Author: Brahma Chellaney
Publication: The Pioneer
Date: November 5, 2009
URL: http://www.dailypioneer.com/213456/US-fly-in-China's-India-ointment.html
The India-China relationship has entered choppy
waters because of a perceptible hardening in the Chinese stance. Anti-India
rhetoric in the state-run Chinese media has intensified, even as China has
stepped up military pressure along the disputed Himalayan frontier through
frequent cross-border incursions. Beijing also has resurrected its long-dormant
claim to Arunachal Pradesh, nearly three times as large as Taiwan.
The more-muscular Chinese stance clearly is
tied to the new US-India strategic partnership, symbolised by the nuclear
deal and deepening military cooperation. As President George W Bush declared
in his valedictory speech, "We opened a new historic and strategic partnership
with India."
The Obama Administration, although committed
to promoting that strategic partnership, has been reluctant to take New Delhi's
side in any of its disputes with Beijing. This has emboldened China to up
the ante against India, with the Chinese Foreign Ministry employing language
like "we demand" in a recent statement that labelled the Indian
Prime Minister's visit to Arunachal Pradesh a "disturbance." The
Communist Party's official newspaper, the People's Daily, after asking India
to consider the costs of "a potential confrontation with China",
ran another denunciatory editorial recently on New Delhi's "recklessness
and arrogance".
New Delhi has hit back by permitting the Dalai
Lama to tour Arunachal Pradesh and announcing an end to the practice of Chinese
companies bringing thousands of workers from China to work on projects in
India. And in a public riposte to Beijing's raising of objections to multilateral
funding of any project in Arunachal Pradesh, India has asked China to cease
its infrastructure and military projects in another disputed region - Pakistan-occupied
Kashmir.
The present pattern of border provocations,
new force deployments and mutual recriminations is redolent of the situation
that prevailed 47 years ago, when China - taking advantage of the advent of
the Cuban missile crisis, which brought the world to the brink of a nuclear
Armageddon - routed the unprepared Indian military in a surprise two-front
aggression. Today, amid rising tensions, the danger of border skirmishes,
if not a limited war, looks real.
Such tensions have been rising since 2006.
Until 2005, China was eschewing anti-India rhetoric and pursuing a policy
of active engagement with India even as it continued to expand its strategic
space in southern Asia, to New Delhi's detriment. In fact, when Chinese Premier
Wen Jiabao visited India in April 2005, the two countries unveiled six broad
principles to help settle their festering border dispute. But after the India-US
defence-framework accord and nuclear deal were unveiled in quick succession
in subsequent months, the mood in Beijing changed perceptibly. That gave rise
to a pattern that now has become commonplace: Chinese newspapers, individual
bloggers, security think tanks and even officially blessed websites ratcheted
up an "India threat" scenario.
A US-India military alliance has always been
a strategic nightmare for the Chinese, and the ballyhooed Indo-US global strategic
partnership triggered alarm bells in Beijing. The partnership, though, falls
short of a formal military alliance. Still, the high-pitched Indian and American
rhetoric that the new partnership represented a tectonic shift in geopolitical
alignments apparently made Chinese policy-makers believe India was being groomed
as a new Japan or Australia to America - a perception reinforced by subsequent
arrangements and Indian orders for US arms worth $ 3.5 billion in just the
past year.
Clearly, New Delhi failed to foresee that
its rush to forge close strategic bonds with Washington could provoke greater
Chinese pressure and that in such a situation, the United States actually
would offer little comfort. Consequently, India finds itself in a spot.
For one thing, Beijing calculatedly has sought
to pressure India on multiple fronts - military, diplomatic and multilateral.
For another, the United States -far from coming to India's support - has shied
away from even cautioning Beijing against any attempt to forcibly change the
territorial status quo. Indeed, on a host of issues - from the Dalai Lama
to the Arunachal Pradesh dispute - Washington has chosen not to antagonise
Beijing. That, in effect, has left India on its own.
The spectacle of the President of the most
powerful country in the world seeking to curry favour with a rights-abusing
China by shunning the Dalai Lama during the Tibetan leader's Washington visit
cannot but embolden the Chinese leadership to step up pressure on India, the
seat of the Tibetan Government-in-exile. Mr Obama also has signalled that
America's strategic relationship with India will not be at the expense of
the fast-growing US ties with China.
The Obama team, after reviewing the Bush-era
arrangements, intends to abjure elements in its ties with New Delhi that could
rile Beijing, including any joint military drill in Arunachal Pradesh or a
2007-style naval exercise involving the United States, India, Australia, Japan
and Singapore. Even trilateral US naval manoeuvres with India and Japan are
being abandoned so as not to raise China's hackles. As his Secretary of State
did in February, Mr Obama is undertaking an Asia tour that begins in Japan
and ends in China - the high spot - while skipping India. In fact, Washington
is quietly charting a course of tacit neutrality on the Arunachal dispute.
Yet Beijing remains suspicious of the likely
trajectory of US-India strategic ties, including pre-1962-style CIA meddling
in Tibet. This distrust found expression in the People's Daily editorial that
accused New Delhi of pursuing a foreign policy of "befriending the far
and attacking the near".
Left to fend for itself, New Delhi has decided
to steer clear of any confrontation with Beijing. As the Prime Minister of
the Tibetan Government-in-exile, Samdhong Rinpoche, has put it: "For
the past few months, China has adopted an aggressive attitude and is indulging
in many provocative activities, which are being tolerated by Indian Government
in a very passive manner."
Still, even as it seeks to tamp down tensions
with Beijing, New Delhi cannot rule out the use of force by China at a time
when hard-liners there seem to believe that a swift, 1962-style military victory
can help fashion a Beijing-oriented Asia.
Having declared that America's "most
important bilateral relationship in the world" is with Beijing, the Obama
team must caution China against crossing well-defined red lines or going against
its self-touted gospel of China's "peaceful rise".
- The writer is professor of strategic studies
at Centre for Policy Research.
