SASF – Blogs

By Mohan Guruswamy. November 3, 2009. The short answer to whether India and China will always be rivals is YES. But rivals need not be enemies and neighbors need not get fratricidal. If there are two large and rising powers in a region, rivalry is inevitable. France and Germany or Brazil and Argentina come readily to mind. A hundred and fifty years ago France and Britain were bitter adversaries. The rise of Teutonic nationalism and of Nazism united the two countries against a common enemy. The “end of history” with the triumph of liberal democracy has largely blunted Franco-German rivalry by entwining them economically, while the advent of the European Union has made the borders seamless. The ratification of the Treaty of Tlatelolco of 1967 by Argentina in 1994, making all of Latin America and the Caribbean a nuclear free zone, has more or less eliminated any vestigial military fears Argentina and Brazil may have had. On the other hand go to a Brazil-Argentina soccer match or to a France-England rugby game and you will wonder if things have changed at all? Rivalries, it seems, are forever!

The situation between India and China is not very different. Nationalism arrived in both countries at about the same time in the early 1900’s with the advent of Sun Yat Sen in China and MK Gandhi in India. This was after centuries of foreign rule over the Han and Hindu ethnic majorities. After decades of turbulence both countries emerged as “free nations” with entirely different systems in the waning 1940’s. Mao Zedong and Jawaharlal Nehru were leaders with entirely different personalities and world views. Mao’s ruthless instincts were honed as the leader of the Communists in a bloody civil war. On the other side Jawaharlal’s were finessed under the tutelage of Mahatma Gandhi into that of a somewhat naïve and dreamy idealist. The isolation of the two countries that the British had so assiduously nurtured by supporting an independent Tibet was rudely shattered by its annexation by China in 1951. This and the handing over of Xinjiang by the then USSR to the new PRC made the Han and the Hindu neighbors for the first time in history.

Since 1954 the legacy of a disputed border has flared up into a bitter row. Both countries are guilty of misinterpreting history to further their claims. India’s claim of the barren and wind swept Aksai Chin plateau rests on an arbitrary extension of the border in 1939 to the present claim line first suggested by WH Johnson in 1865. Johnson was a discontented official of the Survey of India who made his fortune by vastly extending the Kashmir Maharaja’s domain on the map. The 1939 extension was done to create a buffer between Xinjiang, which had turned into a Soviet protectorate, and British India.

On the other side in China the obsequious courtiers of the Qing (Manchu) dynasty were not averse to some cartographic conquests of their own.  Ge Jianxiong, a well respected history professor at China’s prestigious Fudan University, has written that “the notions of Greater China were based entirely on one-sided views of Qing court records that were written for the courts self-aggrandizement.” Ge has also written criticizing those who feel that the more they exaggerate the territory the more “patriotic” they are. The present Dalai Lama lent weight to this by formally staking a claim over Tawang to the newly independent India in 1947. Such is the stuff that wars are made off and the two countries are in a military face-off since 1962.

To be fair to the Chinese they have at several times offered a package deal of settling by foregoing each others un-historic and unsubstantiated claims in Ladakh and Arunachal Pradesh. India’s leadership has balked at this lest it be accused by the opposition of the day of selling out. Only in recent days a new wisdom seemed to creeping into South Block, but the Chinese have suddenly turned recalcitrant. They now seem to suggest that the package deal is no longer on offer?

As if this were not enough there are other issues that color each other perceptions. The voracious appetite for Tiger parts in China is one. The rise of China, which was the dominant event of the last two decades, is now being threatened by a slowing down economy, and it is locked into an irretrievable reverse hock to the vastly indebted USA. India on the other hand has begun to experience heady growth rates since the turn of the century, giving rise to a new giddiness about its place in the world. The Chinese don’t care too much for this. This is the stuff of competition. But not war. For both sides, as the song goes, are now endowed with the mushroom shaped cloud! And so we will have to be content playing rivals.

Mohan Guruswamy

Email: mohanguru@gmail.com

November 3, 2009

Ramtanu Maitra and Susan Maitra

Sunday, January 29, 2006

Continuing terrorist actions and violent demonstrations over the last five decades have turned India’s Northeast into a dangerous place. Large-scale introduction of narcotics and arms from neighboring Myanmar (Burma) and China has made this strategically crucial area a potential theater of violent secessionist movements.

Imbued with the British ideology of encouraging ethnic, sub-ethnic, religious, and linguistic identities—as opposed to the identity of a citizen of a sovereign nation-state—both New Delhi and the residents of Northeast India are marching recklessly along the very path prescribed by the British Raj in 1862, when he laid down the law of apartheid to isolate “the tribals.” While it is not clear how long this fateful road is, there is little doubt what awaits them at the end.

British mindset at work

Since India’s independence in 1947, Northeast India has been split up into smaller and smaller states and autonomous regions. The divisions were made to accommodate the wishes of tribes and ethnic groups which want to assert their sub-national identity and obtain an area where the diktat of their little coterie is recognized. New Delhi has yet to comprehend that its policy of accepting and institutionalizing the superficial identities of these ethnic, linguistic, and tribal groups has ensured more irrational demands for even smaller states. It has also virtually eliminated any plan to make these areas economically powerful, and the people scientifically and technologically advanced.

A situation has now arisen in which New Delhi’s promised carrot of economic development evokes little enthusiasm in the Northeast. Money from New Delhi for “development” serves to appease the “greed” of a handful and to maintain the status quo. On the other hand, fresh separatist movements bring the area closer to the precipice.

Assam has been cut up into many states since Britain’s exit. The autonomous regions of Karbi Anglong, Bodo Autonomous Region, and Meghalaya were all part of pre-independence Assam. Citing the influx of Bengali Muslims since the 1947 formation of East Pakistan, which became Bangladesh in 1971, the locals demand the ouster of these “foreigners” from their soil. Two violent movements in Assam, the United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA) and the Bodo Security Force (BdSF), are now practically demanding “ethnic cleansing” in their respective areas.

To fund their movements, both the ULFA and the BdSF have been trafficking heroin and other narcotics, and indulging in killing sprees against other ethnic groups and against Delhi’s law-and-order machinery. Both these groups have also developed close links with other major guerrilla-terrorist groups operating in the area, including the National Socialist Council of Nagaland (Muivah) and the People’s Liberation Army in Manipur. continue reading…

ULAN BATOR, Mongolia – As events unfold in Xinjiang Province, we have seen a resurgence of ethnic Chinese nationalist sentiment mixed with fear and mistrust of not just the Uighur people but also the outside world.

China’s central and local governments were quick to accuse the U.S.-based World Uighur Congress of fomenting racial tension in Xinjiang and alluded to “outside” terrorist and separatist organizations working together to split up the country.

Meanwhile, China’s blogosphere has been rife with Han Chinese outrage at the foreign media coverage of the violence, calling it prejudiced and erroneous. And on the streets of Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang, Western reporters have faced angry mobs of Han Chinese accusing them of a long-standing bias against China.

But looking at the unrest in Xinjiang from a neighboring country like Mongolia offers an interesting perspective on China’s regional reputation. Whether the Chinese would acknowledge it or not, unfortunately the long reach of history often influences modern attitudes much more than any current day media reports.

How to insult a Mongol
The first thing we learned upon arriving at the Mongolian capital of Ulan Bator was that one way of insulting a Mongol was to tell him, “You are Chinese.”

Our translator, a good-natured 26-year-old nicknamed Togo, explained, “It just means that you think the person is very rude.”

That’s nowhere as offensive as it could be, given the historical enmity between Mongolia and China. But this little bit of cultural exchange, as it were, goes a long way to illustrate how the Chinese are viewed by some neighbors – and how they increasingly may be seen in light of unrest in Tibet and Xinjiang.

An intertwined history
Over the centuries, the two countries have fought bitterly for supremacy.

One of China’s great but short-lived dynasties was Mongolian. Kublai Khan, the grandson of Genghis Khan, established the Yuan dynasty in 1271 and made Beijing the capital of his empire. (It should be noted that ethnic Chinese culture flourished under this “foreign” Imperial Court, which promoted cultural diversity and welcomed outside ideas and outsiders, including Marco Polo.)

The succeeding dynasty, the Ming, rebuilt and fortified the Great Wall with the Mongols in mind – to keep them out of China.

Mongolia, in turn, lost a considerable amount of territory to the Chinese led by the Manchu during the Qing Dynasty. The swath of land it lost is now known as Inner Mongolia and is the third largest province in China, with almost a fifth of its residents ethnic Mongols. (In fact, China has more Mongols than Mongolia.) And they from time to time accuse the Chinese government of discriminating against them.

Inner Mongolia is also where – 800 years after the death of Genghis Khan, with almost as long a history of demonizing him as the leader of savage barbarian hordes – the Chinese have recently tried to reinvent the great Mongol warrior as one of their own. At the height of this rebranding push, critics concluded that China’s policy of assimilating Genghis was meant to reinforce the official line that Inner Mongolia has always been an integral part of China.

Fortunately, for Beijing, Inner Mongolia has not been riven by the kind of ethnic strife witnessed in Tibet or Xinjiang. Perhaps that’s because – unlike the Uighurs in Xinjiang province or the Tibetans – the Mongols actually have their own nation, even if at times Mongolia feels constrained by its much more powerful neighbor.

‘Caught between two hungry wolves’
I was particularly alert when, here in Ulan Bator, Togo introduced me to curious Mongols as an American and avoided any mention of my Chinese roots even when they were clearly mystified by my ethnicity.

Later, in private conversation, Togo described in great detail the animosity many Mongolians still feel toward China and the Chinese.

“We are like the deer, caught between two hungry wolves,” he said to me, referring to Mongolia’s precarious geography between Russia and China.

And Russia, many Mongolians feel, has been the less hungry of the two – hence the close relationship between the two communist governments for several decades. In recent times, however, officials in Ulan Bator have played a cautious game of diplomacy with the Chinese, who have not hesitated to express their displeasure when crossed.

Take the Tibet situation, for example.

Through a common religion, Tibet and Mongolia have strong historical ties. Mongolia, which is predominantly Buddhist, practices the Yellow Hat sect, whose spiritual leader is the Dalai Lama.

But when the Dalai Lama last visited Ulan Bator, in 2006, the Mongolian government took great pains to keep the trip low-key, calling it a religious exchange. After all, during a 2002 visit by him, the Chinese government protested by cutting off rail links with landlocked Mongolia for two days.

Many Mongolians feel a strong kinship with Tibet, and this is especially true for monks. Outside Gandan Monastery – Mongolia’s largest and most important Buddhist monastery – a monk told us that he had visited Dharamsala, India, many times to meet the Dalai Lama and that he hoped to be able to visit Tibet in his lifetime. But when asked what he thought about China’s relationship with Tibet, he demurred, preferring – like his government – not to take a public stance.

Looking farther afield to America
Today, Mongolia looks neither to Russia nor to China.  Instead, the government – especially under newly elected President Tsakhia Elbegdorj – wants to reorient the country toward the United States and its close allies, such as South Korea or Japan.

In fact, Elbegdorj, who in May won on a campaign of hope and anti-corruption, was responsible for steering the nation’s education system toward adopting English as a second language instead of Russian.  In his youth, he attended the University of Colorado-Boulder and then Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. Election campaigners in Mongolia dubbed him their Barack Obama, and he won votes from the country’s overwhelmingly youthful population.

But America isn’t in the headlines these days. Xinjiang is. And Togo has listened to our discussions about the unrest in Xinjiang with great curiosity. When I asked him about the coverage of the story in Mongolia, he laughed.  We’ve been working so hard this week, he hasn’t had time to keep up with the news, he said. But tonight he was going home to read as much as he could.

Tomorrow, he smiled, we could talk about it.

Looking at China unrest from Mongolian perch – World Blog – msnbc.com.