THE LOOK AWAY FROM THE EAST POLICY

Subir Bhaumik

October 21 , 2014

Delhi’s anxieties have denied India’s East and the Northeast crucial Chinese investment, argues

The dust is yet to settle on the visit to India by the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, because it has been blown up across the contested, desolate Himalayan border by the armies of the two nations. Few are talking about the gains both sides made during the visit. Few are talking of the agreement between Narendra Modi and Xi Jinping focussing on the border question that bedevils bilateral relations. But the tense stand-off in Ladakh, which ended recently but not before raising anxieties in spite of a Chinese offer to hold flag meetings, had overshadowed Xi’s visit to a large extent. The touch of beauty and grace introduced by the Chinese First Lady, Peng Liyuan, failed to enliven the summit of two of Asia’s top leaders. When the Chinese could not live up to the investment promises made by their diplomats earlier in the month, many in Delhi were willing to write off the visit as a damp squib, notwithstanding the slew of agreements that were signed. The Japanese have promised more, they said.

After interacting with some Chinese officials accompanying Xi, it became clear that the Chinese had planned much of their investments in the proposed BCIM corridor in eastern and northeastern India to develop its infrastructure. They also wanted to get a clear idea of how India proposed to go about the proposed corridor and the Maritime Silk route. By avoiding concrete discussions on this corridor (the former prime minister, Manmohan Singh, had, at least, agreed to ‘joint research’ to explore its possibilities), Modi sent a clear message to Xi that India was not keen on the BCIM economic corridor that Bangladesh and Myanmar appear greatly interested in.

The signal was unmistakable: Chinese companies were welcome to invest in Gujarat and Maharashtra or elsewhere in India but not in the East or the Northeast. This means that the Chinese plans for the BCIM corridor, which is key to its ‘land-to-sea access’ strategy, stands negated by Modi from whom they had expected much more than they have of any Indian leader in recent years. The Chinese see it as a lack of trust after they had made it clear that they are willing to treat India as a ‘partner’ in Asia’s future, even after the Modi-Abe bonhomie in Tokyo.

The BCIM corridor can still be developed by China through Myanmar and coastal Bangladesh. But if India is distrustful, it may pile pressure on Sheikh Hasina Wajed and she may be forced to hand over the Sonadia deep-sea port project to a nation other than China, possibly a country from the Middle East. This was the only project that defied a solution during Wajed’s recent visit to Beijing. If China does not get access to the Bay of Bengal through India and Bangladesh, its only ‘land-to-sea’ opening from Yunnan will be limited to Myanmar’s Arakan coast. With the United States of America pushing heavily into the Pagoda nation, to the extent that the analyst, Bertil Lintner, feels that Myanmar is “morphing into a US-China battleground”, the Chinese have reasons to feel uneasy. But Bangladesh is committed to the idea of the BCIM economic corridor and Wajed did seek Indian support for the proposal when she met Modi on the sidelines of the recent session of the United Nations general assembly.

My Chinese friends have repeatedly indicated that they would prefer leaving the Japanese to invest in the Ahmedabad-Mumbai corridor and, instead, concentrate on the Amritsar-Calcutta and Calcutta-Kunming corridors for reasons not difficult to understand. When Modi ensured that would not happen, Xi and his team felt badly let down. That explains the huge gap between the kind of investments the Chinese were promising before and what they finally offered during Xi’s visit.

As a business-friendly leader who claims commerce is in his blood, Modi needs to understand that investors not only prefer to choose countries carefully when they invest but they also like to choose locations more carefully and after several considerations. If the Tatas were not willing to shift a few kilometres away from Singur, how can you expect a Chinese company willing to synergize its investments in Bangladesh and Myanmar with those in eastern India to warm up to Modi’s call to invest in Gujarat and Maharashtra? These firms are essentially public sector companies. How could one expect them to invest in areas that are not a priority for Beijing? By the way, two Chinese automobile majors are keen on Singur to set up their assembly plants for the Indian market.

If Modi is trying to keep the Chinese away from a region India is sensitive about because of its proximity to China, the Chinese are keen to invest in areas around which they have already invested in India’s neighbours for identical reasons. Would it not be fair to expect the Chinese company that has won the tender to build the 6.15 kilometre-long rail-road bridge on Bangladesh’s Padma river to be keen on a similar project in West Bengal or Assam rather than in Gujarat?

The Chinese are also upset with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh for trying to raise the Tibetan question. Saffron leaders like Indresh Kumar are on record saying India should internationalize the Tibetan issue (the West would love India to do so) and Delhi must try to “hurt China economically”. Nothing would be a bigger red rag to the Chinese bull than a revival of the Tibetan question, especially when Beijing is battling a festering Uighur insurgency in Xinjiang amidst reports that the ‘East Turkestan’ underground is trying to strike a workable understanding with Tibetan hardliners. These elements resent the Dalai Lama’s soft line of advocating a better Sino-Indian understanding to facilitate a solution in Tibet and feel that the countless self-immolations of Buddhist monks have gone to waste in pricking China’s conscience. So, for them, the Uighurs are a model on how to hit China hard and internationalize their issue with violence.

Beijing is reportedly involved in backroom parleys with the Dalai Lama, trying to facilitate a visit by him to a sacred Buddhist site in northern China. The Dalai Lama has praised Xi Jinping as a “realistic and open-minded leader” and Beijing’s censors have allowed an article about the parleys with Dalai Lama to be published in the Chinese media. The article says Beijing must take this dialogue forward to “isolate Tibetan hardliners” and deny the West a chance to attack China. That should be good news for India because a possible resolution of the Tibetan imbroglio will augur well for the settlement of the border problem because China is more concerned with use of Indian soil by Tibetan exiles than with a few kilometres of Himalayan wasteland.

The Chinese attack in 1962 was preceded by countless warnings aimed at the Jawaharlal Nehru administration not to allow “Indian soil to be used by Tibetan reactionaries and Western imperialists”. So the RSS needs to understand that if India can ‘activate’ Tibet, the Chinese can activate Northeast by arming the likes of Paresh Barua who are camping not far away from China’s borders. The promise of Chinese support may even encourage the the Naga rebel leader, Thuingaleng Muivah, who frequently expresses his frustration at the failure to arrive at a solution after 17 years of negotiations. The Meitei underground is already known to have Chinese links and it has steadfastly refused talks with Delhi unlike Paresh Barua. The Northeast should not suffer a fresh bout of Chinese-backed militancy just because some saffronites fancy poking China in the ribs about Tibet.

Xi Jinping’s exhortations to the People’s Liberation Army commanders to be ready to win a “short regional war” in Asia may not be specifically aimed at India. It carries a subtle warning — ‘you work up Tibet, I can work up Northeast’ — and an equally subtle message — ‘allow us to invest where we want if you want our funds and don’t get too close to our enemies’. Premier Li Keqiang had said during his visit last year that “next door neighbours are often more important than near relatives staying far away.”

For the East and the Northeast which Modi promises to develop by using India’s Look East policy, Xi’s visit was a great let-down. With none else willing to invest in this backward region, Chinese investment in its poor infrastructure may have been a game-changer. That has been denied, yet again, by Delhi’s double standards. In Nehru’s time, Assam was denied a big refinery initially because it was close to China and East Pakistan and Barauni got to process Assam’s crude. Incidentally, India’s first president hailed from Bihar; Barauni falls in Bihar.

Now Delhi plans 157 big and medium dams for hydel power in Arunachal Pradesh, which is closer to China because India needs the power from Northeast to fuel its economic growth. But Delhi will not open the Stilwell Road to trans-regional trade apparently because the Chinese can use it in the case of war or for dumping their products. Only 65 kilometres of this road is in India, the rest is in China and Myanmar, both stretches being developed by Chinese companies. So who is going to block whom? The Chinese can still use it to reach our borders and it makes much more sense, as General J.J. Singh had argued, to stay engaged on the Stilwell road to know what is going on.

If the East and the Northeast are denied Chinese investments and Modi plans to take them all away to Gujarat and Maharashtra, law-makers in the region need to raise the issue more strongly than starting a mayhem in Parliament to block a deal seeking the exchange of a few enclaves with Bangladesh.