Keep the powder dry

The recent controversy over China’s provocative denial of a visa to an Indian general and New Delhi’s measured but firm response to the snub is one more pointer to the unsettled nature of political relations between our two countries.
As we all painfully remember, we went to war in 1962 — a dec­isive triumph for China, which wrested 23,200 square kilometres of Indian territory. At the sa­me time, Beijing has seemingly gone out of its way in the last co­uple of years to remind India that it still claims a further 92,000 square kilometres, mainly in Arunachal Pradesh. It doesn’t help that our two countries share the longest disputed frontier in the world, since the Line of Actual Control (LAC) has never been formally delineated in a manner accepted by both sides. India’s borders were defined by British imperial administrators in the 1913 MacMahon Line, which China rejects (though it accepts that line as its frontier with Burma, which was in those days part of British India).
Whenever troops from either si­de build roads, construct or re­p­air their bunkers and other routine fortifications, or conduct pa­t­­rols close to the LAC, tensions can and repeatedly do flare up. When the two sides are anxious to avoid provoking each other, su­ch activities are kept to a mini­mum, but it would seem that Be­i­jing has taken a conscious decision to keep us on our toes. Th­e­re are periodic reports of incursi­o­ns by Chinese troops onto Indian soil and persistent irritants ov­er Tibetans in India. Stateme­n­ts about China’s claim to Ar­u­n­­a­chal Pradesh, belligerent comments recalling the “lessons of ’62”, stapled visas for Indian citizens born in Kashmir, and now the denial of a visa that would have facilitated high-level defe­n­ce contacts between our countries, suggest a disquieting determination on the part of Beijing not to allow normality to prevail in our relationship. To speak of a “trust deficit” between the two countries is arguably an understatement.
Some analysts, particularly on the fringes of the blogosphere, are even openly speculating abo­ut the prospect of active hostilities. But fears of imminent major hostilities are clearly overblown. China, thriving amidst the global recession and focused on its economic growth (and also still glowing from the huge public relations success of the 2008 Olympics), is hardly likely to jeopardise any of those gains by initiating a clash, and India has no desire whatsoever to provoke its northern neighbour.
In addition, focus on the irritants obscures some seriously po­sitive developments. Trade has risen to an estimated $51 billion in the 2008-09 fiscal year; China has overtaken the US as In­dia’s largest single trading pa­r­tner, though the trade balance is overwhelmingly in China’s fav­o­ur. There are some 7,000 Indian students in China. Tourism, particularly of Indian pilgrims to the major Hindu holy sites in Tibet, Mount Kailash and Lake Mansarovar, is thriving. Indian information technology firms have opened offices in Shanghai and Hangzhou. There are dozens of Chinese engineers working in (and learning from) Indian computer firms and engineering companies from Gurgaon to Bengaluru, while Indian software engineers in Chennai and Bengaluru support the Chinese telecom equipment manufacturer Huawei. India has become a major market for Chinese engineering and construction project exports, and a vital source of raw materials, from iron ore to chemicals.
By and large, India is good at things that China needs to impr­ove at, notably software; China excels at hardware and manufacturing, which India sorely lacks. So there is no doubt that co-operation is in the best interests of the peoples of both India and China. The two countries have complementarities that could make such co-operation mutually beneficial (as some companies in both countries are already proving). In other words, the Indian elephant is in fact dancing with the Chinese dragon.
But the dancers keep tripping over each other’s feet. Behind the recent unpleasantness lies a broader strategic problem. With the end of the Cold War, Beijing had two options in relation to India: to see the country as a natural ally, together with Russia, in building up an alternative to US dominance in the region, or to identify it as a potential adversary to its own aspirations. The emergence of a stronger US-Indian partnership in recent years appears to have convinced China to place New Delhi in the latter category, even as a potential instrument of “containment” of China. Such a perception may have been reinforced by India’s military exercises with the US, Japan and Australia, our cultivation of the former Soviet “stans” in Central Asia (including the establishment of an Indian military base in Tajikistan) and our attempts in recent years to establish strategic ties with countries that Beijing sees as falling within its own sphere of influence (from Mongolia to Vietnam, and including Burma). We should not be apologetic about any of these things, which are unquestionably in India’s national interests. But we should realise that Beijing’s reaction is to find ways repeatedly to put India in its place, to keep us bottled up in our own region with troubles across all our borders, and to remind us from time to time not to become complacent about our political relationship with them.
This is why China opposed us in the Nuclear Suppliers Group on the Indo-US nuclear deal. Co­n­cerned that the American willingness to create an “Indian exc­e­ption” reflected a desire to bui­ld India up as a strategic counterweight to China, Beijing signed a similar accord with Pakistan. Similarly, China’s support for Pa­kistan, including military as­s­i­s­tance and now the raking up of Ka­shmir again, suggests that Ch­i­na wishes to use our troubleso­me neighbour to keep our regional, let alone global, ambitions in check.
So it would be wise for the usually complacent elephant to be wa­ry of the hissing dragon. Ne­e­d­ling an anxious-to-please New Delhi on its troubled northern bo­rders helps China to keep India guessing about its intenti­o­ns, exposes our vulnerabilities to all within our fractious democracy, and cuts a potential strategic rival to size. India and China should not cease exploring the complementarities that could make for a thriving economic partnership. But we should have no illusions about the amount of geopolitical space Beijing would like us to enjoy. For this reason, we should maintain a credible level of deterrence, and be firm in defence of our own interests. In other words, trust in diplomacy, but keep our powder dry.

Shashi Tharoor is a member of Parliament from Kerala’s Thiruvananthapuram constituency