely seen as a gain for China.

In neighbouring Sri Lanka, where India has had an uneasy relationship for decades because of links between the Tamil communities in both countries, China has become an increasingly good friend and large financial donor at a time when the country is desperately short of international support. The island’s government has been widely condemned in the United Nations and elsewhere for alleged human rights violations and mass killings in 2009, when it was fighting a guerrilla war that had been running for 26 years over a separate homeland for its minority Tamil community. Chinese companies have built infrastructure contracts worth some $4bn including the island’s second international airport, opened in March 2013, a port and highways, all funded with Chinese soft loans.
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That makes China a more valuable ally than India, which also helps with a variety of projects
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but whose relations with the island are complicated by the politics of Tamil Nadu.