Zorawar Daulet Singh
The nature of Sino–Indian interactions across five issue areas highlights that Delhi and Beijing have more overlapping interests than is generally recognised. Such an analytical exercise also reveals that South Asia is potentially the most contentious arena for India–China relations. A limited Sino–Indian geopolitical accommodation in the immediate neighbourhood is both viable and necessary to arrest the deterioration in the bilateral relationship in recent years and ensure regional stability.
Any evaluation of India–China relations should attempt to analyse the operating framework that guides this relationship. It is increasingly recognised—indeed, it is all too obvious—that the bilateral equation is in stress. The main reason for this flux is that the old framework established in the closing years of the Cold War appears to be unable to handle the intersection of interests between the two sides at a time of change in various settings—the Asia Pacific, Eurasia, the subcontinent, and the global economy.
The old framework essentially sought to mute the security dilemma, which was largely, though not entirely, a consequence of a disputed frontier, while opening the possibility of developing a mutually beneficial relationship in other non-security areas.1 In many ways, this was a pragmatic attempt to craft a stable equilibrium without actual or meaningful accommodation with the core or vital interests of either side. In this sense, the late 1980s and the manifestation of a detente in the 1990s in the form of confidence-building agreements, built around peace and tranquillity on the frontier, were far less ambitious and more incremental than the grand strategic detente one notices in other normalisation processes among the major powers.2 The United States (US)–China rapprochement in the 1970s and the Russia–China rapprochement in the late 1980s stand out as alternative models for a bilateral normalisation after a prolonged period of intense conflict, rivalry, and competition. In these two cases, we can notice more elements of transformation in the bilateral relationship.
This did not occur in the India–China case. Rather, the detente framework was in essence a contingent truce with possibilities of incremental change in the India–China relationship. Its main result was that it kept the peace on the Himalayan frontier while enabling tentative and relatively modest transactions in non-security areas. The old framework was, thus, never intended to produce a transformation or a complete normalisation in ties. It was a stopgap formulated within the political constraints of both sides, neither of whom were able or willing to “give-and-take” on core issues. The fragility of this improvised arrangement has been exposed in recent years, as more and more issues in bilateral ties are being perceived and framed in competitive and adversarial terms. Given the absence of an agreed bilateral framework to regulate India–China differences, a real danger that looms ahead is one of an overreaction from both sides to the perceived and real challenges to each side’s ambitions and interests.
A Complex Picture
One of the main reasons, arguably, for the challenges and frustration that India’s strategic community is confronting in dealing with China is a general reluctance to accept the emergence of a stronger, more capable China across many domains of power. For some reason, almost in utter defiance of a realistic appraisal of the balance of power, we have expanded the image of rivalry into more and more domains. Indian policymakers are struggling to formulate an approach that is realistic, pragmatic, and strategic. But, if we carefully examine the points of intersection between India and China, we might discover a more complex picture, rather than the binaries that animate the popular discourse.
This article briefly explores five issue areas where Indian and Chinese interests intersect in order to evaluate the potential for conflict, rivalry, competition, and cooperation. Each issue area could also hold multiple, even contradictory, facets that condition the nature of Sino–Indian interactions (Table 1, p 11). I, then, engage with the most contentious issue area—the overlapping periphery—and make the case for a limited geopolitical accommodation whereby India and China can preserve their vital interests.
Table 1 reveals that of all the issue areas where Indian and Chinese interests will intersect in the foreseeable future, South Asia is the subregion most fraught with the possibility of negative scenarios, uncontrolled rivalry and a heightening security dilemma. The areas of tension, mistrust and competition are primarily in the immediate vicinity of the subcontinent. Crafting a sensible policy and ensuring consistency between means and ends in this area is going to be one of India’s big foreign policy challenges in the coming decade. The backdrop of material asymmetry and, thus, the lack of ability to compete dollar-for-dollar with China in the neighbourhood will remain a severe constraint. It must also inform the overall posture, framing of objectives, and responses.
So what does this imply in terms of Indian policy? We need to shift the discourse away from a schizophrenic “China is coming, so let us do something in the region,” to more nuanced and careful assessments of the impact that China’s engagement with South Asia is actually producing across the region. Here, we need to define our goals clearly: establish red lines where pushback and deployment of relevant power resources is necessary to deflect a particular policy choice by China;3 and also outline areas of overlapping interests where India and China’s goals are not necessarily divergent, and in some areas might even be convergent.
A Pragmatic Assessment
India possesses real and latent negative leverages or veto strength to constrain both external powers and smaller neighbours from pursuing an adverse set of choices. But, negative leverage is only useful in certain limited scenarios; especially when the external power is expanding its influence in traditional ways such as through establishing military bases or by pulling states into military alignments. For the most part, India’s toolkit is highly imbalanced because it lacks the variety of power resources or effective mobilisation of different power resources (that is, economic capacity, financial capacity, and institutional capacity) to project positive leverage or influence in the neighbourhood. This is precisely where China trumps India. It is not playing a game where India’s comparative advantages, like geopolitical proximity and military resources, can easily come into play in subregional competition.
Having said this, it is not axiomatic that China’s subregional engagement is undermining South Asian stability or encouraging anti-India orientations in South Asia.4 What is occurring is that India’s smaller neighbours now have two bigger powers vying for their attention, and these smaller states have learnt the art of successfully extracting developmental and security benefits from this game. Can India conceptualise and pursue a role where it is not necessarily locked in a zero-sum game of influence with China, a game that ironically is becoming positive-sum for other South Asian states? What is the type of relationship that India prefers its neighbours to have with China? Is a non-aligned posture for its neighbours viable and acceptable from Delhi’s point of view?
Certainly, this is the type of posture that most South Asian states are already adopting or seeking to adopt. It does not appear that such questions have been considered seriously in Delhi. And, yet, such a reframing of China’s regional engagement can no longer be deferred because it is becoming increasingly unviable—materially, politically and diplomatically—for India to block China’s engagement with the subcontinent. Aspirations of hegemony and preponderance are neither materially viable, nor can India hope to realistically generate a pan–South Asian consent for such an order in the evolving balance of power.
A pragmatic assessment might persuade Indian policymakers to temper their threat perceptions and avoid the temptation to play a low-level scorched earth policy response, where destabilising regimes and, thus, the neighbourhood becomes an end in and of itself. While India’s veto strength is still considerable in certain areas and states, it needs to be wielded wisely, and based on a sensible assessment of the developmental aspirations of its neighbours as well as regarding Chinese motivations in pursuing engagement across the neighbourhood.
Other things being equal, internally resilient and economically vibrant neighbours are likely to be in both India and China’s wider interest in regional stability. If a stable overlapping periphery is in India and China’s shared interest, it should pave the way for some kind of a bilateral conversation to mitigate some of the uncertainty and competition, and exploit the untapped coincidence of interests that might be emanating from China’s growing involvement in South Asia. In sum, intelligently defining the type of South Asian order that is conducive to India’s security and developmental interests must precede the choice and mix of strategies to respond to China’s South Asia policy.
Finally, given the hierarchy of known and anticipated challenges that India and China will probably confront in the coming decade—India’s in its internal transformation and preservation of socio-economic and geopolitical stability in the immediate neighbourhood, and China’s in making the transition from its imbalanced economic structure while also dealing with geopolitical pressures on its eastern maritime frontiers—a limited accommodation could enable each side to focus on its primary national goals and geopolitical heartlands.
Notes
1 After the 1979 China visit of then Foreign Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, a three-point formula was established. Both sides agreed to pursue a resolution of the boundary dispute; both agreed to maintain peace and tranquility during that process; both agreed that there should be no impediment to the development of bilateral relations in various fields. This basic framework was enshrined in the 1988 Deng Xiaoping–Rajiv Gandhi summit (Singh 2012: 22).
2 This is not to diminish the importance of these agreements. For example, the September 1993 agreement was “formalized in an international treaty a bilateral commitment by India and China to maintain the status quo on the border … Both countries also formally renounced the use of force to settle the issue” (Menon 2016: 26–27).
3 For example, some obvious red lines might include a Chinese military base in South Asia, pressures to alter the territorial status quo, destabilising South Asian regimes, or promoting an anti-India sentiment in South Asia.
4 I am excluding Pakistan here. The India–China–Pakistan triangle deserves a separate treatment, one that must also include the role of the United States in the overall interaction dynamic.
References
Menon, Shivshankar (2016): Choices: Inside the Making of India’s Foreign Policy, Gurgaon: Penguin Random House.
Singh, Zorawar Daulet (2012): Himalayan Stalemate: Understanding the India–China Dispute, Delhi: Straight Forward Publishers.
- See more at: http://www.epw.in/journal/2016/53/strategic-aaffairs/limited-geopolitical-accommodation-benefi-ts-india%E2%80%93china#sthash.SgQItTiN.dpuf
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