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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

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?”)