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From: Berhane Habtemariam (Berhane.Habtemariam@gmx.de)
Date: Mon Aug 23 2010 - 14:46:24 EDT
India and China-A Himalayan rivalry
Asia’s two giants are still unsure what to make of each other. But as they
grow, they are coming closer—for good and bad
Aug 23, 2010 | Beijing, Delhi and Tawang
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MEMORIES of a war between India and China are still vivid in the Tawang
valley, a lovely, cloud-blown place high on the south-eastern flank of the
Himalayas. They are nurtured first by the Indian army, humiliated in 1962
when the People’s Liberation Army swept into Tawang from next-door Tibet.
India now has three army corps—about 100,000 troops—in its far north-eastern
state of Arunachal Pradesh, which includes Tawang.
With another corps in reserve, and a few Sukhoi fighter planes deployed last
year to neighbouring Assam, they are a meaty border force, unlike their
hapless predecessors. In 1962 many Indian troops were sent shivering to the
front in light cotton uniforms issued for Punjab’s fiery plains. In a
weeklong assault the Chinese seized much of Arunachal, as well as a slab of
Kashmir in the western Himalayas, and killed 3,000 Indian officers and men.
Outside Tawang’s district headquarters a roadside memorial, built in the
local Buddhist style, commemorates these dead. At a famous battle site,
below the 14,000-foot pass that leads into Tawang, army convoys go slow, and
salute their ghosts.
In wayside villages of solid white houses fluttering with coloured
prayer-flags, China’s two-week occupation of Tawang is also remembered.
Local peasants, aged 60 and more but with youthful Tibetan features,
light-brown and creased by the wind, recall playing Sho (Tibetan Mahjong)
with the invaders. Many say they remember them fondly: the Chinese, they
note, helped get in the wheat harvest that year. “They were little men, but
they were always ready to help. We had no problem with them,” says Mem
Nansey, an aged potato farmer. The Chinese withdrew to Tibet, their
superiority established but their supply lines overstretched, barely a
fortnight after they had come. “We weren’t sorry to see the back of them,
either,” says Mr Nansey, concerned, it seems, that no one should doubt his
loyalty to Delhi, 1,500km (930 miles) to the west.
His ambivalence is widely shared. China and India, repositories of 40% of
the world’s people, are often unsure what to make of each other. Since
re-establishing diplomatic ties in 1976, after a post-war pause, they and
their relationship have in many ways been transformed. The 1962 war was an
act of Chinese aggression most obviously springing from China’s desire for
western Aksai Chin, a lofty plain linking Xinjiang to Tibet. But its deeper
causes included a famine in China and economic malaise in both countries.
China and India are now the world’s fastest-growing big economies, however,
and in a year or two, when India overtakes Japan on a
purchasing-power-parity basis, they will be the world’s second- and
third-biggest. And as they grow, Asia’s giants have come closer.
Their two-way trade is roaring: only $270m in 1990, it is expected to exceed
$60 billion this year. They are also tentatively co-operating, for their
mutual enrichment, in other ways: for example, by co-ordinating their bids
for the African oil supplies that both rely on. Given their contrasting
economic strengths—China’s in manufacturing, India’s in services—some see an
opportunity for much deeper co-operation. There is even a word for this
vision, “Chindia”. On important international issues, notably climate-change
policy and world trade, their alignment is already imposing.
Their leaders naturally talk up these pluses: at the summit of the BRICs
(Brazil, Russia, India, China) in Brasília in April, for example, and during
celebrations in Beijing earlier this year to commemorate the 60th
anniversary of India’s recognition of the People’s Republic. “India and
China are not in competition,” India’s sage-like prime minister, Manmohan
Singh, often says. “There is enough economic space for us both.”
China’s president, Hu Jintao, says the same. And no doubt both want to
believe it. The booms in their countries have already moved millions out of
poverty, especially in China, which is far ahead on almost every such
measure of progress (and also dismissive of the notion that India could ever
rival it). A return to confrontation, besides hugely damaging the improved
image of both countries, would plainly jeopardise this movement forward.
That is why the secular trend in China-India relations is positive.
Yet China and India are in many ways rivals, not Asian brothers, and their
relationship is by any standard vexed—as recent quarrelling has made
abundantly plain. If you then consider that they are, despite their mutual
good wishes, old enemies, bad neighbours and nuclear powers, and have two of
the world’s biggest armies—with almost 4m troops between them—this may seem
troubling.
Forget Chindia
There are many caveats to the recent improvement in their relationship. As
the world’s oil wells run dry, many—including sober analysts in both
countries—foresee China-India rivalry redrawn as a cut-throat contest for an
increasingly scarce resource. The two oil-gluggers’ recent co-operation on
energy was, after all, as unusual as it was tentative. More often, Chinese
state-backed energy firms compete with all-comers, for Sudanese oil and
Burmese gas, and win.
Rivalry over gas supplies is a bigger concern for Indian policymakers. They
fear China would be more able to “capture” gas by building massive pipelines
overnight. Water is already an object of contention, given that several of
the big rivers of north India, including the Brahmaputra, on which millions
depend, rise in Tibet. China recently announced that it is building a dam on
the Brahmaputra, which it calls the Yarlung Tsangpo, exacerbating an old
Indian fear that the Beijing regime means to divert the river’s waters to
Chinese farmers.
As for Chindia, it can seem almost too naive to bother about. Over 70% of
India’s exports to China by value are raw materials, chiefly iron ore,
bespeaking a colonial-style trade relationship that is hugely favourable to
China. A proliferating range of Chinese non-tariff barriers to Indian
companies, which India grumbles about, is a small part of this. The fault
lies chiefly with India’s uncompetitive manufacturing. It is currently
cheaper, an Indian businessman says ruefully, to export plastic granules to
China and then import them again in bucket-form, than it is to make buckets
in India.
This is a source of tension. India’s great priority is to create millions of
jobs for its young, bulging and little-skilled population, which will be
possible only if it makes huge strides in manufacturing. Similarly, if China
trails India in IT services at present, its recent investments in the
industry suggest it does not plan to lag for long.
Yet there is another, more obvious bone of contention, which exacerbates all
these others and lies at the root of them: the 4,000km border that runs
between the two countries. Nearly half a century after China’s invasion, it
remains largely undefined and bitterly contested.
The basic problem is twofold. In the undefined northern part of the frontier
India claims an area the size of Switzerland, occupied by China, for its
region of Ladakh. In the eastern part, China claims an Indian-occupied area
three times bigger, including most of Arunachal. This 890km stretch of
frontier was settled in 1914 by the governments of Britain and Tibet, which
was then in effect independent, and named the McMahon Line after its
creator, Sir Henry McMahon, foreign secretary of British-ruled India. For
China—which was afforded mere observer status at the negotiations preceding
the agreement—the McMahon Line represents a dire humiliation.
China also particularly resents being deprived of Tawang, which—though south
of the McMahon Line—was occupied by Indian troops only in 1951, shortly
after China’s new Communist rulers dispatched troops to Tibet. This district
of almost 40,000 people, scattered over 2,000 square kilometres of valley
and high mountains, was the birthplace in the 17th century of the sixth
Dalai Lama (the incumbent incarnation is the 14th). Tawang is a centre of
Tibet’s Buddhist culture, with one of the biggest Tibetan monasteries
outside Lhasa. Traditionally, its ethnic Monpa inhabitants offered fealty to
Tibet’s rulers—which those aged peasants around Tawang also remember. “The
Tibetans came for money and did nothing for us,” said Mr Nansey, referring
to the fur-cloaked Tibetan officials who until the late 1940s went from
village to village extracting a share of the harvest.
Making matters worse, the McMahon Line was drawn with a fat nib,
establishing a ten-kilometre margin for error, and it has never been
demarcated. With more confusion in the central sector, bordering India’s
northern state of Uttarakhand, there are in all a dozen stretches of
frontier where neither side knows where even the disputed border should be.
In these “pockets”, as they are called, Indian and Chinese border guards
circle each other endlessly while littering the Himalayan hillsides—as dogs
mark lampposts—to make their presence known. When China-India relations are
strained, this gives rise to tit-for-tat and mostly bogus accusations of
illegal border incursions—for which each side can offer the other’s empty
cigarette and noodle packets as evidence. In official Indian parlance such
proof is grimly referred to as “telltale signs”. It is plainly garbage. Yet
this is a carefully rehearsed and mutually comprehensible ritual for which
both sides deserve credit, of a sort. Despite several threatened
dust-ups—including one in 1986 that saw 200,000 Indian troops rushed to
northern Tawang district—there has been no confirmed exchange of fire
between Indian and Chinese troops since 1967.
Hands extended—and withdrawn
It would be even better if the two countries would actually settle their
dispute, and, until recently, that seemed imaginable. The obvious solution,
whereby both sides more or less accept the status quo, exchanging just a few
bits of turf to save face, was long ago advocated by China, including in the
1980s by the then prime minister, Deng Xiaoping. India’s leaders long
considered this politically impossible. But in 2003 a coalition government
led by the Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party—which in 1998 had cited
the Chinese threat to justify its decision to test a nuclear bomb—launched
an impressive bid for peace. For the first time India declared itself ready
to compromise on territory, and China appeared ready to meet it halfway.
Both countries appointed special envoys, who have since met 13 times, to
lead the negotiations that followed. This led to an outline deal in 2005,
containing the “guiding principles and political parameters” for a final
settlement. Those included an agreement that it would involve no exchange of
“settled populations”—which implied that China had dropped its historical
demand for Tawang.
Yet the hopes this inspired have faded. In ad hoc comments from Chinese
diplomats and through its state-controlled media—which often refer to
Arunachal as Chinese South Tibet—China appears to have reasserted its demand
for most of India’s far north-eastern state. Annoying the Indians further,
it started issuing special visas to Indians from Arunachal and Kashmir—after
having denied a visa to an Indian official from Arunachal on the basis that
he was, in fact, Chinese. It also objected to a $60m loan to India from the
Asian Development Bank, on the basis that some of the money was earmarked
for irrigation schemes in Arunachal. Its spokesman described a visit to
Tawang by Mr Singh, ahead of a general election last year, as “provocative
and dangerous”. Chinese analysts warn against understanding from these hints
that China has formally revised its position on the border. But that is
India’s suspicion. And no one, in either country, is predicting a border
settlement soon.
In fact, the relationship has generally soured. Having belatedly woken up to
the huge improvements China has made in its border infrastructure, enabling
a far swifter mobilisation of Chinese troops there, India announced last
year that it would deploy another 60,000 troops to Arunachal. It also began
upgrading its airfields in Assam and deploying the Sukhois to them. India’s
media meanwhile reported a spate of “incursions” by Chinese troops. China’s
state-controlled media was more restrained, with striking exceptions. Last
year an editorial in the Global Times, an English-language tabloid in
Beijing, warned that “India needs to consider whether or not it can afford
the consequences of a potential confrontation with China.” Early this year
India’s outgoing national security adviser and special envoy to China, M.K.
Narayanan, accused Chinese hackers of attacking his website, as well as
those of other Indian government departments.
Recent diplomacy has brought more calm. Officials on both sides were
especially pleased by their show of unity at the United Nations climate
meeting in Copenhagen last December, where China and India, the world’s
biggest and fourth-biggest emitters of carbon gas, faced down American-led
demands for them to undertake tougher anti-warming measures. A slight
cooling in the America-India relationship, which President George Bush had
pushed with gusto, has also helped. So, India hopes, has its appointment of
a shrewd Mandarin-speaker, Shivshankar Menon, as its latest national
security adviser and special envoy to China. He made his first visit to
Beijing in this role last month; a 14th round of border talks is expected.
And yet the China-India relationship has been bruised.
Negative views
In China, whose Communist leaders are neither voluble nor particularly
focused on India, this bruising is mostly clear from last year’s quarrel
itself. The Chinese, many of whom consider India a dirty, third-rate sort of
place, were perhaps most obviously to blame for it. This is despite China’s
conspicuous recent success in settling its other land disputes, including
with Russia and Vietnam—a fact Chinese commentators often cite to indicate
Indian intransigence. Chinese public opinion also seems to be turning
against India, a country the Chinese have been wont to remark on fondly, if
at all, as the birthplace of Buddhism. According to a recent survey of
global opinion released by the BBC, the Chinese show a “distinct cooling”
towards India, which 47% viewed negatively.
In garrulous, democratic India, the fallout is easier to gauge. According to
the BBC poll, 38% of Indians have a negative view of China. In fact, this
has been more or less the case since the defeat of 1962. Lamenting the
failure of Indian public opinion to move on, Patricia Uberoi, a sociologist
at Delhi’s Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, notes that while
there have been many Indian films on the subcontinent’s violent partition,
including star-crossed Indo-Pakistani romances, there has been only one
notable Indian movie on the 1962 war: a propaganda film called “Haqeeqat”,
or “Truth”, supported by the Indian defence ministry.
Hawkish Indian commentators are meanwhile up in arms. “China, in my view,
does not want a rival in Asia,” says Brajesh Mishra, a former national
security adviser and special envoy to China, who drafted the 2005 agreement
and is revered by the hawks. “Its main agenda is to keep India preoccupied
with events in South Asia so it is constrained from playing a more important
role in Asian and global affairs.” Senior officials present a more nuanced
analysis, noting, for example, that India has hardly been alone in getting
heat from China: many countries, Asian and Western, have similarly been
singed. Yet they admit to heightened concern over China’s intentions in
South Asia, and foresee no hope for a settlement of the border. Nicholas
Burns, a former American diplomat who led the negotiations for an
America-India nuclear co-operation deal that was concluded in 2008, and who
now teaches at Harvard University, suspects that over the past year China
has supplanted Pakistan as the main worry of Indian policymakers. He
considers the China-India relationship “exceedingly troubled and perturbed”
and thinks that it will remain “uneasy for many years to come”.
Fear of encirclement
For foreign-policy realists, who see China and India locked in a battle for
Asian supremacy, this is inevitable. Even fixing the border could hardly
mitigate the tension. More optimistic analysts, and there are many, even if
currently hushed, consider this old-school nonsense. Though both India and
China have their rabid fringe, they say, they are rational enough to know
that a strategic struggle would be sapping and, given each other’s vast
size, unwinnable. Both are therefore committed, as they claim, to fixing the
border and fostering better relations. Yet there are a few impediments to
this—of which two are most often cited by analysts in Beijing and Delhi.
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One is represented by the America-India nuclear deal, agreed in principle
between Mr Singh and Mr Bush in 2005. Not unreasonably, China took this as a
sign that America wanted to use India as a counterweight to China’s rise. It
also considered the pact hypocritical: America, while venting against
China’s ally, North Korea, going nuclear (which it did a year later), was
offering India a free pass to nuclear-power status, despite its refusal to
sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Indian analysts believe that
China, in a cautious way, tried to scupper the deal by encouraging some of
its opponents, including Ireland and Sweden, to vote against it in the
Nuclear Suppliers Group, a 46-member club from which it required unanimous
approval.
This glitch reflects a bigger Chinese fear of encirclement by America and
its allies, a fear heightened by a recent burst of American activity in
Asia. The United States has sought to strengthen security ties with
South-East Asian countries, including Vietnam and Indonesia. It has also
called on China, in an unusually public fashion, to be more accommodating
over contested areas of the South China Sea—where America and India share
concerns about a Chinese naval build-up, including the construction of a
nuclear-submarine base on the Chinese island of Hainan. In north-east Asia,
America has launched military exercises with South Korea in response to
North Korea’s alleged sinking of a South Korean warship in March. Some
Chinese analysts, with ties to the government, consider these a direct
challenge to China.
China is deeply suspicious of America’s military campaign in nearby
Afghanistan (and covertly in Pakistan), which is supported from bases in
Central Asian countries. It is also unimpressed by a growing closeness
between India and Japan, its main Asian rival. Japanese firms are, for
example, expected to invest $10 billion, and perhaps much more, in a 1,500km
“industrial corridor” between Delhi and Mumbai. In 2007 Japanese warships
took part in a naval exercise in the Bay of Bengal, also involving Indian,
Australian and Singaporean ships and the American nuclear-powered vessels
USS Nimitz and USS Chicago, which was hosted by India and was the biggest
ever held in the region.
This seemed to back a proposal, put about by American think-tankers, for an
“axis of democracies” to balance China. Officially, India would want no part
of this. “We don’t want to balance China,” says a senior Indian official.
But, he adds, “all the democracies do feel it is safer to be together. Is
China going to be peaceful or not? We don’t know. In the event that China
leaves the path of peaceful rise, we would work very closely together.”
India also fears encirclement, and with reason. America’s Pentagon, in an
annual report on China’s military power released on August 16th, said
China’s armed forces were developing “new capabilities” that might extend
their reach into the Indian Ocean. China has also made big investments in
all India’s neighbours. It is building deepwater ports in Pakistan and
Bangladesh, roads in Nepal and oil and gas pipelines in Myanmar. Worse, it
agreed in 2008 to build two nuclear-power plants for its main regional ally,
Pakistan—a deal that also worried America, who saw it as a tit-for-tat
response to its nuclear deal with India. (China has become Pakistan’s
biggest supplier of military hardware, including fighter jets and
guided-missile frigates, and in the past has given it weapons-grade fissile
material and a tested bomb design as part of its nuclear support.)
Muffling Tibet
Hawkish Indians consider these Chinese investments as a “string of pearls”
to throttle India. Wiser ones point out that India is too big to
throttle—and that China’s rising influence in South Asia is an indictment of
India’s past inability to get on with almost any of its neighbours. Under Mr
Singh, India has sought to redress this. It is boosting trade with Sri Lanka
and Bangladesh, and sticking, with commendable doggedness in the face of
little encouragement, to the task of making peace with Pakistan. That would
be glorious for both countries; it would also remove a significant
China-India bugbear.
The other great impediment to better relations is Tibet. Its fugitive Dalai
Lama and his “government-in-exile” have found refuge in India since 1959—and
China blames him, and by extension his hosts, for the continued
rebelliousness in his homeland. A Tibetan uprising in March 2008, the
biggest in decades, was therefore a major factor in last year’s China-India
spat. It led to China putting huge pressure on India to stifle the
anti-China Tibetan protests that erupted in India—especially one intended to
disrupt the passage of the Olympic torch through Delhi en route to Beijing.
It also objected to a visit to Tawang by the Dalai Lama last November, which
it predictably called a “separatist action”. This visit, from which leftover
banners of welcome still festoon the town’s main bazaar, perhaps reminded
China why it is so fixated on Tawang—as a centre of the Tibetan Buddhist
culture that it is struggling, all too visibly, to control.
Mindful of the huge support the Dalai Lama enjoys in India, its government
says it can do little to restrict him. Yet it policed the protest tightly,
and also barred foreign journalists from accompanying him to Tawang. India
would perhaps rather be spared discreet balancing acts of this sort. “But
we’re stuck with him, he’s our guest,” says V.R. Raghavan, a retired Indian
general and veteran of the 1962 war. Indeed, many Indian pundits consider
that China will never settle the border, and so relinquish a potential
source of leverage over India, while the 75-year-old lama is alive.
After his death, China will attempt to control his holy office as it has
those of other senior lamas. It will “discover” the reincarnated Dalai Lama
in Tibet, or at least endorse the choice of its agents, and attempt to groom
him into a more biddable monk. In theory that would end a major cause of
China-India discord, but only if the Chinese can convince Tibetans that
their choice is the right one, which seems unlikely. The Dalai Lama has
already indicated that he may choose to be “reborn” outside China. There is
talk of the important role Tawang has often played in identifying
incarnations of the Dalai Lama, or even that the 14th may choose to
reincarnate in Tawang itself.
For the abbot of Tawang’s main monastery, Guru Tulku Rinpoche, that would be
a great blessing. “If his holiness chooses to be born in Tawang, we would be
so happy,” he says in his red-carpeted monastic office, as half a dozen
skinny lads file in to be inducted into monkhood. Silently, they prostrate
themselves before the abbot, while he scribbles down their new monastic
names. Outside his window, the early morning sun sparkles through the white
clouds that hang low over Tawang. It is hard to think that this remote and
tranquil spot could have caused such a continent-sized ruckus. Yet, if the
abbot has his wish, it will cause a lot more trouble yet.
