Author: Brahma Chellaney
Publication: The Pioneer
Date: November 15, 2009
URL: http://www.dailypioneer.com/215919/Checkmate-India.html
With rising border tensions, history is in danger of repeating itself as India
gets sucked into a pre-1962-style trap by the Chinese. The need for India,
writes Brahma Chellaney, is to shore up its deterrent capabilities and put
premium on leveraged diplomacy
At a time when the global power structure
is qualitatively being transformed, the economic rise of China and India draws
ever more attention. But the world has taken little notice of the rising border
tensions and sharpening geopolitical rivalry between the two giants that represent
competing political and social models of development.
China and India have had little political
experience historically in dealing with each other. After all, China became
India's neighbour not owing to geography but guns - by forcibly occupying
buffer Tibet in 1950. As new neighbours, India and China have been on a learning
curve. Their 32-day war in 1962 did not settle matters because China's dramatic
triumph only sowed the seeds of greater rivalry.
In recent months, hopes of a politically negotiated
settlement of the lingering territorial disputes have dissipated amid muscle-flexing
along the long, 4,057-kilometre Himalayan frontier. A clear indication that
the 28-year-old border talks now are deadlocked came when the most-recent
round in August turned into a sweeping strategic dialogue on regional and
international issues. The escalation in border tensions, though, has prompted
an agreement to set up a direct hotline between the two Prime Ministers. A
hotline, however welcome, may not be enough to defuse a situation marked by
rising military incursions and other border-related incidents as well as by
new force deployments.
A perceptible hardening of China's stance
toward India is at the hub of the bilateral tensions. This hardening became
apparent almost three years ago when the Chinese Ambassador to India publicly
raked up the issue of Arunachal Pradesh, the northeastern Indian State that
Beijing calls "Southern Tibet" and claims as its own. For his undiplomatic
act on the eve of President Hu Jintao's New Delhi visit, the Ambassador actually
received Beijing's public support. Since then, the Indian Army has seen Chinese
military incursions increase in frequency across the post-1962 line of control.
According to Indian defence officials, there were 270 line-of-control violations
by the People's Liberation Army (PLA) and 2,285 instances of "aggressive
border patrolling" by it last year alone. Other border incidents also
are being reported, such as the PLA demolition of some unmanned Indian forward
posts at the Tibet-Bhutan-Sikkim trijunction and Chinese attempts to encroach
on Indian-held land in Ladakh.
As a result, the India-China frontier has
become more "hot" than the India-Pakistan border, but without rival
troops trading fire. Indeed, Sino-Indian border tensions now are at their
worst since 1986-87, when local military skirmishes broke out after PLA troops
moved south of a rivulet marking the line of control in the Sumdorong Chu
sector in Arunachal Pradesh. Those skirmishes brought war clouds over the
horizon before the two countries moved quickly to defuse the crisis. Today,
PLA forays into Indian-held territory are occurring even in the only area
where Beijing does not dispute the frontier - Sikkim's 206-kilometre border
with Tibet. Chinese troops repeatedly have attempted to gain control of Sikkim's
evocatively named Finger Area, a tiny but key strategic location.
In response, India has been beefing up its
defensive deployments in Arunachal Pradesh, Sikkim and Ladakh to prevent any
Chinese land-grab. Besides bringing in tanks to reinforce its defences in
mountainous Sikkim, it is deploying two additional Army mountain divisions
and two squadrons of the advanced Sukhoi-30 MKI bomber-aircraft in its northeastern
State of Assam, backed by three airborne warning and control systems. To improve
its logistical capabilities, it has launched a crash programme involving new
roads, airstrips and advanced landing stations along the Himalayas. None of
these steps, however, can materially alter the fact that China holds the military
advantage on the ground. Its forces control the heights along the frontier,
with the Indian troops perched largely on the lower levels. Furthermore, by
building modern railroads, airports and highways in Tibet, China is now in
a position to rapidly move large additional forces to the border to potentially
strike at India at a time of Beijing's choosing.
Diplomatically, China is content, long having
occupied land at will - principally the Aksai Chin plateau, which is almost
the size of Switzerland. Aksai Chin, an integral part of Kashmir long before
Xinjiang became a province of China under Manchu rule, provides the only accessible
Tibet-Xinjiang route through the Karakoram passes of the Kunlun Mountains.
Yet Beijing chooses to press claims on additional Indian territories as part
of a grand strategy to keep India under military and diplomatic pressure.
Since ancient times, the Himalayas have universally
been regarded as the northern frontiers of India. But having annexed Tibet,
China has laid claim to areas far to the south of this Himalayan watershed,
as underscored by its claim to Arunachal Pradesh - a State nearly three times
the size of Taiwan. That Tibet remains at the core of the India-China divide
is being underlined by Beijing itself as its claim to additional Indian territories
is based on alleged Tibetan ecclesial or tutelary links to them, not any professed
Han connection. Such attempts at incremental annexation actually draw encouragement
from India's self-injurious acceptance of Tibet as part of the People's Republic
of China.
At the centre of the Chinese strategy is an
overt refusal to accept the territorial status quo. In not hiding its intent
to further redraw the frontiers, Beijing only highlights the futility of political
negotiations. After all, the status quo can be changed not through political
talks but by further military conquest. Yet, paradoxically, the political
process remains important for Beijing to provide the façade of engagement
while trying to change the realities on the ground. Keeping India engaged
in endless, fruitless border talks while stepping up direct and surrogate
pressure also chimes with China's projection of its "peaceful rise."
But as border tensions have escalated, vituperative
attacks on India in the Chinese media have mounted. The Communist Party's
mouthpiece, the People's Daily, taunted India in a June editorial for lagging
behind China in all indices of power and asked it to consider "the consequences
of a potential confrontation with China." Criticising the Indian moves
to strengthen defences, it peremptorily declared: "China won't make any
compromises in its border disputes with India." A subsequent commentary
in the paper warned India to stop playing into the hands of "some Western
powers" by raising the bogey of a "China threat."
The most-provocative Chinese essay, however,
appeared on China International Strategy Net, a quasi-official website that
enjoys the Communist Party's backing and is run by an individual who made
his name by hacking into United States' Government websites in retaliation
to the 1999 American bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade. Posted on
August 8, the essay called for a Chinese strategy to dismember multiethnic
India into 20 to 30 fragments. This is an old, failed project China launched
in the Mao years when it trained and armed Naga, Mizo and other tribal guerrillas
in India's restive northeast.
The strains in Sino-Indian relations also
have resulted from sharpening geopolitical rivalry. This was evident from
China's botched 2008 effort to stymie the US-India nuclear deal by blocking
the Nuclear Suppliers Group from opening civilian nuclear trade with New Delhi.
In the NSG, China landed itself in a position it avoids in any international
body - as the last holdout. Recently, there has been an outcry in India over
attempts to undermine the Indian brand through exports from China of fake
pharmaceutical products labeled "Made in India."
The unsettled border, however, remains at
the core of the bilateral tensions. Indeed, 47 years later, the wounds of
the 1962 war have been kept open by China's aggressive claims to additional
Indian territories. Even as China has emerged as India's largest trading partner,
the Sino-Indian strategic dissonance and border disputes have become more
pronounced. New Delhi has sought to retaliate against Beijing's growing antagonism
by banning Chinese toys and cell phones that do not meet international standards.
But such modest trade actions can do little to persuade Beijing to abandon
its moves to strategically encircle and squeeze India by employing China's
rising clout in Pakistan, Burma, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Nepal.
In fact, the question that needs to be asked
is whether New Delhi helped create the context to embolden Beijing to be assertive
and bellicose. For long, New Delhi has indulged in ritualised happy talk about
the state of its relationship with Beijing, brushing under the rug both long-standing
and new problems and hyping the outcome of any bilateral summit meeting. New
Delhi now is staring at the harvest of a mismanagement of relations with China
over the past two decades by successive Governments that chose propitiation
to leverage building. New Delhi is so slow to correct its course that mistakes
only get compounded. For example: India is to observe 2010 - the 60th anniversary
of China becoming India's neighbour by gobbling up Tibet - as the "Year
of Friendship with China."
Yet another question relates to China's intention.
In muscling up to India, is China seeking to intimidate India or actually
fashion an option to wage war on India? In other words, are China's present-day
autocrats itching to see a repeat of 1962? The present situation, in several
key aspects, is no different from the one that prevailed in the run-up to
the 1962 invasion of India, which then Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai declared
was designed "to teach India a lesson." Consider the numerous parallels:
First, like in the pre-1962 war period, it
has become commonplace internationally to speak of India and China in the
same breath. The aim of "Mao's India war," as Harvard scholar Roderick
MacFarquhar has called it, was large political: To cut India to size by demolishing
what it represented - a democratic alternative to the Chinese autocracy. The
swiftness and force with which Mao Zedong defeated India helped discredit
the Indian model, boost China's international image and consolidate Mao's
internal power. The return of the China-India pairing decades later is something
Beijing viscerally detests.
The Dalai Lama's flight to India in 1959 -
and the ready sanctuary he got there - paved the way for the Chinese military
attack. Today, 50 years after his escape, the exiled Tibetan leader stands
as a bigger challenge than ever for China, as underscored by Beijing's stepped-up
vilification campaign against him and its admission that it is now locked
in a "life and death struggle" over Tibet. With Beijing now treating
the Dalai Lama as its Enemy No 1, India has come under greater Chinese pressure
to curb his activities and those of his Government-in-Exile. The continuing
security clampdown in Tibet since the March 2008 Tibetan uprising parallels
the harsh Chinese crackdown in Tibet during 1959-62.
In addition, the present pattern of crossfrontier
incursions and other border incidents, as well as new force deployments and
mutual recriminations, is redolent of the situation that prevailed before
the 1962 war. When the PLA marched hundreds of miles south to occupy the then-independent
Tibet and later nibble at Indian territories, this supposedly was neither
an expansionist strategy nor a forward policy. But when the ill-equipped and
short-staffed Indian Army belatedly sought to set up posts along India's unmanned
Himalayan frontier to try and stop further Chinese encroachments, Beijing
and its friends dubbed it a provocative "forward policy." In the
same vein, the present Indian efforts to beef up defences in the face of growing
PLA crossborder forays are being labeled "new forward policy" by
Beijing.
Moreover, the 1962 war occurred against the
backdrop of China instigating and arming insurgents in India's northeast.
Though such activities ceased after Mao's 1976 death, China seems to be coming
full circle today, with Chinese-made arms increasingly flowing into guerrilla
ranks in northeastern India, including via Burmese front organisations. India
says it has taken up this matter with Beijing at the foreign minister-level.
While a continuing 12-year-old ceasefire has brought peace to Nagaland, some
other Indian States like Assam and Manipur are racked by multiple insurgencies,
allowing Beijing to fish in troubled waters.
Finally, just as India had retreated to a
defensive position in the border negotiations with Beijing in the early 1960s
after having undermined its leverage through a formal acceptance of the "Tibet
region of China," New Delhi similarly has been left in the unenviable
position today of having to fend off Chinese territorial demands. Whatever
leverage India still had on the Tibet issue was surrendered in 2003 when it
shifted its position from Tibet being an "autonomous" region within
China to it being "part of the territory of the People's Republic of
China." Little surprise the spotlight now is on China's Tibet-linked
claim to Arunachal Pradesh than on Tibet's status itself.
This is why Beijing invested so much political
capital over the years in getting India to gradually accept Tibet as part
of China. Its success on that score has helped narrow the dispute to what
it claims. That neatly meshes with China's long-standing negotiating stance:
What it occupies is Chinese territory, and what it claims must be shared -
or as it puts it in reasonably sounding terms, through a settlement based
on "mutual accommodation and mutual understanding." So, while publicly
laying claim to the whole of Arunachal Pradesh, China in private is asking
India to cede at least that State's strategic Tawang Valley - a critical corridor
between Lhasa and Assam of immense military import because it overlooks the
chicken-neck that connects India's northeast with the rest of the country.
In fact, with the Dalai Lama having publicly
repudiated Chinese claims that Arunachal Pradesh, or even just Tawang, was
part of Tibet, a discomfited Beijing sought to impress upon his representatives
in the now-suspended dialogue process that for any larger political deal to
emerge, the Tibetan Government-in-Exile must support China's position that
Arunachal has been part of traditional Tibet. The plain fact is that with
China's own claim to Tibet being historically dubious, its claims to Indian
territories are doubly suspect.
Today, as India gets sucked into a pre-1962-style
trap, history is in danger of repeating itself. The issue then was Aksai Chin;
the issue now is Arunachal. But India is still reluctant to shine a spotlight
on Tibet as the lingering core issue. Even though Tibet has ceased to be the
political buffer between India and China, it needs to become the political
bridge between the world's two most-populous countries. For that to happen,
Beijing has to begin a process of reconciliation and healing in Tibet.
Internationally, there are several factors
contributing to China's greater assertiveness toward India as part of an apparent
strategy to prevent the rise of a peer rival in Asia. First, India's growing
strategic ties with the United States are more than offset by America's own
rising interdependence with China, to the extent that US policy now gives
Beijing a pass on its human-rights abuses, frenetic military buildup at home
and reckless strategic opportunism abroad. America's Asia policy is no longer
guided by an overarching geopolitical framework as it had been under President
George W Bush, a fact reflected by the Obama Administration's silence on the
China-India border tensions.
In addition, the significant improvement in
China's own relations with Taiwan and Japan since last year has given Beijing
more space against India. A third factor is the weakening of China's Pakistan
card against India. Pakistan's descent into chaos has robbed China of its
premier surrogate instrument against India, necessitating the exercise of
direct pressure.
Against this background, India can expect
no respite from Chinese pressure. Whether Beijing actually sets out to teach
India "the final lesson" by launching a 1962-style surprise war
will depend on several calculations, including India's defence preparedness
to repel such an attack, domestic factors within China and the availability
of a propitious international timing of the type the Cuban missile crisis
provided 47 years ago. But if India is not to be caught napping again, it
has to inject greater realism into its China policy by shedding self-deluding
shibboleths, shoring up its deterrent capabilities and putting premium on
leveraged diplomacy.
- Brahma Chellaney is professor of strategic
studies at the privately funded Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi
