By Mohan Guruswamy
Ironically enough the downslide in India-China relations began in just days before November 2006 visit of Hu Jintao, supposedly intended to showcase an upswing in the relations. It began when the then Chinese Ambassador to India, Sun Yuxi, made a rather indiscreet and untimely comment to a TV news channel that the status of Arunachal Pradesh was still an unresolved issue between the two countries. Whether Sun Yuxi made this comment as mere restatement of the old Chinese position for the record or to deliberately stir the pot will be debated for a long time. Sun Yuxi himself told me that he did not intend it to stir things up and that the partly American owned TV channel deliberately played it up to blight the improving ties. Sun Yuxi also, quite significantly, added that while he might have been indiscreet, his statement won him a great deal of support from groups in China who favor a hard-line with India, ever since it began to draw closer to the USA. Many in China believe that India is now part of an US attempt to encircle it and even Prakash Karat of our CPM has echoed this view. The result of the Sun Yuxi statement was that what had become a mere border alignment issue was once again transformed into a territorial issue.
The thaw in our ties was initiated when Deng Xiaoping made an offer to Rajiv Gandhi in December 1988 to settle the border dispute on an as is where is basis. The politically beleaguered Rajiv Gandhi felt that he did have the political capital for a deal to essentially forego claims on Aksai Chin in exchange for an alignment generally corresponding McMahon Line. The two leaders then agreed to keep the issue frozen for settlement “at some future time”.
Following this and the agreements consequent to the visits of Narasimha Rao and Atal Behari Vajpayee, it was generally believed in India that the Chinese claim on Arunachal Pradesh was now in the past. While releasing my book “India China Relations: The Border Issue and Beyond” earlier this year, in response to a pointed question from a journalist, the then Foreign Secretary strongly hinted that a settlement along the status quo might now be more acceptable to the Indian leadership.
As if the border row wasn’t enough to heat up relations, other issues too have cropped up. There is the question of the Dalai Lama’s continued residence in India which surfaced even as the waters of distrust began receding. China’s inability to deal with the increasing Tibetan restiveness also makes it angrily point a finger at India. When in India the Dalai Lama is restricted to just performing his ecclesiastical duties which include tending to the spiritual needs of a large Indian flock adhering to the Tibetan school of Mahayana Buddhism. The Chinese have now taken umbrage over his visit to the ancient monastery at Tawang. Let alone the Dalai Lama’s visit, they were even critical of Dr. Manmohan Singh’s visit to the state last month. In the recent days the situation has been further vitiated by stories, many of them false, in the Indian media.
The global economic crisis has exacerbated problems within China’s rapidly growing economy. With US markets’ rapidly shrinking it needs to find markets elsewhere to sustain its export led growth model. The rapidly growing Sino-Indian trade, but increasingly tilted in China’s favor mostly due to an undervalued Yuan, is yet another festering issue. China derives much of its export prowess due to its undervalued Yuan and exploitative labor practices. The economic profligacy of the USA and China’s somewhat naïve hoarding of trillions of dollars as reserves makes it the USA’s co-equal in causing the global economic mayhem. There is no sign that China has derived lessons from this and will revalue the Yuan.
The misuse of business visas by Chinese construction companies to bring in tens of thousands of workers into India is now another issue. On the other hand the issue of visas on a separate sheet of paper to Indian residents of J&K and Arunachal Pradesh in a bid to highlight their disputed status is seen as deliberately provocative by India. Providing a backdrop to all this is the China’s rather duplicitous role at the Vienna conference to ratify the IAEA’s exemption for India from the stringent provisions instituted after our 1974 nuclear test; and its opposition to the expansion of the UN Security Council’s permanent membership and by extension India’s entry into it.
In the recent days several new publications and books have exposed how extensively China assisted in the development of Pakistan’s nuclear program and their delivery systems. Since Pakistan’s nuclear program is entirely India centric, this is in itself is quite revealing about the intensity of Chinese hostility then towards India. The Chinese have been insisting that it was in the past and China is now committed to improving ties with India. But the proof of the pudding is in the eating and China, despite its much vaunted policy culinary abilities, has not yet put it on the table!
(Mohan Guruswamy is a well known commentator and is the author of the recently published “Chasing the Dragon: Will India Catch-up with China?”)
