We wrote in our
piece on ‘Healthy Developments in India, China,
Pakistan’ that:
“We just heard
another GOI statement that China has been told that
we must settle the International Border along ground
realities and if that is true then our reading is
correct as we have always maintained. We will be
obliged to settle 'as is where is' and Tawang
remains with us with minor adjustments in the
central sector and nil in the Eastern or Western
sectors. If our reading is correct then where is the
problem and the MacMahon line goes and the Tibet
issue is resolved as China's own and as the MOD
report says we must watch the build up in Tibet and
be on guard. Then Establishment 22, SSF, SSB and
many other miltary and paramilitary agencies will
have no role to play but we fear that in India
Parkinson's Law is more powerful than in any other
country and so this may be a pipe dream.”
We
add that we have great sympathy for the Defence
Minister Pranab Mukherjee and the PM Manmohan Singh.
The entire security establishment in India appears
to have gone out of control –– the lines between
homeland and external security are blurred and the
so called Security and National Security Advisers
are doing their own thing. The Defence Ministry is
without a CDS or a proper Integrated Defence HQ
(which exists in name only). The Israelis were here
to advise on terrorism, Rumsfeld wants his say and
now Putin is getting tough and at lower levels there
is little synergy between the three services ––
as admitted by the services themselves. But our
Armed Forces are professional and so if the balloon
goes up they will respond to the challenge.
In the piece
below hark the caution, "To engage with China
in the circumstances would require no less than
keeping awake in your sleep".
A Fine
Balance
How should
the UPA go about engaging the Chinese?
01 Dec 2004:
Following Manmohan Singh’s talks with the Chinese
leadership in Laos, there will be pressure on the
UPA to expand the relationship, pressure from the
Left allies, especially the CPI-M, which has
fraternal ties with the Chinese Communist Party, the
various Chinese lobbies masquerading as friends of
India, and so on. What is the quality of the
relationship, which can be built with China, if at
all, what to watch out for, and what not to expect?
Subramanium
Swamy is among the few Indian politicians who trusts
China, but for the rest, it has been a swinging
relationship, friendship turning to bitterness, or
bitterness to eager embrace. A.B.Vajpayee is the
epitome of these oscillating ties, bitter and hurt
when China attacked Vietnam, India’s friend and
ally, when he was visiting Beijing as the first
Janata government’s foreign minister. George
Fernandes comes in at the other end of the spectrum,
starting out with Lohia’s distrust of China, going
so far as to label it India’s enemy number one,
but when the Chinese cottoned on to his
anti-Americanism at a South-East Asian security
conference, and invited him over, he was bowled
over.
The first PM to
keep his balance with China was P.V. Narasimha Rao.
He was not glassy- but steely-eyed in his dealings
with China. He correctly analysed India could not
forever sustain hostility on two fronts, the western
one with Pakistan and the long eastern border with
Chinese Tibet. To the extent that India had to
compromise on the Tibet issue, he commenced the
process, leading up to TAR’s recognition as
Chinese by the NDA, but Narasimha Rao knew what he
wanted and what he could get. He could not get a
border settlement, a settlement of the differences
that lead to the 1962 war, but he aimed for peace
and tranquility on that long eastern frontier, and
since the Chinese were convinced of the need to
demilitarise too, an agreement did not take long
coming. In his dealings with the Chinese, Rao
indulged in no romanticism, no ideology, but was
resolutely pragmatic.
Rao’s threads
with China were picked up by Vajpayee, but the
relationship swing was extreme in his prime
ministership. It started out bitter after he
defended the second Pokhran explosion citing
China’s enmity, and while relations were gradually
repaired, they swung the other way, last year, when
he got into a tearing hurry to get a border deal
with China. He thought getting Sikkim recognised as
an Indian state by China would benefit him in the
2004 general elections, forgetting that Indian
voters couldn’t be bothered, so long as Sikkim was
not seized by the PLA or separated on its own. That
is how insular Indians are.
Seizing on his
anxieties, the Chinese demanded counter-recognition
of the Tibetan Autonomous Region as Chinese. There
is a difference here between Rao’s anxiety to
close one front and Vajpayee’s anxiety to win an
election on Chinese concessions. The one was
motivated by pure national interest, military
necessity, but the other brought up party politics.
Sharply rebuked about this, in which this magazine
played a small role, Vajpayee attempted a course
change, reminding the Chinese premier in a meeting
outside China about the great Indian media hostility
to China. It worked, because Vajpayee appeared to be
seeking out unless China recognised Sikkim as
Indian, and so it happened, first removed from a
government website as Chinese, then from the Chinese
yearbook, but knowing the Chinese, nothing is final,
unless they say so.
For Manmohan
Singh, the obvious course to follow on China is as
laid down by Narasimha Rao, not Vajpayee, to be
absolutely open-eyed about the dealings, neither
fettered by the past but not forgetting it either,
and to carry the security establishment along. Right
in the middle of Vajpayee’s Beijing visit in June
2003, the PLA grabbed two IB officers and SSB
support staff on a routine mission in Arunachal
Pradesh. The NDA bottled up the grab, not to spoil
the visit, but an enraged security establishment
leaked it after the visit, and the government had to
do some flurried damage control. More than
Vajpayee’s visit do good, this could have ruined
him with the voters, but the Congress opposition was
not up to the opportunity.
A similar or
perhaps more serious event has occurred before
yesterday, when Manmohan Singh met the Chinese
premier, Wen Jiabao, and spoke about bringing down
the “Berlin Wall” between the two countries.
Indian coastguards seized two Chinese ships with
more than forty sailors who were doing magnetic
resonance imaging of the seabed around the Andamans
(Intelligence, “2 Chinese spy ships seized off
Andamans,” 30 November 2004). The Andamans will
station some of our future strategic forces, and
among other things, the magnetic resonance was being
done to check the seabed capacity to withstand heavy
submarine movements and take pen facilities, and the
offensive weapons required in case of a hostility.
The Chinese embassy in New Delhi refused to meet the
arrested sailors, and the Taiwanese embassy
cooperated to identify some of the Taiwanese among
them, the Chinese themselves traveling on fake
documents. Not to spoil the Manmohan-Wen Jiabao
meeting, the UPA government has been playing down
the spycatch. To flash back, the Chinese refused to
return a force landed US spyplane in April 2001
until the Americans apologised. It cannot be
business as usual when the Chinese are caught around
your most strategic island, for the third time, as
it turns out. Give in now, and you give in most of
the time.
Even otherwise,
the Chinese have been playing dirty. US intelligence
has revealed (“FBI detects Al-Qaeda base in
Xinjiang,” 2 November 2004) that China has hosted
Al-Qaeda leaders in Xinjiang in return for not
supporting the East Turkistan movement. And now, it
is busily advancing Iran’s case for weaponisation
to counter US unilateralism, and hopes India,
Russia, and the European Union will join its effort
(“China backs Iran’s N-programme,” 27 November
2004). In perverse pursuit of its self-interest, it
proliferated to Pakistan against India, now deals
clandestinely with the Al-Qaeda which most of the
civilised world abhors, and in return for lucrative
oilfield contracts, is supporting Iran’s WMD
programme, the most dangerous development since
Pakistan went nuclear.
Post 9/11, the
world has become a minefield of narrow nationalisms,
and China has emerged one of its worst
practitioners. To engage with China in the
circumstances would require no less than keeping
awake in your sleep.