Implosion: India’s Tryst with Reality

by John Elliott

  ‘Please remember that a people cannot be forced to be free or to practise democracy. They have to come to these values themselves if they are to be lasting. Such a crusade for one’s values is often mistaken by others as the pursuit of self-interest couched in high tone words’, said Menon in his 2011 lecture. officials such as Menon argue that India did not create the mess and muddle caused by the West’s involvement in places like Syria. Reflecting that view, a senior Indian official told me:36 ‘We didn’t manufacture the problem. We don’t supply weapons there. We are not involved and we don’t have the right to be. We have watched their [US, UK and others] game in Libya and Syria, turning the clock back in the region’. When I asked why India did not make its voice heard widely and publicly with such a potentially popular line, I was told, with a smile: ‘We have a view but our friends are happy we keep quiet about it publicly’.

  It is not enough though, for India to stay silent. With its depth of experience in international issues such as terrorism, religious fundamentalism, poverty and climate change, it needs to make its voice heard with reasoned argument and leadership. Only then, with the world welcoming a new, strong, independent voice, will it gradually win the international recognition and status that it craves.

  Notes

  1. Remarks by President Obama to the Joint Session of the Indian Parliament in New Delhi, India, 8 November 2010, http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2010/11/08/remarks-president-joint-session-indian-parliament-new-delhi-india

  2. http://www.ridingtheelephant.wordpress.com/2010/11/09/obama-ends-his-india-visit-on-a-high-but-challenges-it-to-change/

  3. Remarks by President Obama to the Joint Session of the Indian Parliament, supra.

  4. Kanti Bajpai, ‘Foreign Policy on a shoestring’, The Times of India, 13 October 2012, http://www.articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2012-10-13/edit-page/34414274_1_ifs-foreign-policy-bigger-service

  5. In conversation with JE

  6. Mani Shankar Aiyar, ‘India’s foreign policy – from Jawaharlal Nehru to Manmohan Singh’, Australia-India Institute, University of Melbourne, 22 September 2011; Aiyar says Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi used the phrase several times, including at the 9th Non-Aligned Summit in Belgrade, see Selected Speeches and Writings, 1989, Vol. V, Publications Division, New Delhi, p. 277

  7. Jaswant Singh talking to JE October 2012; see also his book surveying the country’s foreign policy since independence: India at Risk: Mistakes, Misadventures and Misconceptions of Security Policy, Roli Books, Delhi 2013, and a television discussion when it was published on http://www.ndtv.com/video/player/the-big-fight/india-s-securityconcerns/296592?pfrom=home-topstories

  8. Aiyar’s lecture footnote: In 1952, Nehru told a press conference that while ‘there was no question of our being a mediator or anything like that’, it was ‘well-recognized that we are in a special position because we have friendly contacts with the Governments concerned’, adding that ‘we will be very happy to use those contacts in furtherance of the settlement’. Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru, Second Series, Vol. 19, 583, Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Fund, 1996, distributed by OUP. In 1953, India’s principled stand, which had annoyed the Soviet Union when India voted at the UN in favour of the resolution finding North Korea to be the aggressor and then the Americans by refusing to side with the US on China crossing the Yalu river, was eventually vindicated when India was requested to chair the Neutral Nations Repatriation Commission which enabled the armistice to come into being and hold over the next sixty years and more. Earlier, the Indian representative had been Chairman of the United Nations Commission on Korea since late 1947, yet recognition of India’s special role in world affairs. See India After Independence, Bipan Chandra et al., Penguin Viking, 1999, pp. 152-154

  9. Aiyar’s lecture footnote: Jawaharlal Nehru to the Indonesian Prime Minister, Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru, Vol. 25, p. 468, Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Fund, 1996

  10. Aiyar’s lecture footnote: Chandra et al.

  11. Shivshankar Menon, National Security Adviser, ‘Our ability to change India in a globalised world’, The Prem Bhatia Memorial Lecture, IIC, New Delhi 11 August 2011, full video with Q&A: www.iicdelhi.in/webcasts/play_webcast/16th-prem-bhatia-memorial-lecture-2011---india-and-the-global-scene/; full text http://www.prembhatiatrust.com/click on Lecture 16. Partial text: http://www.claws.in/index. php?action=master&task=930&u_id=36

  12. ‘Manmohan slams West for using force to change regimes’, The Times of India, 25 September 2011, http://www.articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2011-09-25/india/30200524_1_libya-sovereignty-countries

  13. India and West Asian Security conference, Delhi, 15 February 2015 http://www.idsa.in/keyspeeches/IndiaandWestAsianSecurity

  14. This report gives a concise 50-year review of the relationship. Dr Radha Kumar, ‘The EU and India: Common Interests, Divergent Policies’, Delhi Policy Group, March 2013, http://www.delhipolicygroup.com/pdf/The-Eu-and-India-%20Common-Interests-Divergent-Policies. pdf

  15. Shashi Tharoor, ‘there are few visible “wins” in India-EU co-operation’, Pax Indica, pp. 245-247, Allen Lane India, 2012

  16. http://www.ridingtheelephant.wordpress.com/2013/02/20/pr-man-turned-prime-minister-cameron-pays-respect-but-over-plays-his-hand/

  17. JE, ‘India’s flatfooted diplomacy’, ‘Bystander’ column, Business Standard, 19 October 2001, http://www.business-standard.com/india/news/india8217s-flatfooted-diplomacy/100162/

  18. Antonio Armellini, If the Elephant Flies, Har-Anand Publications, Delhi, 2012 http://www.haranandpublications.com/history&politics.html

  19. Seema Sirohi, ‘India-U.S: Last chance to salvage ties’, by Gateway House, 11 September 2013, http://www.gatewayhouse.in/india-u-s-last-chance-to-salvage-ties/?utm_source=MadMimi&utm_medium=email&utm_content=Weekly+Briefing&utm_campaign=20130906_m117144040_Weekly+Briefing&utm_term=Read+more

  20. David M. Malone, Does the Elephant Dance? Contemporary Indian Foreign Policy, OUP India 2011, http://www.oup.co.in/product/academic-general/politics/international-relations/207/does-elephant-dance-contemporary-indian-foreign-policy/9780198073833

  21. Conversations with the author, 2012

  22. Conversation with JE

  23. Brahma Chellaney, ‘Parched and Thirsty, yet Most Generous in Water Diplomacy’, The Times of India, 3 July 2012 http://www.chellaney.net/2012/07/03/parched-and-thirsty-yet-most-generous/

  24. Brahma Chellaney, ‘Behind The Sri Lankan Bloodbath’, Forbes, 10 September 2009, http://www.forbes.com/2009/10/08/tamil-tigers-rajiv-gandhi-opinions-contributors-sri-lanka.html

  25. ‘Federal foreign policy: Mamata Banerjee has raised an important point’, Business Standard, 7 September 2011, http://www.business-standard.com/article/opinion/federal-foreign-policy-111090700061_1.html and also see http://www.economist.com/blogs/banyan/2013/01/bangladesh-and-its-near-abroad

  26. http://www.indiatoday.intoday.in/story/sir-creek-dispute-gujarat-chief-minister-narendra-mod-rann-of-kutchmaritime-boundary/1/237992.html

  27. 27. Sumantra Bose conversation with JE after the launch of his book, Transforming India: Challenges to the World’s Largest Democracy, Picador India, December 2013

  28. http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/lead/india-needs-a-federal-foreign-policy/article4591675.ece

  29. ‘I.K. Gujral: A tribute from Bangladesh’, The Daily Star, 13 December 2012 http://www.archive.thedailystar.net/newDesign/news-details. php?nid=260907

  30. K. Shankar Bajpai, Knowing what’s good for us, Indian Express, 24 December 2010, http://www.indianexpress.com/news/knowing-what-s-good-for-us/728788/

  31. Remarks by the President to the Joint Session of the Indian Parliament in New Delhi, India, 8 November 2010, http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2010/11/08/remarks-president-joint-session-indian-parliament-new-delhi-india

  32. Jan Egeland was speaking at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club in Delhi, October 2012, when he was deputy director of Human Rights Watch. He became Secretary General of the Norwegian Refugee Council in
August 2013

  33. Speaking at the Observer Research Foundation in a discussion on Tharoor’s Pax Indica, July 2012

  34. JE was at the meeting which took place in October 2012

  35. ‘General Assembly, in Resolution, Demands All in Syria “Immediately and Visibly” Commit to Ending Violence’, http://www.un.org/News/Press/docs/2012/ga11266.doc.htm

  36. JE ‘background chat’ conversation with Indian source

  20

  India and China

  Himalayan Struggles

  Wen Jiabao, China’s premier from 2003 to 2013, was unexpectedly fulsome. Speaking in Delhi’s rather drab Indian Council of World Affairs’ conference hall in December 2010, he was full of talk about China’s and India’s joint aspirations, their friendship, their cooperation, and about how their two-way trade would almost double to $100bn a year by 2015. He had brought a weirdly large posse of 400 businessmen1 with him on a two-to-three day visit to India and had presided with Manmohan Singh over a flourish of $16bn business deals and joint agreements. In his speech, there was even a personal tribute to Mahatma Gandhi that rivalled a similar line President Barack Obama had deployed in Delhi a month earlier.2

  The Chinese and Indian civilizations had ‘once added radiance and beauty to each other and deeply influenced the process of human civilization,’ he said. ‘The great Chinese and Indian nations which have suffered all kinds of hardships but strived unceasingly will definitely glow with vitality, shoulder the historical mission and join hands to shape new glory of oriental civilizations.’ As I sat there and listened to him, it seemed that Wen meant it and that, sometimes almost adlibbing, he was using this relatively low-key moment in his visit to establish China as a friend.

  Suddenly his tone and even his demeanour changed, and he put India firmly in its place as an unequal neighbour, taking China’s usual rigid line on the two countries’ decades-old dispute over its mountainous 3,488-km border. Lecturing like a stern headmaster, he said: ‘It will not be easy to completely resolve this question. It requires patience and will take a fairly long period of time’, adding that ‘only with sincerity, mutual trust and perseverance can we eventually find a fair, reasonable and mutually acceptable solution’. The tone and phrases were typical of China’s patronising style of negotiation – I had heard it 20 years earlier when I was in Hong Kong and Beijing was stalling British negotiators on the terms for the territory’s return in 1997 to Chinese sovereignty.

  This dashed any hopes India may have had of making progress on the border issue. It sounded as though Wen was reflecting sharply differing views inside China’s government over how to treat India, as he moved from the more constructive approach to that of the hardliners in the Peoples’ Liberation Army (PLA). Perhaps significantly, China’s foreign ministry website carried only the cooperative remarks,3 while the Xinhua official news agency led its story with the tough line, headlined ‘Patience needed to resolve boundary question’.4

  The mood was strikingly different when China’s next premier, Li Keqiang, visited India in May 2013 and conducted a charm offensive, albeit just after a serious confrontation on the border. Never once did he deflect from friendly and practical remarks about sowing ‘the seeds of friendship’. On the border, he said the two sides had ‘agreed to push forward with negotiations’, which contrasted sharply with the line taken by Wen Jiabao. It is the Wen Jiabao cameo, however, that goes to the heart of India’s foreign policy dilemma, which dates from its defeat by China in the 1962 war.

  China has become the biggest foreign policy challenge facing India and the most bewildering worry, not least because the entire 3,488 km (2,167 mile) border, called the Line of Actual Control (LAC), is disputed and is not defined on the ground or on maps. (By contrast, most of the India-Pakistan Line of Control – LoC – is delineated and is accepted as a temporary arrangement). China also weighs heavily on the Indian consciousness because of 1962, and it has a physical presence everywhere that India is or wants to be – ranging from disputed mountains and valleys in the Himalayas to potentially insecure shipping lanes in the South China Sea. China also controls the flow of river waters that India needs, and it wields growing power across South Asia as well as influence in the UN and other international forums where India is represented.

  This potentially explosive range of differences is partially offset by growing trade and economic links, which have boomed in recent years so that China has become India’s largest trading partner with bilateral trade of around $70bn.5 The target for 2016 is $100bn. Together, the two countries now account for 40 per cent of the world’s population and their rivalry has grown as they have emerged from past constraints – China from the Cultural Revolution of the late-1960s, and India from British colonialism and subsequent centralized economic controls.

  There is intense competition for oil and other energy and natural resources in Asia, Africa, the Gulf and South America. With an economy that has grown nearly ten-fold in 30 years, China is far ahead of India. Its GDP is already four times larger and some forecasts say it will overtake America by 2017. It has enormously greater involvement in international investment, trading and financial markets than India. Its military budget is almost three times larger and its armed forces are much better equipped, while its physical infrastructure, especially highways, is far more advanced. It has become the world’s second largest oil importer after the US, taking roughly 5.5m barrels per day (BPD), while India at number four imports approximately 2.3m BPD.

  What is certain is that there is no prospect of India and China being at ease with each other. Looking back, there never was, from the time of India’s independence, because China saw itself as a future regional and world power and was not prepared for India to be in the same league. There is however broad stability, despite increasing militarization on the Himalayan border, with rapidly growing economic ties, tedious and literally endless border negotiations, and occasional constructive bilateral co-operation on international issues.

  ‘India–China relations are complex and require careful management. There is need for firmness but also prudence. The Chinese are sometimes contemptuous of India but at times there is a respectful wariness. This is matched by our own ambiguous posture on China. This is likely to continue,’ says Shyam Saran, a former Indian foreign secretary.

  Nehru’s Dream

  Nehru idealistically saw India and China as parallel civilizations that could work together and did not realize till it was too late that this clashed with China’s ambition to achieve regional supremacy. On the ground, his attitude may have been indicated by the size of the 30-acre plot allocated for China’s embassy compound on Shanti Path, New Delhi’s diplomatic boulevard, which is bigger than any other country’s. ‘He didn’t understand China,’ says Jagat Mehta, who was a young Indian diplomat in the 1950s and later became foreign secretary.6 ‘He thought that anti-imperialism would smother nationalism but it didn’t’, so the two countries lacked the common bond that Nehru envisaged. Mehta says that Nehru did not consult his officials sufficiently: ‘He lacked in that he did not know how to ask questions, and we in the civil service did not have the courage to tell him’.

  In what must have been the biggest mistake of his foreign policy, Nehru was persuaded to turn down an offer from China in 1959–60 to settle the disputed Himalayan border. Based on what is known as the McMahon line, it had been drawn up by Britain and agreed with China and Tibet in 1914. China now rejects that agreement because it does not accept that Tibet, which it annexed in 1950–51, was a sovereign country qualified to settle border disputes.

  Initially, Nehru’s strategy of friendship appeared to be working and he signed the Five Principles of Peaceful Co-existence with China, known as the Panchsheel Agreement, in 1954. But Nehru went too far and appeared, in Chinese eyes, to be patronizing Chou en-Lai, the premier, when he introduced him in 1955 at an international conference of African and Asian nations in Bandung, Indonesia. Relations soured and Nehru, by now himself feeling patroni
zed, is said to have told India’s ambassador to Peking in 1958: ‘I don’t trust the Chinese one bit. They are a deceitful, opinionated, arrogant and hegemonistic lot’.7 Relations steadily worsened, especially after the flight of the Dalai Lama from Tibet to sanctuary in India in 1959.

  There were also increased Chinese incursions along the border, which culminated in its troops walking into what is now the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh (then called the North-East Frontier Agency) at the strategically sensitive Buddhist monastery town of Tawang in 1962. Four devastating (for India) weeks later, in what was never formally declared a war, China withdrew from all the land that it had occupied to the current disputed Line of Actual Control.8 China could have marched as far as it liked into India because it would have faced little resistance, so ill-prepared were the defences, but it had taught India a lesson and that was enough. People in Tawang still talk of the sudden invasion, the panic among Indian forces, the burning of bridges and houses by the retreating army, and the relative good behaviour of the invader.9

  The invasion coincided with the Cuban missile crisis. ‘Just as Mao Zedong started his invasion of Tibet while the world was preoccupied with the Korean War, so he chose a perfect time to invade India, as recommended by the ancient strategist Sun Tzu,’ wrote Brahma Chellaney.10 ‘The attack coincided with a major international crisis that brought the United States and the Soviet Union within a whisker of nuclear war over the stealthy deployment of Soviet missiles in Cuba. China’s unilateral ceasefire coincided with America’s formal termination of its naval blockade of Cuba, marking the end of the missile crisis.’

  Zhou Enlai, communist China’s first and longest serving premier (1949–1976) who was admired internationally as a charming and urbane but also tough statesman, said at the time that his aim was ‘to teach India a lesson’. As Brahma Chellaney put it on the 50th anniversary of the defeat, ‘such have been the long-lasting effects of the humiliation it imposed that China to this day is able to keep India in check’.11