If China needles us, try respond in kind
That India’s relationship with China is a somewhat troubled one is no secret. The recent high-profile visit to this country by Premier Li Keqiang, his first trip overseas after taking over, was meant to signal that all was well after the two sides dialled down tensions arising from the blatant Chinese incursion into Daulat Beg Oldie in the Depsang region of Ladakh recently.
But notwithstanding the bonhomie of that visit and public pronouncements that the differences were no more than “irritants,” neither New Delhi nor Beijing have any real illusions about each other’s political aspirations. The two Asian giants are rivals in all but name, not just in the immediate Asian theatre but farther afield in resource-rich Africa.
Thursday’s remarks by a hardline Chinese general on the very day A.K. Antony arrived in his country — the first visit by an Indian defence minister in seven years — even as its “all-weather ally” Pakistan’s new PM Nawaz Sharif was in Beijing, can be no random shot across the bows. Lt. Gen. Luo Yuan’s warning to India against “starting new troubles” by increasing military deployment on the border, prefaced with the line that “India was the only country in the world that talks about China as a military threat”, was brutally specific. Leaving aside the little matter of the general’s short-term memory loss on how Vietnam, the Philippines and Japan view the newly-empowered Chinese Navy’s flexing of its muscles in waters that it claims are Chinese, it provided a valuable window into the thinking that runs through the top echelons of the People’s Liberation Army, and its obvious alarm that India, after years of procrastination, was finally going ahead with reinforcing its deployment in the mountain regions where borders remain unmarked, and therefore, open to manipulation.
Whether these are views that are shared by the Chinese government or not, it is a timely reminder to the soft-spoken defence minister as he goes into talks with his counterpart on a new border cooperation agreement that Beijing’s core strategy has always been to keep India off balance as it seeks to contain its rise as a rival Asian power. The PLA general, who is the first to publicly claim that India still occupies 90,000 sq km of Chinese territory, is clearly voicing Chinese strategic thinking. The Indian government cannot believe that by simply raising the matter with China, which has dutifully said that “the statement is not reflective of the Chinese official view”, the matter ends there.
Just as the “stapled visas” issue was reversed only after India cancelled all defence agreements, India must not allow China’s policy of not tackling the border “irritant” by talking about everything else except that to continue any longer.
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