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Looking beyond the border issue

In many ways, India and China are natural partners, being neighbours who share a long boundary. For more than 5,000 years they were culturally and religiously interacting with each other, peacefully and normally, except for a relatively brief period of 20 years from 1958 to 1978.

In fact, no two neighbours of any size in any continent can claim such a long period of peaceful co-existence and cultural contact. This is an encouraging fact of history. Except for the bitter memory of the 1962 conflict, there is no deep-seated sentiment mitigating against a future strategic partnership between them.

However, being a democracy India is more expressive about China than China is about India, since the Chinese press is controlled. Such a lack of articulation leaves the impression that China does not take India seriously. India could, at a future date, become a strategic partner or formidable adversary, or an economic collaborator or fierce competitor, and yet China’s perception of India is not yet explicitly articulated.

In the long term, will a strategic India-China relationship, if forged today, be abandoned by China? Indians cannot be sure because of the Chinese opaqueness in the discourse with India.

Once China attains the economic status it wants, its leaders may want to assert its political and military clout in South Asia against Indian interests. At present China assists Pakistan, Burma (Myanmar), Bangladesh, Nepal, and Sri Lanka with military supplies, but has not openly exercised its clout in these countries against India. But China has kept open the option to do so. There is also the festering border dispute that requires resolution.

It would be thus appropriate first to consider the centrality of the border dispute in the future prospect of a durable Sino-Indian strategic partnership, as this dispute can be a triggering factor for adverse Sino-Indian relations.

Between 1949 and 1957, the media in India mostly went by Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s pronouncements on Sino-Indian relations. Because of his perspective, the broad masses of India regarded relations between the countries to be extremely cordial. But this was only apparently so; the seeds of discord had been sown early. How these seeds had germinated since, is described in my study (Chapter 3, India’s China Perspective (Konark, 2001)). The core inference from the facts narrated there is: Neither China, nor indeed India, has a case of any undisputed merit in the cartographic border claims, and worse, neither had been honest to the other about the facts through the 1950s.

China did not reveal its territorial claims even when the two countries negotiated and signed the 1954 Agreement on Tibet. Though it was an agreement on trade and intercourse, it was concluded in order to settle all outstanding issues and to consolidate friendly relations. One of the Five Principles of Peaceful Co-existence (the Panch Sheel) was “mutual respect for each other’s territorial integrity and sovereignty,” which clearly implied that the borders of each party to the treaty were known to the other. Had China believed there was a substantial territorial dispute, then that was the time to raise the question, before solemnly pledging to respect mutually the “territorial integrity” of the other. Equally wrong was Nehru in not raising explicitly, and then clinching, the border issue, especially when India was clearing out of Tibet and recognising it to be a province of China.

In October 1954, Nehru while in Beijing mentioned to the Chinese leaders that he had seen some maps published in China that showed a wrong boundary between the countries, but added that he was not worried about it, because the boundaries of India were quite clear and not a matter of argument.

On January 23, 1959, Prime Minister Chou Enlai wrote to Nehru that it was “true that the border question was not raised in 1954 when negotiations were held for the Agreement on Trade and Intercourse between Tibet region of China and India. This was because conditions were not yet ripe for its settlement.” This was an amazing admission. How had the time become ‘ripe’ in 1959 for the dispute to be raised?

After administering a blistering defeat in 1962, the Chinese forces withdrew 20 km behind the McMahon Line, which China called “the 1959 line of actual control” in the Eastern Sector, and 20 km behind the line of its latest position in Ladakh, which was further identified with the “1959 line of actual control” in the Western Sector. This left China in possession of 23,200 sq km of territory in Ladakh. India asked for status quo ex-ante as of September 8, 1962 in all sectors, which China rejected. A stalemate resulted on the boundary dispute: in effect it remains even today.

Towards the end of December 1964, Chou Enlai, speaking to the National People’s Congress in Beijing, called the suggestion of restoration of the status quo as of September 8, 1962 “an unreasonable Indian pre-condition.” He declared that China would never dismantle its posts. He reminded India that China had not relinquished its claim to an additional 90,000 sq km south of the McMahon Line. This territorial demand was in addition to the 23,200 sq km in Ladakh that was already with China.

Thus, the border issue, if it is made central to further development of Sino-Indian relations, will effectively freeze any progress towards entente.

The first requirement of an effective Indian policy towards China is therefore to build a national consensus on how in a globalised world India defines its complex of interests vis-À-vis China, to deal with the situation on the border that has dramatically changed since 1962, and how best to communicate this consensus candidly to Chinese leaders. It is significant that while China denounces the McMahon Line as ‘imperialist,’ it has accepted a similarly imperialist line with Burma in toto. This contradiction is explainable by the issue of Tibet.

Second, Tibet will continue to play the defining role in Sino-Indian relations. India has reiterated its policy of regarding Tibet as an autonomous region of China, and not permitting any anti-China political activity by Tibetan elements on Indian soil. This statement of policy has been repeated during exchange of visits by the Prime Ministers of China and India. In 2003, Prime Minister Vajpayee specifically and categorically confirmed the position in Beijing. Yet the China views the émigré government of the Dalai Lama nominees in Dharamshala with suspicion.

The third is in the resolution of competitive interests between China and India. Any two large nations will have competitive aspirations and needs, and if these cannot be resolved satisfactorily then bilateral relations will weaken even if these can be cemented in other dimensions.

And finally, the fourth dimension is in matching the expectations of the peoples of the two nations. If one nation assumes that friendship means totality of convergence or submergence of all national interests, while the other expects it to be based on a purely give-and-take basis, relations are bound to sour because the expectations are not matched. That is the situation today in Sino-Indian bilateral affairs.

A fundamental problem in Indian policy-making towards China is that there is no apparent consensus in India even today, on the “end” objectives of engagement. The domestic strategic discourse has failed to come up with a clear criterion to evaluate the “means” to be adopted. There is as yet no clear China perspective in the Indian government. In this context, a review of contemporary Sino-Indian relations is needed before developing a stable strategic ‘Sino-Indian Partnership’ — the current buzzwords.

In particular, a crucial choice will have to be made. Choice I: India could form a compact with China. Choice II: It could become part of the U.S. efforts to keep China ‘contained’. How and why the choice is to be made must be subject to an in-depth analysis and national debate. Either India befriends China in a fundamental and strategic sense, or India confronts China. There is no third way.

The upshot of this analysis can be summarised in three points: (a) A strategic partnership between India and China has to be viewed in dimensions of economic, global influence, and national security. Hence, to opt for such a partnership there has to be a holistic approach. (b) For historical, cultural and geographical reasons, it is natural for India and China to be partners in global affairs. It is, however, too early for India to clinch a strategic partnership with China because of the upheaval in the international economy triggered by globalisation, and more important, the imminence of a financial crisis in China and India (see the author’s Financial Architecture and Comparative Development Economic of China and India, 2007). Thus, bilateral discussions for this partnership at all important levels should take place only after all scenarios are visualised and issues are thrashed out, to avoid misunderstanding. (c) For the time being, the U.S. is important as a market and as a pioneer in innovative technology. Hence, it is not a feasible for either India or China to come to any understanding that is inconsistent with U.S. global interest. This is more true for China than it is for India because the former is more vitally interlinked with the U.S. economy and foreign trade with the West and pro-U.S. East Asia.

(The author is a former Union Minister for Commerce. He is a specialist on China and on India-China relations.)

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