Malevolent Republic

by K S Komireddi

  China initiated a surprise multi-pronged attack against India in 1962, occupying a substantial portion of contested territory on the Tibetan plateau. Nehru’s comrades in the Non-Aligned Movement were of little use. Egypt’s Nasser was rebuffed by China and Yugoslavia’s Tito was denigrated as ‘a lickspittle of US imperialism’ for appearing to side with India. It was Washington that rushed military aid to India. But just as American jumbo jets, flown to bolster India’s retaliation, began landing in West Bengal, Beijing announced a unilateral ceasefire. The war ended quickly, but India, thoroughly worsted, never recovered from the experience. Delhi took great pains thereafter to maintain the fiction that it was on excellent terms with Beijing. Routine provocations by China—incursions into Indian territory, sponsorship of anti-India insurgencies, and clandestine nuclear assistance and lavish subventions to Pakistan—did nothing to temper the tributes flowing eastward from Delhi.

  In 2003, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, the first Hindu nationalist prime minister at the head of a coalition government, incinerated India’s last card against Beijing when he recognised Tibet, which India accepted as an autonomous region of China, as an integral ‘part of the territory the People’s Republic of China’.26 Since Mao’s violent annexation of Tibet in 1950—when monasteries were razed, monks executed, thousands of non-violent protesters massacred, and many thousands more detained, starved, tortured, uprooted and carted away to communes to toil in conditions so severe that some resorted to cannibalism to survive—China has relentlessly disfigured that hypnotically beautiful country. It has mined and carted away Tibet’s mineral wealth, dammed and diverted waters from its bountiful rivers, herded innumerable Tibetans into what it calls ‘New Socialist Villages’, suppressed the expression of Tibetan identity, annihilated whole ways of native life and repopulated it with Han Chinese settlers. There is no colonialism on earth more absolute than China’s in Tibet, and there is no people in the world more poorly equipped to resist it than the Tibetans. The Buddhists under occupation there now protest by immolating their own bodies, and more than 3,000 of them flee every year to India, where authorities detain anyone of Tibetan appearance to appease visiting Chinese leaders.

  Tibetans, however, aren’t the only victims of Tibet’s tragedy. The third-largest reservoir of freshwater on earth, Tibet is the source of some of Asia’s most vital rivers: Yangtze, Mekong, Yarlung Tsangpo. The survival of more than 750 million people in nations downstream—India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Burma, Laos, Cambodia—depends on waters originating in Chinese-controlled territory. By aggressively damming transboundary rivers and curtailing their flow, China has not only jeopardised Tibet’s fragile ecology. It has also gained political leverage over the downstream nations. The rapidly proliferating megadams within China’s ever-expanding borders—more than 26,000, or half the world’s total—are taps that Beijing can turn on and off at will. Unlike India, which has signed generous water-sharing treaties with Pakistan and Bangladesh, China has repeatedly rebuffed efforts aimed at equitable resource allocation. In 1997, it rejected a United Nations convention that prescribed a framework for water sharing. When Vladimir Putin threatens to cut off oil supplies to Europe, it at least spurs talk among his clients of alternative sources of energy. But for China’s weak and impoverished neighbours, there are no alternatives to water. They are at Beijing’s mercy.

  Vajpayee’s surrender on Tibet was the single most ignoble concession to China by Delhi. It yielded no tangible benefits for India. And under Manmohan Singh, China, deploying a combination of aid and ammunition, tightened its noose of influence around India—beginning in Pakistan in the north-west, running through Nepal and Myanmar in the east, and ending in Sri Lanka in the south. Nothing more depressingly conveys India’s psychological dread of China than Singh’s decision in 2007 to downgrade, on China’s demand, Japan’s participation in exercises with the United States designed to boost India’s defence preparedness against … China.27

  Modi’s election held the promise of disrupting this disastrous trend. Unlike his abject predecessor, Modi cut an imposing figure on the world stage. He refreshed relations that had fallen into catastrophic neglect. He loudly courted defence partnerships with fellow democracies. He moved India closer to Washington. He even echoed America’s denunciation of Chinese aggression in South China Sea. And his ‘Act East’ policy, discarding the caution of past governments, confidently projected Delhi as a democratic rival to Beijing. China’s communist overlords, long accustomed to treating India shabbily, appeared in the beginning to be unsettled by Modi. And Modi translated his muscular attitude into action in 2017 when Chinese troops materialised in Doklam—a piece of territory that is the subject of a dispute between Bhutan and China—to pave over an existing road. The road would have granted China easy access to a small strip of land (at its narrowest only 23 kilometres) which connects India to its easternmost states. The amputation of this corridor by China in the event of war would instantly sever Delhi from 45 million Indian citizens while converting the territory they inhabit—roughly the size of Britain—into a bargaining counter which Beijing, already in illegal possession of vast tracts of Indian land, might exploit to extract concessions elsewhere.

  Modi ordered in Indian troops to halt the Chinese construction work in Doklam and restore status quo ante. For two months, the Chinese Communist Party and the People’s Liberation Army inundated India with lurid threats, and there were moments during the edgy stand-off when the two nuclear-armed adversaries appeared poised for another all-out war. Some felt Modi overreacted; others believed he had no choice. Wherever one stood on his handling of Doklam, the high-altitude drama served to clarify the fragility of Indian assumptions about another important relationship that underlay Modi’s decision to confront China.

  India has been moving closer to the United States since the end of the Cold War. The cordial rediscovery, after decades of mutual hostility, was lubricated by the economics of globalisation. The US has gone from being a donor of food aid to India’s largest trading partner. But the courtship of India by the US in the post-9/11 years—when Washington, seized by a zeal for spreading democracy, began viewing India as a ‘democratic counterweight’ to China in the long run—infected India’s financial and political elites with deleterious delusions. Years of isolation had made them dangerously susceptible to flattery. Goaded by the US, they began to envisage an external role for India that the country’s internal realities could not support. A burgeoning cast of ‘strategic experts’ began exhorting India, where most people do not have access to clean water or toilets, to act like a global power. The world, to quote from a book on Indian foreign policy, is apparently ‘looking to India to shape the emerging international order’.28 Anybody who has actually travelled in the world and interacted with people outside of the circles of academia and think tanks will find that statement ludicrous. But well-heeled Indians became so besotted with the vision of high status crafted in Washington that, in 2003, the Indian government contemplated sending soldiers to Iraq as part of Bush’s coalition.

  The rhetoric of ‘values’ was, of course, vacuous gloss. If Washington was animated by values alone, it would not have stocked the arsenal of Pakistan—founded on values antithetical to India’s—with weapons, or criminally indulged Islamabad’s nuclear programme, which now functions as an insurance policy for the most extensive terrorist operation on the planet. Nor would it have subordinated its avowed principles to business interests in the 1990s to legitimise China’s communist regime. The American accommodation of totalitarians who had so recently butchered pro-democracy activists on Tiananmen Square was marketed by Washington as an innovative way of influencing China—by partnering with it and giving it a prominent position inside, rather than keeping it outside, global institutions. It is because principles came last that, far from moulding China’s behaviour, it is Washington that incrementally surrendered to Beijing. A good way to measure any country’s grand claims to standing up to China is to look at its treatmen
t of Tibetans. It has been customary for American presidents to invite the Dalai Lama to Washington. Obama did away even with this minor gesture of solidarity with the Tibetans for fear of offending Beijing. Even the brief private audience Obama eventually granted Tibet’s beleaguered spiritual leader was accompanied with ritualistic humiliation intended to placate China: the Dalai Lama was made to exit the White House through the back doors, surrounded by bags of trash.29

  Emboldened by this meek display of deference, Chinese goons roughed up British civilians on British soil in the run up to the 2008 Olympics for exercising their right to protest.30 Rather than protest, the British prime minister at the time, like the leaders of every other major democracy, showed up to pay court to China’s rulers at the Beijing Olympics stadium. Western authors now self-censor for the tawdry privilege of being published in China; Hollywood modifies its films to propitiate the CCP; and governments that never tire of puffing their chests at the Middle East’s tinpot tyrannies routinely abase themselves before Beijing.

  Against this backdrop, Delhi’s diminishing hesitation in signing up to Washington’s policy of containing China speaks of the increasingly powerful hold of the fantasy of a democratic alliance on the psyche of India’s governing elite. There was some anxiety in Washington and even Delhi that Modi, shunned by successive US administrations after the Gujarat pogrom, might upend the emergent partnership. When he did not, it was explained away as a measure of his maturity: he was setting aside personal rancour for the larger national interest. Modi was motivated by baser reasons. His trumpeting of the fact that he was on a first-name basis with Barack Obama, followed by gasconades to fawning reporters that ‘Barack and I tell jokes to each other’, bespoke a deep need, after enduring that humiliating entry ban, for validation and legitimacy from the US president. The Americans met the need by kneading his enormous ego. Obama accepted Modi’s invitation to be his guest at India’s Republic Day parade in January 2015—the first time an American president attended the event in Delhi.

  Anyone who felt that India’s pro-American tilt under Modi was driven primarily by anything other than the prime minister’s vanity need only have studied his kinesics and language around Obama. He was showing Obama off to Indians, showing himself off in the company of Obama to the world, an outcast breathlessly announcing his arrival. He greeted Obama wearing a UK£ 10,000 Savile Row suit with his own name monogrammed in golden pinstripes. Introducing Obama to his radio audience, he became properly sycophantic. ‘Some people wonder, what does “Barack” mean?’ he said. ‘I was searching for the meaning of Barack … Barack means, one who is blessed. I believe, along with a name, his family gave him a big gift.’31 And at the Republic Day procession, lost in statesmanly banter with his important ‘friend’, he did not rise to acknowledge the sacrifice of a martyred Indian soldier’s widow who had just collected a medal from the president of India and paused fleetingly to greet the prime minister. This is the man, lest we forget, who accuses his opponents of displaying insufficient deference for the armed forces.

  Obama’s own homage, of course, came with a price. Modi amply rewarded the US president by reviving a logistics agreement with the US that had been frozen by the Congress-led government. All the agreement does, its proponents said, is formalise existing military-to-military arrangements between Delhi and Washington. The terms of the deal enable each side’s military to access the other’s facilities—including bases—to retool and refuel. America’s assets, theoretically accessible to India, were of no use to Delhi; but India’s assets were immensely valuable to America as it was ‘pivoting’ to Asia. At minimum, the deal should have been debated. But Modi, eager to please, bypassed democratic deliberation. Anybody who questioned his haste in pushing the deal through was besmirched as a relic of the Cold War, a carryover from the days of schizoid anti-Americanism.

  A partnership with Washington is indispensable to India’s security and economy. But the pace at which Modi is reorienting India risks turning it into a frontline state in someone else’s strategy to contain China, an exalted foot soldier, a tritagonist in its own backwaters. The intensification of relations with Washington has done little to enhance India’s security. At the 2016 BRICS summit, held in Goa, China managed successfully to shield Pakistan from censure. Even Russia, India’s most sympathetic foreign partner not so long ago, seemed indifferent to Delhi’s concerns. Moscow even proceeded to stage a joint military exercise with Pakistan in defiance of India’s objections—unthinkable only a few years ago.32

  Modi, maintaining a continuity with India’s traditions of autonomy in other areas, put too much store by the idea of a democratic alliance against communist China. ‘There is no bond that is stronger than a bond between two democracies,’ the prime minister once asserted. History is replete with the tragic consequences of the miscalculations of those who mortgage their security to others to bask in the mythic virtues of ideological consanguinity. Indians who had clamoured for closer ties with the US were left complaining that Donald Trump did not extend Delhi any support during its stand-off with China at Doklam. Nehru, it is fair to say, got much more from Washington in 1962 without giving an inch to American demands than Modi did in 2018 after having offered up India’s bases to America.

  India’s geography makes it vulnerable to conflict on both sides of its border. Modi, by attempting to expel China from territory claimed by Bhutan and not India, created a precedent that China could have cited to squeeze Delhi: all Beijing needed was an invitation from its clients in Pakistan to do to India in disputed areas of Kashmir what India was doing to China in Doklam. None of this is to say that India should have been a spectator to the advancing People’s Liberation Army workers on its crucial frontiers. It is to say that a face-off with potentially calamitous consequences should be underwritten by a great deal more than vague notions of camaraderie or the ‘resolve’ of a leader. The early confidence exuded by India, hinting at the existence of a plan, collapsed into a desperate face-saving exercise when it became apparent that Modi had all along been improvising. What his supporters called ‘Modi doctrine’ was pure bluster. India did not even have a full-time defence minister as its soldiers, holding off the Chinese for more than two months, exchanged blows with the enemy. By some accounts, it had ammunition for a ten-day shooting war.33 The two sides eventually disengaged. But the Chinese returned just as quickly to resume the construction work that had been interrupted by Modi.34

  Having presided over a major debacle, Modi adopted his fallback position: selling falsehoods. Highly visible during the chest-thumping stage of the crisis, he swiftly retreated from public view once things deteriorated. It was left to his foreign minister to inform parliament that India had prevailed in its objective to push back the Chinese.35 This was, needless to say, very far from being true. Modi’s climbdown appeared all the more ignominious because he retreated after having begun from a position of strength. In the end, Modi, the strongman who set out to teach China a lesson, did what every leader too afraid to upset the Chinese does: he refused to meet the Dalai Lama and paid court to the Chinese president.36 Voices in Bhutan have since wondered if their country should not deal directly with Beijing. Doklam, in the end, was an even greater failure in one sense than India’s defeat at China’s hands on Nehru’s watch. In 1962, India had no history to guide it and was caught by surprise. In 2018, Modi, who presented himself as the anti-Nehru, elected to chasten the Chinese and had no cards when the bluff was called.

  A democratic security alliance in Asia comprising India, Japan, Australia and the United States is not only unavoidable—it is perhaps also necessary. Yet an alliance forged in the name of principle is meaningless if the allies themselves depart from the principle. Democracy, brandished as the humane alternative to communism, has seldom looked more discredited than it does in the age of Trump and Modi. India can scarcely be taken seriously as a ‘democratic counterweight’ to China by those exposed to Beijing’s ruthlessness as it itself transforms into a brut
ally exclusionary Hindu-supremacist state under Modi.

  Some years ago, Belarus’s greatest poet, paraphrasing Solzhenitsyn—‘a poet doesn’t adjust his treatment of a theme to a tyrant’s taste’—told me that what had sustained him in tenebrous times was the knowledge that there were systems of government beyond the Soviet Union’s artificial frontiers consecrated to preserving human dignity, not forcibly to remaking human beings. The poet, effectively imprisoned in his home by the dictatorship of Aleksandr Lukashenko when I met him, listed the greatest inspirations of his youth: America—and India. He had read Tagore, Nehru and Gandhi. It occurred to me then that perhaps one way for India to undermine the ideology that animates China—an ideology that to Tibetans and Uighurs is as lethal today as it was when Mao was alive—is not to crow about ‘values’ but to honour them.

  A year after I met the Belarusian dissident poet, the Indian police was dispatched to apprehend Tenzin Tsundue, another poet striving to overcome another kind of totalitarianism, to please China. As he was violently dragged away, Tsundue spoke his final words on behalf of his fellow Tibetans: ‘India gives us our strength, our confidence—India is our guru.’37 Paying homage to the foundational ideals of India was the poet’s way of shaming the Indians who were presiding over their demise. But an India run by bigots dedicated to destroying all that made it, despite its manifest flaws, something that so many beyond its borders—from W.E.B. Du Bois and Martin Luther King, Jr, to Nelson Mandela and Nikol Pashinyan—once looked up to is perhaps incapable of being shamed. This is Modi’s legacy.

  9

  Seizure

  If you were to ask me to choose between democratic values, and wealth, power, prosperity and fame, I will very easily and without any doubt choose democratic values.