In the history of India’s dealings with the world, there have been few moments more humiliating than the encroachment by Chinese soldiers of our land in Ladakh — and then staying put there in a show of truculence — when President Xi Jinping was on a state visit here and was being feted by Prime Minister Modi.
Not exactly known for delicacy in these matters, the Chinese on this occasion did one better than when they had invaded Vietnam, when Vajpayee, India’s external affairs minister at the time, was on Chinese soil. They simply went ahead and invaded Indian territory when their supreme leader was on Indian soil.
If anything, this is the high-altitude equivalent of gunboat diplomacy.
Beijing won’t cut much ice if it sought to argue that since the boundary is not demarcated, soldiers on both sides stray into each other’s area unknowingly. But what the PLA boys engaged in was an open-eyed intrusive measure. They were not straying. They worked to a plan. And they received political orders from the top. In such matters things don’t work any other way in the People’s Republic.
The Manmohan government had nearly met the same fate last year. When Chinese Premier Li Keqiang was about to arrive in India, PLA troops thrust into the Indian side and occupied ground. The PM rushed his external affairs minister Salman Khurshid to Beijing as PLA and Indian soldiers stood “eyeball to eyeball”, hinting that the Chinese leader’s visit could be imperilled if the unpleasant situation persisted.
This worked wonders. The PLA contingents backed off. Beijing apprehended ignominy and shame if a scheduled visit of its Prime Minster was called off. Mr Li, it may be recalled, was mint-new at his post then and had virtually cadged an invitation from PM Manmohan when the two were in Africa. And yet, the Chinese mandarins thought nothing of planning a show of force as their premier was to touch down in India.
Historical insight suggests that we should tread warily in dealing with the Chinese. The pattern of talks with China since 1993 when P.V. Narasimha Rao travelled to Beijing and signed an agreement to keep the LAC “tranquil” is revealing.
The foremost lesson here is that in the foreseeable future Beijing has no mind to delineate the boundary. The principal reason underlying such an outlook is that Beijing thinks it gains leverage over New Delhi by having an unsettled border.
While the carrot of settling the vexed issue “at an early date” through “mutual understanding and mutual accommodation” is routinely dangled, the stick of trouble on the border is never kept out of view.
In effect, what China is trying to tell India is that if New Delhi proceeds to deepen friendship with countries in Southeast Asia (most notably Vietnam) and the Far East (Japan), then it can forget about the border.
The border issue is also a factor in China’s relations with Pakistan. For both, their axis serves as a means to keep India off balance. If we look at the larger picture, not too much should be read into Beijing’s supposed current disenchantment with Islamabad’s inability to keep the Pakistan-based anti-China Islamic insurgents from harassing the PRC. For Beijing, Pakistan is of great nuisance value as far as India is concerned. It also gives the Chinese arrow-straight access to the seas in near proximity of the major oil-bearing regions of the world. From Pak’s perspective, the unsettled Sino-Indian boundary is of capital value.
This game will be hard to pull off, but for China’s conspicuous strengths. Its economy is about four times the size of India’s, and its military capabilities easily outstrip those of this country. Besides, an expansionist appeal is historically built into the Chinese psyche. To compound matters, India has to content with two enemies simultaneously — China and Pakistan.
When in the 1980s China had hinted at a territory swap with India, it had found itself under a degree of international isolation and had sought to overcome this handicap by seeking to build some understanding with India — then the leader of the non-aligned movement — also with a view to raising its own profile with developing countries which were mostly in NAM and formed a political bloc in the UN.
Subsequently, even the earlier hint was obfuscated, and for the past 15 years Beijing has sought to give currency to the view, which some Indians have uncritically come to accept, that no Indian government is strong enough to engage in a territorial exchange with it — or capable of doing so — to settle and normalise the boundary. This, in effect, is passing the buck.
The Modi government seems to have gone into the Chinese tango with inadequate preparation and an insufficient appreciation of the larger reality. This explains its recent over-exuberance when the Chinese leader was over.
