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An occasion for India to think big

For any major international power, developing bilateral relations with China inevitably involves coming to terms with its phenomenal rise. For major regional powers such as Russia, Japan, Vietnam and India, this is particularly acute because the Asian security scenario also happens to be very dynamic.

The discourses in the Indian media, including by some of the prominent figures in the strategic community, over Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s upcoming visit to China unfortunately overlook this aspect. The curtain-raisers have more to say about the Dalai Lama or China’s infrastructure development activities in the Tibet Autonomous Region than about Dr. Singh’s visit providing a rare opportunity for assessing how India must come to terms with its northern neighbour, which is more than half a superpower already.

That is a pity. It is never a good idea to be bogged down in peripherals. Despite the assertion by some of our strategic thinkers, it is hard to agree that Tibet or the Dalai Lama is the sum total of what Sino-Indian relations ought to be. Secondly, we cannot get bogged down in contentious issues when almost the entire Asian region, and indeed much of the global community — be it the United States and Britain, Chile and Brazil, Nigeria and Sudan, or Saudi Arabia and Iran — is busy devising plans for advancing its ties with China, giving them more content and vitality. In diplomacy, stragglers find themselves having to crawl their way back on a pitiless greasy pole.

It is on the score of the emergent Asian security paradigm that Indian thinking must learn a great deal. Our thinkers in the past year focussed a great deal on the ‘potentials’ of a quadripartite alliance involving the United States, Japan, Australia and India. They made assumptions in near-epic proportions of the Sino-Japanese antipathies or the U.S’ so-called ‘containment’ policy toward China or the imperative need for a concert of democracies in Asia. How relevant are these themes today? Already these ideas and assumptions look somewhat vacuous. Unsurprisingly, given the great fluidity of Asian security, it was audacious to be cocksure.

As ‘non-alignment’ has become a dirty word in the idiom of our thinkers — especially since Washington began disparaging the concept — one must be apologetic about saying so, but the inescapable reality seems to be that a need arises for India to creatively transmute the ideology of non-alignment. Its haphazard transition in the tumultuous early 1990s — domestically and internationally — precluded profound thinking, but better late than never. If the quintessence of non-alignment was in distilling our national interests in a difficult world, the need is more than ever before. The signposts of the post-Cold War era already point to the need for endeavouring for this task where, ironically, China has stolen a march on us.

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, flag carrier of the U.S. government in the Cold War era, featured a year-ender on post-Soviet Russia last month. It said, “This was the year Vladimir Putin implicitly compared the U.S. to the Third Reich… And it was the year that — despite the occasional diplomatic language to the contrary — the last remnants of the vaunted strategic partnership between Russia and the West appeared headed for the dustbin of history… 2007 marked a new low in Russia’s post-Soviet relations with the West. And many experts expect things to get even worse.”

The commentary made an extraordinary assessment: “Cold War or not, Russia has certainly been attempting to lay the foundations for an alternative security architecture to compete with the West. In the past year, Moscow has tried to breathe life into security architecture bringing together ex-Soviet states like the Collective Security Treaty Organisation, and sought a closer military alliance with China via the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation.”

This is not cavalier opinion-making, but a media organ funded by the U.S. administration has made things clear to a global audience what the limited circle of specialists, politicians and diplomats already knew for some time about how the land lay in Russia-U.S. relations.

Plainly speaking, Russia’s resurgence is beginning to hurt the U.S. global strategies. Its latest move on Iran is virtually playing on the U.S. nerves — a possible readiness to supply medium range S-300 surface-to-air missiles, which together with the short-range Tor-M1 systems supplied earlier, would effectively nullify any residual attempt by Washington to bully Tehran. To quote Russian daily Izvestiya, “Iran will be Moscow’s trump card in its drive against the third stage of U.S. missile defences in Poland and the Czech Republic.” Russia’s “asymmetrical response” drills a hole right through the U.S. Middle East policy. Tor-M1 is equally effective against aircraft, cruise missiles and unmanned aerial vehicles, but is a close-battle weapon, the last defence line that engages or eliminates targets that may get through S-300s. That is to say, Tor-M1 plus S-300 would provide for Iran a credible modern multiechelon air defence system covering any key strategic facility.

The inevitability of strategic challenge from a resurgent Russia was foreseen by the Bill Clinton administration. The key interlocutor in Mr. Clinton’s presidential diplomacy with Boris Yeltsin, Strobe Talbott, in his authoritative work, The Russia Hand, makes it abundantly clear that Washington knew Russia would rise like a Phoenix from the ashes. Some day historians would assess whether it was more than a coincidence that the Clinton administration’s U-turn towards India closely followed the first definite signals reaching Washington of Russia’s disenchantment with the West (following Yevgeniy Primakov’s return to the Kremlin in 1995).

Suffice it to say, New Delhi’s equations with Moscow will always remain a crucial factor in Washington’s India policy. What Indian thinkers completely missed out was that for the foreseeable future, Russia, and not China, would remain Washington’s number 1 adversary in the global arena. Our thinkers must think a bit harder why their American interlocutors obfuscated this geopolitical reality.

Post-Soviet Russia still remains the only power that possesses strategic deterrence against the U.S. and frustrates the seven decades-old American dream of attaining nuclear superiority. That is why Washington assiduously works on Beijing for calibrating the highly sensitive triangular equations involving the U.S., China and Russia.

China has utilised the available space to its advantage. Indeed, China has not hidden it is creatively expanding the frontiers of non-alignment. What else is its concept of a “harmonious world” about? The People’s Daily explained recently: “Confucius expounded the philosophical concept of ‘harmony without uniformity’, meaning the world is full of differences and contradictions, but the righteous man should balance them and achieve harmony.” In an important speech at the Party School of the Chinese Communist Party Central Committee in June, President Hu Jintao underlined that China should “tightly grasp” and optimally use the important “strategic opportunity period” that is currently available.

Without doubt, Beijing can look back at the past year with satisfaction. On the one hand, Premier Wen Jiabao told the Russian media on the eve of his visit to Moscow in November that Sino-Russian relations were now “both at their best in history and at a most important historical stage” and China looked ahead at the coming decade as “an important historical period” for both the “evolution of the international situation” and the development of China-Russia “strategic cooperative partnership.” On the other hand, a year-ender by the People’s Daily said in 2007 that the China-U.S. relations saw enhanced mutual understanding “on the basis of reaching continuous consensus and the boosting of cooperation of both parties on vital global subjects.” The commentary drew satisfaction that Beijing won “positive appraisal” from Washington for bilateral cooperation on such global issues as the North Korea problem, Sudan, the war on terror, energy security and global warming.

Equally, Indian thinkers, who are so visibly paranoid about the Indian elephant getting “dragooned,” overlook the dramatic shift of templates in China-Japan relations. From Chinese accounts, Japanese Prime Minister’s four-day visit to China on New Year’s Eve was a “rip-roaring success.” Despite the huge backlog of history and a plethora of contemporary issues that seriously complicate their relations, the two countries have sized up the volatile regional and international situation and decided that they must keep up with the times by searching for a “win-win magnanimity” and tenaciously expand the converging point of mutual interests.

There is food for thought for our strategic thinkers in this unfolding Asian drama. Already, within four months of the much-vaunted “Malabar Exercises” in the Bay of Bengal, the entire tantalising architecture of Asian security drawn up by some of our thinkers with such imaginations is threatening to be a mere sand castle that could be easily washed away by the tides of contemporary Asian history. The Prime Minister’s visit to China is an occasion for New Delhi to think big.

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