Nemesis
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China's aggressive stance is set to leave a deep mark on the century. India must stand firm against its expansionist neighbour
The idea of China's "peaceful rise" has always represented the triumph of imagination over reality.But over the last several months, Beijing has done enough to shatter every hope of peace in Asia. It began with an unprecedented attempt by Beijing in March this year to block a $2.9bn Asian Development Bank loan to India on the grounds that some of the cash was intended for use in the eastern state of Arunachal Pradesh, a region China claims as its own. This was followed by a gratuitous broadside against India in the People's Daily, the Communist party's mouthpiece.
Military incursions into India by Chinese forces were backed up by Beijing's diplomatic assault on India's territorial integrity and pluralistic nationalism: the Chinese embassy in New Delhi began issuing irregular visas to Kashmiri Indians in an effort to legitimise separatism. And last week, Beijing officially condemned prime minister Manmohan Singh's visit to Arunachal Pradesh.
Officially, India maintains that it is on good terms with Beijing. China's outrageous provocations manage only to elicit "disappointment" in New Delhi. This week, Dr Singh will even meet with his Chinese counterpart, Wen Jiabao, on the sidelines of the Asean summit in Thailand; warm words about friendship will be exchanged. But platitudes can no longer conceal the fact that China is strangulating India. Using a combination of aid and ammunition, Beijing has drawn a hostile circle of influence around India: beginning in Pakistan (to which Beijing supplied nuclear technology) in the north-west, it runs through Nepal (to which it exported Maoism) and Burma (where it shields a dictatorship) in the east, ending in Sri Lanka (where it armed a genocidal state) in the south.
Two reasons account for China's obsession with India. The first is historical: China crawled on to the world stage on India's back. India not only became the second non-communist country in the world to bestow recognition on Mao's pariah state; it was also, in Nehru's words, the most passionate pleader of China's "cause in the councils of the world". When President Eisenhower offered India the UN security council seat held by Taiwan, Nehru, ever the idealist, turned it down, urging the US to offer it to China instead.
But soon, Beijing developed the arriviste's disdain for its most forceful supporter. Mao could not abide an Asia with multiple centres of power. New Delhi's decision to grant asylum to the Dalai Lama in defiance of Beijing's bullying confirmed India as a contender. China initiated a surprise multi-pronged attack on India in 1962, occupying a substantial portion of contested territory on the Tibetan plateau. Beijing retreated just as American jumbo jets, flown to aid India's assault, began landing in West Bengal. Today, Beijing actively aligns itself with India where its interests are involved on climate change, for instance but on a bilateral level, it views India as inconvenient competition.
The second reason goes to the heart of China's current condition. Western observers of Beijing, enraptured by the glitz of China, have long stopped examining the decay of the party that runs it. Many in the west still argue that China's economic prosperity is a precursor to political freedom for its people. But this theory, as Minxin Pei has argued, ignores the important fact that an authoritarian state is less likely to loosen its grip on a wealthy country than it would be to forego the control of an impoverished one. Last month's celebrations in Beijing bore out Pei's point: so insecure was the Communist party that, as Gordon Chang reported, a security force more than a million strong force was put in place to keep ordinary people away from the celebrations marking the 60th anniversary of the "People's Republic"; hotel rooms overlooking the procession were booked by the government; and residents in nearby houses were barred from looking out of their windows.
Chinese nationalism is a genie that serves the state. With such a fragile hold on the country, the Communist party has to invoke monsters in order to rally support. Japan has been the traditional target, but today's India vexes Beijing even more. If India can guarantee fundamental rights to its diverse citizens while managing a growth rate not far from China's and more than make up for the low numbers with a free press, regular elections, and independent institutions why, someone is bound to ask, can China not do the same?
In the coming months and years, Beijing is going to become even more aggressive with India. New Delhi must now discard the myth of China's invincibility that has led it into appeasement, and devise a definitive China policy featuring at least three elements.
First, India should continue fortifying its side of the border with China by upgrading infrastructure, deploying troops, setting up air bases; New Delhi must yield to the overwhelming patriotic sentiment in Arunachal Pradesh and allow the formation of a local military regiment.
Second, India must deepen its engagement with Australia and Japan, broaden its military exercises with the US, and build active alliances with south-east Asian countries wary of China.
Finally, India must allow the "Dalai clique" to engage in political activity. It makes no sense for New Delhi to suppress Tibetan protesters in order to mollify an expansionist monster that has sponsored anti-India insurgencies for at least 50 years. Tibet's restive population is a time bomb whose detonator, the Dalai Lama, is with India. New Delhi must stop gagging His Holiness.
The Sino-Indian conflict will define the 21st century in a more complicated manner than the Soviet-American conflict characterised the second half of the 20th. So far, this clash has received very little attention in the west. In the not-too-distant future, people everywhere are going to have to pick sides. The troubled peace of today is necessarily a prelude to the impending war.
Superpower rivalry, Sino-Indian style | Kapil Komireddi | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk
Also a refutation of the claims of Neville Maxwell -
Assertion - The general consensus of opinion for a long time has been that India was the aggressor.
Response - I am not sure there was ever such a "consensus". Neville Maxwell was among the very few people who pinned the blame on India. But Maxwell was an atrocious judge of events. Among other things, he said Indian democracy would die by 1967 and the Indian army would take over. The Guardian actually described him as "the Delhi correspondent of a British newspaper whose thundering misjudgments in foreign affairs have become a byword" -- an oddly typhlotic creature who claimed democracy was dying in India when it was, in The Guardian's words, "for the first time coming fully alive".
Maxwell's claim that "India... threatened that it would support the position of the Nationalist rump on Formosa rather than the Peoples Republic of China in the United Nations" does not stand up to scrutiny. Nehru was deeply (some would say delusionally) appreciative of the PRC, and he refused to occupy Taiwan's seat on the Security Council in deference to China.
Maxwell's book on the war was an extended op-ed, not a history. For that, you have to turn to more recent scholarship. Ramachandra Guha's "India After Gandhi" has an excellent (and very objective) account of the war. Guha accessed classified minutes of the extensive conversation between Nehru and Zhou Enlai. At worst, you can accuse Nehru of recklessness, not chauvinism. The colonisation of Tibet should have alarmed India. Yet no measures were taken to secure the borders.
The attack of 1962 required extensive preparation. It was India that was unprepared, caught by surprise, without adequate troops or supply lines, and its soldiers fighting with outdated weapons wearing canvas shoes. But China retreated just as India got its act together (thanks to armaments from Washington and London). The notion that the CPC was a peace-loving entity provoked into action by Nehru's Congress is risible.
Kapil Komireddi is not usually a very "pro India" writer, but this was brilliantly written.
Hope u agree.
we are also buying the latest of their technology.
