MOHAN GURUSWAMY:
The short answer to how long will India and China be rivals is: Forever. But rivals need not be enemies and neighbors need not get fratricidal. If there are two large and rising powers in a region, rivalry is inevitable. France and Germany or Brazil and Argentina come readily to mind. A hundred and fifty years ago France and Britain were bitter adversaries. The rise of Teutonic nationalism and of Nazism united the two countries against a common enemy.
Enmity between nations is usually a consequence of shared of unhappily shared history. The enmity between China and Japan for instance is a consequence of the occupation of a good part of China by Imperial Japan. The enmity between India and Pakistan is due to different perceptions of the same history and was freeze dried for these past few generations by Partition. Parts of India might share the same blood as Pakistan, but that doesn’t matter. Religion is stronger than blood. Worse still is the intense enmity between the two Koreas, where ideology is the driving force. But India and China have had no shared history or competitive ideologies – not now anyway. This is more of a rivalry.
The “end of history” with the triumph of liberal democracy has largely blunted Franco-German rivalry by entwining them economically, while the advent of the European Union has made the borders seamless. The ratification of the Treaty of Tlatelolco of 1967 by Argentina in 1994, making all of Latin America and the Caribbean a nuclear free zone, has more or less eliminated any vestigial military fears Argentina and Brazil may have had. On the other hand go to a Brazil-Argentina soccer match or to a France-England rugby game and you will wonder if things have changed at all? Rivalries, it seems, are forever!
The situation between India and China is not very different. Nationalism arrived in both countries at about the same time in the early 1900’s with the advent of Sun Yat Sen in China and Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi in India. This was after centuries of foreign rule over the Han and Hindu ethnic majorities. After decades of turbulence both countries emerged as “free nations” with entirely different systems in the waning 1940’s.
Mao Zedong and Jawaharlal Nehru were leaders with entirely different personalities and worldviews. Mao’s ruthless instincts were honed as the leader of the Communists in a bloody civil war. On the other side Jawaharlal’s were finessed under the tutelage of Mahatma Gandhi into that of a somewhat naïve and dreamy idealist. The isolation of the two countries that the British had so assiduously nurtured by supporting an independent Tibet was rudely shattered by its annexation by China in 1951. This and the handing over of Xinjiang by the then USSR to the new PRC made the Han and the Hindu neighbors for the first time in history.
Since 1954 the legacy of a disputed border has flared up into a bitter row. Both countries are guilty of misinterpreting history to further their claims. India’s claim of the barren and wind swept Aksai Chin plateau rests on an arbitrary extension of the border in 1939 to the present claim line first suggested by WH Johnson in 1865. Johnson was a discontented official of the Survey of India who made his fortune by vastly extending the Kashmir Maharaja’s domain on the map. The 1939 extension was done to create a buffer between Xinjiang, which had turned into a Soviet protectorate, and British India.
On the other side in China the obsequious courtiers of the Qing (Manchu) dynasty were not averse to some cartographic conquests of their own. Ge Jianxiong, a well-respected history professor at China’s prestigious Fudan University, has written, “the notions of Greater China were based entirely on one-sided views of Qing court records that were written for the courts self-aggrandizement.” Ge has also written criticizing those who feel that the more they exaggerate the territory the more “patriotic” they are. The present Dalai Lama lent weight to this by formally staking a claim over Tawang to the newly independent India in 1947. Such is the stuff that wars are made off and the two countries are in a military face-off since 1962.
To be fair to the Chinese they have at several times offered a package deal of settling by foregoing each others un-historic and unsubstantiated claims in Ladakh and Arunachal Pradesh. India’s leadership has balked at this lest it be accused by the opposition of the day of selling out. Only in recent days a new wisdom seemed to creeping into South Block, but the Chinese have suddenly turned recalcitrant. Not just that, they have become assertive. They now seem to suggest that the package deal is no longer on offer?
As borders go China is pretty much at its pre-1962 claim lines. But it keeps adding acreage to its claims and has since the early 1990’s begun to lay claim to all of Arunachal Pradesh, which it calls Lower Tibet. It does not seem to want to agree even to resolutions of the Line of Actual Control (LAC) perceptions in various sectors. Though we have a Border Co-operation Agreement since January 2012, which stipulates rules of engagement in overlapping LAC areas. But from time to time China tests the limits of this, as in Dokolam now. And we react as can be expected from any self-confident nation with notions of its own power and grandeur.
As if this were not enough there are other issues that color each other perceptions. The voracious appetite for Tiger parts in China is one. The rise of China, which was the dominant event of the last two decades, is now being threatened by a slowing down economy, and it is locked into an irretrievable reverse hock to the vastly indebted USA. This has led it to create initiatives like the One Belt, One Road (OBOR), which is primarily meant to create demand for its surplus industrial capacity, shift part of its low or zero return investments US debt to other countries. We have seen this done in Sri Lanka with Hambantota and other glitzy investment projects for which the near bankrupted Sri Lankans are now required to pay with interest. India has rightly viewed OBOR as a dubious exercise and this has caused the Chinese much umbrage.
India on the other hand has begun to experience heady growth rates since the turn of the century, giving rise to a new giddiness about its place in the world. The Chinese don’t care too much for this. This is the stuff of competition. But not war. For both sides, as the song goes, are now endowed with the mushroom shaped cloud! And so we will have to be content playing rivals.
Mohan Guruswamy
Email: mohanguru@gmail.com
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