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Professor, strategic thinker, author and commentator

The U.S.-India nuclear deal

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The wages of the nuclear deal

 

Brahma Chellaney

Mint, August 16, 2010

 

http://www.livemint.com/2010/08/15215312/The-wages-of-the-nuclear-deal.html

 

The quiet signing of the reprocessing agreement on 30 July has completed the last remaining bilateral element of the nuclear deal with the U.S. The multilateral elements are not only complete, but also being implemented. For example, India already has brought 16 of its nuclear facilities under permanent international inspection — a number scheduled to progressively go up to cover two-thirds of all Indian nuclear installations within four years. In addition, India is set to shut down by this year-end its main military-production workhorse, the Cirus reactor — the biggest cumulative contributor of weapons-grade plutonium to the country’s stockpile.

 

Yet, despite the deal being in force, India continues to battle major technology controls. China has greater access than India does to U.S. high technology, and this is unlikely to change after the ongoing Obama administration review of American export controls. Because the review is being driven by the barely disguised business goal to increase U.S. share of the Chinese market so as to reduce the yawning trade deficit, the China-India access gap can only widen in Beijing’s favour.

 

            What tangible benefits, strategic or otherwise, has the deal yielded for India? Let’s face it: The Americans were more honest than the Indians about the deal. The final deal has turned out to be in line with what the U.S. Congress mandated, not what the Indian Parliament had repeatedly been assured by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.

 

            In fact, the deal conforms fully to the provisions of the 2006 Hyde Act. The congressional ratification legislation — the 2008 Nuclear Cooperation Approval and Non-Proliferation Enhancement Act, or NCANEA — actually tightened some of the Hyde Act provisions. The Indian side had publicly claimed that the Hyde Act would not determine the final deal, with some in authority even seeking to creatively differentiate between “operative” and “non-binding” parts of that Act. It had further been claimed that the 123 Agreement, once ratified, would become the “last expression of the sovereign will” and override all other laws including national laws.

 

These too-clever-by-half arguments have fallen flat on their face. Nothing can be more embarrassing to the Indian side than the fact that the bilateral accords it negotiated and signed — the 123 Agreement and the reprocessing pact — match up to U.S. congressional stipulations.

 

Worse still, the accords have been made subservient to American law. Take the 123 Agreement, which neither contains the international-law principle (found in the U.S.-China accord) that neither party will invoke its internal law as justification for a failure to honour the accord, nor provides (unlike the U.S.-Japan or U.S.-South Korea accord) for an arbitral tribunal to settle any dispute. As the NCANEA makes explicit, “Nothing in the [123] Agreement shall be construed to supersede the legal requirements of the Henry J. Hyde Act.”

 

As a result, the final deal ends up giving America specific rights — enforceable through the pain of unilateral suspension or termination of cooperation — while saddling India with obligations. The NCANEA actually records that the promise of uninterrupted fuel supply is a “political,” not legal, commitment. It cannot be anything else because the 123 Agreement itself confers an open-ended right on the U.S. to suspend fuel supplies straight away while issuing a one-year termination notice. In fact, as a corollary to that right, the U.S. has retained the prerogative in the reprocessing accord to unilaterally suspend its reprocessing consent to India.

 

            What stands out about the final deal are the four “No”s for India: No binding fuel-supply guarantee to avert a Tarapur-style fuel cut-off; no irrevocable reprocessing consent; no right to withdraw from its obligations; and no right to conduct a nuclear test ever again. The no-test obligation constitutes the first instance in the nuclear age where one nuclear-weapons power has used a civilian cooperation deal to impose such a prohibition on another nuclear-weapons state. The Cirus’s impending dismantlement is another weapons-related obligation thrust on India.

            No country in history has struggled longer to build a minimal deterrent or paid heavier international costs for its nuclear programme than India. Despite Asia’s oldest nuclear programme, India now has the world’s smallest nuclear arsenal — smaller than even Pakistan’s. More significant is that India still does not have a single Beijing-reachable nuclear missile in its inventory or production line. It is against that background that the nuclear deal marks a turning point.

 

The lasting legacy of the deal, in which the Indian government invested considerable time and diplomatic resources, will be to ensure that India stays enmeshed in its struggle to build regionally confined nuclear-weapons capability while becoming more reliant than ever on conventional arms imports to meet its basic defence needs. If ever there was hope of India becoming a full-fledged nuclear-weapons state like China, that prospect has passed.

 

A closer relationship with the U.S. is in India’s own interest. But it could have been built without a deal that carries serious, long-term costs. Indeed, such are the wages of the deal that India has refrained from speaking up on regional-security issues that directly impinge on its interests, including the continuing transfer of offensive U.S. weapon systems to Pakistan, now the largest recipient of American economic and military aid in the world. Islamabad, in fact, has managed to cut its own deal to buy two China-origin reactors without the burden of conditions cast on India.

 

Brahma Chellaney is professor of strategic studies at the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi

 

Comments are welcome at theirview@livemint.com

Lift the wraps on the Himalayan border situation

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Let facts speak for themselves on the India-China frontier

 

Brahma Chellaney

The Sunday Guardian, August 15, 2010

 

For almost 11 months now, the Indian government has put a lid on the Himalayan border situation with China. Ever since several senior government figures last September spoke out against the manner the media was covering Chinese border incursions, sources of information have dried up and newspapers and television networks have carried little news. It is not that the Chinese cross-border forays have ended or even abated. It is just that Indian media organizations have little information to report, even though the incidence of Chinese incursions remains high.

 

Beijing can only be pleased with the way New Delhi has managed to gag its own media over the border incidents.  The unwitting message that sends is that when the world’s biggest autocracy builds up pressure, the world’s largest democracy is willing to tame its own media.

 

Just as China has sought to pass off military incursions into Bhutan as instances of Chinese troops “losing their way,” soldiers of its People’s Liberation Army “lost their way” into Indian territory 270 times in 2008 alone — the last full year for which official figures are available. In addition, there were 2,285 instances of “aggressive border patrolling” by the PLA in 2008. Such a pattern of aggressive patrolling and intrusions has persisted to this day.

 

The plain fact is that the continuing border tensions reflect a growing strategic dissonance between China and India, which represent competing political and social models of development. Tibet has emerged at the centre of escalating Himalayan tensions. China has resurrected its long-dormant claim to Arunachal Pradesh — almost three times as large as Taiwan — and stepped up military pressure along the 4,057-kilometre frontier with India.

 

As the resistance to its rule in Tibet has grown, Beijing has sought to present Tibet as a core issue to its sovereignty. Tibet now holds as much importance in Chinese policy as Taiwan. But in spotlighting the Arunachal issue, Beijing seems to be drawing another analogy, even if unwittingly: Arunachal is the new Taiwan that must be “reunified” with the Chinese state.

 

Tibet, however, has always been the core issue in Sino-Indian relations. After all, China became India’s neighbour not owing to geography but guns — by annexing buffer Tibet in 1951. Today, Beijing is ever ready to whip up diplomatic spats with Western nations that extend hospitality to the Dalai Lama. But India remains the base of the Tibetan leader and his government-in-exile.     

 

The key instigation in the more-muscular Chinese stance towards India clearly has come from the U.S.-Indian strategic tie-up, unveiled first in 2005. As President George W. Bush declared in his valedictory speech, “We opened a new historic and strategic partnership with India”.

 

Since then, the official Chinese media has started regurgitating the coarse anti-India rhetoric of the Mao Zedong era, with commentators warning New Delhi not to forget the lesson of 1962, when China humiliated India in a 32-day, two-front war. The Chinese Communist Party’s mouthpiece, the People’s Daily, earlier charged India with pursuing a foreign policy of “befriending the far and attacking the near,” while a commentary by the China Institute of International Strategic Studies — a PLA think-tank — cautioned India “not to requite kindness with ingratitude” and not to “misjudge the situation as it did in 1962”.

 

Against that background, India’s interests will be better served by letting the facts on the border situation with China speak for themselves.

 

In recent years, China has opened pressure points against India across the Himalayas, with border incidents occurring in all the four sectors. Chinese forces are intruding even into Utttarakhand (although the line of control in this middle sector was clarified in 2001 through an exchange of maps) and into Sikkim (whose 206-kilometer border with Tibet is not in dispute and indeed is recognized by Beijing). Yet, Indian officials have said the incursions are the result of differing perceptions about the line of truth. That may be so about Arunachal Pradesh and Ladakh, but can that be true about Sikkim and Uttarakhand? It speaks for itself that Beijing hasn’t offered this lame excuse.

 

Even in the pre-1962 period, India sought to play down China’s aggressive moves along the border. The result was “the stab in the back” in 1962, as Jawaharlal Nehru called it.

 

In fact, there are important parallels between the situation pre-1962 and the situation now. Border talks are regressing, Chinese claims on Indian territories are becoming publicly assertive, Chinese cross-border incursions are rising, and India’s China policy is becoming feckless.

Indeed, what stands out in the history of Sino-Indian disputes is that India has always been on the defensive against a country that first moved its frontiers hundreds of miles south by annexing Tibet, then furtively nibbled at Indian territories before waging open war, and now lays claims to additional Indian territories. By contrast, on neuralgic subjects like Tibet, Beijing’s public language still matches the crudeness and callousness with which it sought in 1962, in Premier Zhou Enlai’s words, to “teach India a lesson.”

     

The irony is that by laying claims to additional Indian territories on the basis of their purported ties to Tibet, China blatantly plays the Tibet card against India, going to the extent of citing the birth in Tawang of one of the earlier Dalai Lamas, a politico-religious institution it has systematically sought to destroy. Yet India remains coy to play the Tibet card against China.

 

The net result of failing to use Tibet as a bargaining chip has been that India first lost Aksai Chin, then more territory in 1962 and now is seeking to fend off Chinese claims to Arunachal Pradesh.

 

Beijing openly covets Arunachal Pradesh as a cultural extension to Tibet — a classic attempt at incremental annexation. Just because the 6th Dalai Lama was born in the 17th century in Arunachal’s Tawang district, Beijing claims that Arunachal belongs to Tibet and thus is part of China. By that argument, it can also lay claim to Mongolia as the 4th Dalai Lama was born there in 1589. The traditional ecclesiastical links between Mongolia and Tibet indeed have been closer than those between Arunachal and Tibet. What makes China’s claim more untenable is that, as part of its gerrymandering of Tibet, it has hived off the birthplaces of the 7th, 10th, 11th and present Dalai Lama — the 14th in line — from Tibet. Before seeking Arunachal, shouldn’t it be asked to first return the traditional Tibetan areas of Amdo and eastern Kham to Tibet?

NPT’s challenges now come from within its regime

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Saturday, Aug. 7, 2010  The Japan Times

The NPT’s uncertain future

 
This year marks the 40th anniversary of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty’s coming into force. Despite its central role in shaping the global nuclear order, the NPT’s future looks anything but promising.

The main challenges the NPT now faces come from within its regime, not from the nonparties. The nations outside the NPT fold that wanted to go nuclear have done so. And having acquired nuclear weapons, those states are in no position to join a treaty that essentially is rigidly structured and is thus not amendable.

It has been widely forgotten that the NPT originally was intended to prevent countries like Japan, West Germany and Italy from acquiring nuclear weapons. Japan, did not ratify the treaty until 1976 — eight years after the NPT was concluded, and six years after the pact took effect. Over the years, however, the challenges to the NPT have come from outside the list of its original targets.

It is remarkable that the NPT has survived for so long and that it was extended indefinitely in 1995. As a result of the 1995 action, the treaty — originally conceived as a 25-year bargain between nuclear-weapons states and nonnuclear-weapons states — has become permanent.

For the foreseeable future, nuclear weapons, with their unparalleled destructive capacity, are likely to remain at the center of international power and force capacity. Nuclear weapons, as the 2002 U.S. nuclear posture review stated, will continue to play a "critical role" because they possess "unique properties."

Some 95 percent of all nuclear weapons are in the arsenals of the United States and Russia. The U.S. has announced recently that it has 5,113 nuclear weapons in its arsenal, plus "several thousand" more waiting to be dismantled. Russia is believed to have a fairly similar number of nuclear weapons in deployment.

Although their arsenals have declined, both Russia and the U.S. still maintain "overkill" capabilities — that is, either can destroy the entire world several times over. There can be no justification for maintaining such large arsenals today, and the reductions proposed by the new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) between the U.S. and Russia will not change the overkill capacities of the two sides.

The latest U.S. Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) incorporates a welcome shift by proclaiming that the U.S. will not use nuclear weapons against a nonnuclear-weapons state or in response to a nonnuclear attack. Yet that assurance is hedged with caveats — the nonnuclear-weapons states have to be fully "in compliance" with their nonproliferation obligations; and given the catastrophic potential of biological weapons, the U.S. reserves the right to respond with nukes against a biological attack.

It would have been better had the posture review made clear — without any qualification — that the sole purpose of nuclear weapons is to deter a nuclear attack. Instead, the NPR declares such a sole purpose as a long-term goal. With the burden of the Nobel Peace Prize weighing heavily on U.S. President Barack Obama’s mind, the caveat-ridden NPR comes across as being more posture than review.

Given the fact that every nuclear- weapons state, by definition, is a proliferator, the varying standards still being applied on proliferation underscore the nonproliferation challenges. Geopolitical interests, rather than objective criteria, usually determine a response to any proliferation problem. Also, who is a legitimate nuclear-weapons state or who is not has remained a subject of controversy. The NPT recognizes as nuclear powers only those countries that tested a nuclear device before 1967. But it is hardly a good advertisement for the NPT regime that some nuclear-weapons states remain outside its fold.

Actually, the real "success" of the NPT has been in reinforcing the system of extended deterrence by giving countries such as those in NATO and others like Japan, Australia and South Korea little choice other than to continue to rely on the U.S. for nuclear-umbrella protection. Minus the NPT, these countries would have been the most-likely candidates to go nuclear because they also happen to be the most-capable states technologically. So, the effect of the NPT has been to either strengthen extended deterrence or to drive nuclear programs underground, as was symbolized by North Korea.

A few technologically capable countries, like Sweden and Switzerland, of course, voluntarily relinquished their nuclear-weapons option even while staying out of any alliance system. Their decision was based on a careful judgment that their security would be better protected without nuclearization.

Today, a key question that arises is whether any of the countries ensconced under the U.S. nuclear umbrella would be willing to forgo the benefits of extended deterrence in order to help lower the utility of nuclear weapons and give a boost to the cause of nuclear disarmament.

Today, the world has a treaty (although not in force) that bans all nuclear testing but no treaty to outlaw the use of nuclear weapons. In other words, those that are party to the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty are prohibited from testing a nuclear weapon at home but are legally unencumbered to test the weapon by dropping it over some other state. That anomaly must be removed.

Brahma Chellaney is the author of the 2010 international best-seller, "Asian Juggernaut" (HarperCollins).

The Japan Times: Saturday, Aug. 7, 2010
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China’s laogai system of forced prison labor follows its international investments

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China’s newest export: convicts

The use of convict labourers on overseas projects is damaging China’s international reputation

China has devised a novel strategy to relieve pressure on its overcrowded prisons: employ convicts as labourers on overseas projects in the developing world. The practice has exposed another facet of China’s egregious human rights record which, when it comes to the overseas operations of Chinese companies, includes the government’s failure to enforce its own regulations.

China executes three times as many people every year as the rest of the world combined. Amnesty International has estimated that, in 2007, China secretly executed on average "around 22 prisoners every day".

In addition to being the world’s leading executioner, China has one of its largest prison populations. The 2009 world prison population listcompiled by the International Centre for Prison Studies at King’s College London, put the total number of inmates in Chinese jails at 1.57 million – larger than the population of Estonia, Guinea-Bissau, Mauritius, Swaziland, Trinidad & Tobago, Fiji or Qatar.

The forced dispatch of prisoners to work on overseas infrastructure projects raises new issues regarding China’s human rights record. It also adds a new element – the dumping of convicts – to its trade and investment policy, which has been much criticised for dumping goods.

Thousands of Chinese convicts, for example, have been pressed into service on projects undertaken by state-run Chinese companies in Sri Lanka, a strategically important country for China as it seeks to enhance its regional position in the Indian Ocean. After providing Sri Lanka’s government with offensive weapon systems that helped end the country’s decades-long civil war, China has been rewarded with port-building, railroad, and other infrastructure projects.

Chinese convicts also have been dispatched to the Maldives, where the Chinese government is building 4,000 houses on several different islands as a government-to-government "gift" to win influence. So far, however, China has failed to persuade the country’s president to lease it one of the 700 uninhabited Maldivian islands for use as a small base for the Chinese navy.

Chinese companies’ operating practice for overseas projects, including in Africa, is to keep the number of local workers to a bare minimum and to bring in much of the workforce from China, some of which comprises convicts "freed" on parole for project-related overseas work. Convict labourers, like the rest of the Chinese workforce on such projects, are housed near the project site. That way, if any convict worker escaped, he would be easy to find in an alien setting.

In theory, such practices run counter to regulations promulgated by the Chinese commerce ministry in August 2006, in response to a backlash against Chinese businesses in Zambia following the death of 51 Zambian workers in an explosion at a Chinese-owned copper mine. These regulations called for "localisation," including hiring local workers, respecting local customs, and adhering to safety norms. During an eight-nation 2007 African tour, Chinese President Hu Jintao made a point of meeting with Chinese businesses to stress the importance of corporate responsibility in their local dealings.

Moreover, in October 2006, the state council – China’s cabinet – issued nine directives ordering that Chinese overseas businesses, among other things, "pay attention to environmental protection", "support local community and people’s livelihood cause" and "preserve China’s good image and its good corporate reputation".

But Chinese regulations are sometimes promulgated simply to blunt external criticism, and thus are seldom enforced, except when a case attracts international attention. For example, in 2003 China enacted a law on environmental-impact assessments, which was followed in 2008 by "provisional measures" to permit public participation in such assessments. Yet Chinese leaders remain more zealous about promoting exports and economic growth than in protecting the country’s air and water.

Similarly, the state council’s 2006 nine directives to Chinese overseas companies have been subordinated to the drive for exports and growth, even when it imposes environmental and social costs on local communities abroad. Indeed, as part of the government’s "going global" policy, Chinese companies are offered major incentives and rewards for bagging overseas contracts and boosting exports.

The use of convict labourers adds a disturbing new dimension to this strategy. But even before convicts became part of China’s overseas development effort, some Chinese projects, especially dam-building schemes, were embroiled in disputes with local communities in Botswana, Burma, Pakistan, Ghana and Sudan. In fact, several small bombs exploded less than three months ago at the site of Burma’s Myitsone dam, whose construction by a Chinese company in insurgency-torn Kachin state is displacing thousands of subsistence farmers and fishermen by flooding a wide swath of land.

Chinese companies cannot get thousands of prisoners released on their own, let alone secure passports and exit permits for them. It is obvious that the practice of pressing convicts into service on overseas projects has been instituted at the instance of the Chinese government.

Until the Chinese government’s treatment of its own citizens and those of other countries is guided by respect for basic human rights and the rule of law, China is unlikely to command the respect that it seeks on the world stage.

• Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2010.

China’s policy: From dumping goods to dumping convicts

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Convicts for Export

Brahma Chellaney

 
© Project Syndicate 

 

China has devised a novel strategy to relieve pressure on its overcrowded prisons: employ convicts as laborers on overseas projects in the developing world. The practice has exposed another facet of China’s egregious human-rights record, which, when it comes to the overseas operations of Chinese companies, includes the government’s failure to enforce its own regulations.

China executes three times as many people every year as the rest of the world combined. Amnesty International has estimated that, in 2007, China secretly executed on average “around 22 prisoners every day.”

In addition to being the world’s leading executioner, China has one of its largest prison populations. The 2009 “World Prison Population List” compiled by the International Center for Prison Studies at King’s College, London, put the total number of inmates in Chinese jails at 1.57 million – larger than the population of Estonia, Guinea-Bissau, Mauritius, Swaziland, Trinidad & Tobago, Fiji, or Qatar.

The forced dispatch of prisoners to work on overseas infrastructure projects raises new issues regarding China’s human-rights record. It also adds a new element — the dumping of convicts — to its trade and investment policy, which has been much criticized for dumping goods.

Thousands of Chinese convicts, for example, have been pressed into service on projects undertaken by state-run Chinese companies in Sri Lanka, a strategically important country for China as it seeks to enhance its regional position in the Indian Ocean. After providing Sri Lanka’s government with offensive weapon systems that helped end the country’s decades-long civil war, China has been rewarded with port-building, railroad, and other infrastructure projects.

Chinese convicts also have been dispatched to the Maldives, where the Chinese government is building 4,000 houses on several different islands as a government-to-government “gift” to win influence. So far, however, China has failed to persuade the country’s president to lease it one of the 700 uninhabited Maldivian islands for use as a small base for the Chinese navy.

Chinese companies’ operating practice for overseas projects, including in Africa, is to keep the number of local workers to a bare minimum and to bring in much of the workforce from China, some of which comprises convicts “freed” on parole for project-related overseas work. Convict laborers, like the rest of the Chinese workforce on such projects, are housed near the project site. That way, if any convict worker escaped, he would be easy to find in an alien setting.

In theory, such practices run counter to regulations promulgated by the Chinese commerce ministry in August 2006, in response to a backlash against Chinese businesses in Zambia following the death of 51 Zambian workers in an explosion at a Chinese-owned copper mine. These regulations called for “local ization,” including hiring local workers, respecting local customs, and adhering to safety norms. During an eight-nation 2007 African tour, Chinese President Hu Jintao made a point of meeting with Chinese businesses to stress the importance of corporate responsibility in their local dealings.

Moreover, in October 2006, the State Council – China’s cabinet – issued nine directives ordering that Chinese overseas businesses, among other things, “pay attention to environmental protection,” “support local community and people’s livelihood cause,” and “preserve China’s good image and its good corporate reputation.”

But Chinese regulations are sometimes promulgated simply to blunt external criticism, and thus are seldom enforced, except when a case attracts international attention. For example, in 2003 China enacted a law on environmental-impact assessments, which was followed in 2008 by “provisional measures” to permit public participation in such assessments. Yet Chinese leaders remain more zealous about promoting exports and economic growth than in protecting the country’s air and water.

Similarly, the State Council’s 2006 nine directives to Chinese overseas companies have been subordinated to the drive for exports and growth, even when it imposes environmental and social costs on local communities abroad. Indeed, as part of the government’s “going global” policy, Chinese companies are offered major incentives and rewards for bagging overseas contracts and boosting exports.

The use of convict laborers adds a disturbing new dimension to this strategy. But even before convicts became part of China’s overseas development effort, some Chinese projects, especially dam-building schemes, were embroiled in disputes with local communities in Botswana, Burma, Pakistan, Ghana, and Sudan. In fact, several small bombs exploded less than three months ago at the site of Burma’s Myitsone Dam, whose construction by a Chinese company in insurgency-torn Kachin State is displacing thousands of subsistence farmers and fishermen by flooding a wide swath of land.

Chinese companies cannot get thousands of prisoners released on their own, let alone secure passports and exit permits for them. It is obvious that the practice of pressing convicts into service on overseas projects has been instituted at the instance of the Chinese government.

Until the Chinese government’s treatment of its own citizens and those of other countries is guided by respect for basic human rights and the rule of law, China is unlikely to command the respect that it seeks on the world stage.

Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2010.
http://www.project-syndicate.org

Failed talks at Islamabad

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Pakistan turns the tables on India

 

Brahma Chellaney

The Economic Times, July 20, 2010

 

In the blame-game over the botched Islamabad talks, it is India that comes out looking poorer. First, it resumed talks with Pakistan without having secured anything on the central issue of terrorism. Second, having made a diplomatic climbdown, India found itself being publicly put in the dock at the conclusion of the Islamabad talks.

 

The upshot is that a defensive India has had to respond to public accusations by a country whose state agencies continue to orchestrate acts of terror against Indian targets. This, however, is not the first time Pakistan has turned the tables on India.

 

Whether it was the Agra summit, or the Sharm el-Sheikh meeting, or the latest talks, it was a “hurt” India that came out defending itself. As long as India continues to cling to a diplomacy of hope and dreams, Pakistan, although a failing state, will continue to reap the diplomatic advantage.

 

Few states put as much faith in diplomacy alone as India does. Yet, in the absence of realistic, goal-oriented statecraft, the propensity to act in haste and repent at leisure runs deep in Indian foreign policy. Gushy expectations and wishful thinking have blighted Indian foreign policy and condemned the nation to relive history.

 

The previous BJP-led government took India on a roller-coaster ride, with an ever-shifting policy course on Pakistan. The present government is taking India on another jarring roller-coaster ride, having learned no lesson from the Sharm el-Sheikh blunder or its earlier action in designating Pakistan as a “fellow victim of terror” like India.

 

Pretty much everyone in the Indian delegation returned from Sharm el-Sheikh with egg on his face — from the prime minister, who claimed incredulously that he had done nothing to change anything, to the foreign secretary, who blamed “poor drafting” for causing the furor in India. Yet, no sooner had the uproar subsided than the PM sought to redo exactly what had angered the nation.

 

What prompted New Delhi this year to resume dialogue with Pakistan, first at the foreign-secretary level and then at the foreign-minister level? Mum is the word. Confusion and contradiction marks India’s current Pakistan policy. Just take one example.

 

On the one hand, New Delhi blames Pakistan‘s powerful Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency for "controlling and coordinating" the Mumbai terror attacks “from the beginning to the end.” And on the other hand, it institutes “peace talks” with a Pakistani government whose India policy is controlled by the army and ISI. What does India seek to gain from such talks? Mum again is the word.

 

If New Delhi really has evidence to implicate the ISI in the Mumbai attacks, shouldn’t it, at a minimum, designate that rogue agency as a terrorist organization?

 

But that may be expecting too much from a government that thus far has not taken the smallest of small steps in response to the Mumbai attacks, not even as a mere token of India’s outrage over the role of Pakistani state actors in those strikes. Apart from sending Pakistan dossier after dossier pleading for action against the masterminds (and, in the process, fashioning a new counterterrorism tool — dossier-bombing), New Delhi has not lifted a finger.

 

In fact, the PM has been continuously shifting his Pakistan-related goalpost. After the Mumbai attacks, Singh first sought the dismantlement of Pakistan’s terror infrastructure against India. His benchmark then narrowed to bringing to justice the “perpetrators” (the actual executors, not the masterminds) of the Mumbai attacks. Next, Singh further watered down his stance by saying India was “willing to walk more than half the distance” if Pakistan undertook not actual action but merely offered “a renewed reaffirmation” to “bring the perpetrators of the Mumbai massacre to justice”. That is exactly what happened: In exchange for Pakistan’s mere reaffirmation of its anti-terror commitments, Singh resumed talks, only to suffer an embarrassing debacle in Islamabad.

 

But don’t expect the PM to give up on his make-peace-with-Pakistan line. In fact, after returning from Islamabad, the Indian foreign minister publicly blames the home secretary for ruining the talks. “Everyone who was privy to whatever was happening in government ought to have known that the right kind of atmosphere from India’s side should have been created for the talks to go on in a very normal manner, but unfortunately this episode happened,” he said.

 

Dangerous delusions characterize the Indian policy approach. One is that, “We cannot wish away the fact that Pakistan is our neighbor,” as the PM says. So, “a stable, peaceful and prosperous Pakistan” is in India’s “own interest.” But political maps are never carved in stone, as the breaking away of Eritrea, East Timor and others have shown. Didn’t Indira Gandhi change political geography in 1971? In fact, the most-profound global events in recent history have been the fragmentation of several states, including the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. If Pakistan is on the path to self-destruct, why does India want “a stable, peaceful and prosperous Pakistan”?

 

Another delusion is that India and Pakistan are locked by a shared destiny. How can a plural, inclusive and democratic India share a common future with a theocratic, militarized and radicalized Pakistan?

 

 Randall L. Schweller, in his study Deadly Imbalances, labels revisionist nations “wolves” and “jackals”, while status quo states are either “lambs” or “lions”.  India certainly qualifies as a “lamb”, surrounded by “jackal” Pakistan and “wolf” China.  The “lamb” status is in keeping with its intrinsic disposition and meek objectives.  Although its borders have shrunk since independence, India is lamb-like content with the status quo.  Only a “lamb” state will make unilateral concessions.  Also, only a “lamb” will assume that others change their beliefs and policies as rapidly as it meanders to a new course.

 

Brahma Chellaney is Professor of Strategic Studies at the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi.

ASEM process: Two continents seek one vision

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Don’t underestimate ASEM

The Japan Times, July 21, 2010
 

One of the less-noticed initiatives in the world is the Asia-Europe Meeting (ASEM), designed to foster closer cooperation between the old economic giants of Europe and the new economic powers of Asia — the two diverse but culturally rich continents that together represent half of the world’s GDP and about 60 percent of the global population and international trade.
 

Heads of state or government from 46 Asian and European countries will gather in Brussels in early October for the eighth ASEM summit to discuss key international challenges and ways to strengthen political, economic and cultural ties between the two continents. They will include leaders from Russia, Australia and New Zealand, which are set to shortly join the ASEM initiative.

 

As a runup to the summit meeting, the ASEM Public Conference on Europe-Asia Inter-Regional Relations, held in Brussels from July 12 and 13, examined the regional institutional architectures in Asia and Europe, security concerns in both continents, global economic and financial challenges and prospects for building closer Asian-European collaborations.

 

ASEM has the potential to play an important role on the world stage. Indeed, Europe has developed an important stake in Asia’s continued economic growth and peace: Its trade with Asia totaled 750 billion euro in 2009. European foreign direct investment in Asia is estimated at 350 billion euro, with some 40 billion euro invested in 2008 alone.

 

In addition, according to analyst Dr. Fraser Cameron, the European Union, as an institution, expends 800 million euro on development assistance in Asia — a figure that rises to over 3 billion euro when bilateral development aid from the EU member-states in included.

 

At the last ASEM summit meeting in Beijing in 2008, discussions began on reforming international institutions, whose structure has remained static since the 1940s even though the world has changed fundamentally. In response to the growing Asian pressure, the World Bank agreed three months ago on a 3.13 percent shift in voting power to give emerging and developing nations greater influence.

 

Reaching a deal on such a change, however modest, became a test case in Asia-Europe relations because the European economies were reluctant to give up some of their voting shares, especially as the United States was intent on holding on to its veto power. The biggest beneficiary of this reform is China, whose voting power at the World Bank now ranks third behind the U.S and Japan.

 

Group of 20 leaders last month pledged to push for a similar agreement in the International Monetary Fund to transfer up to 5 percent of the voting power to emerging economic powers by the next G20 summit in Seoul in early November.

 

Some 14 years after its establishment, ASEM remains an ambitious initiative. It is difficult to lump Europe and Asia together, especially at a time when Asia has become the world’s largest creditor and the main economic locomotive and Europe’s financial crisis has turned its focus inward. Asia has done a much better job than Europe and the U.S. in coping with the international financial crisis. The EU entered the 21st century on a confident note after introducing the euro and then expanding to become a 27-nation institution. But in more recent years, discord over institutional changes and the impact of the financial crisis have stalled its momentum.

 

Still, Asia’s rise is often exaggerated, just as there tends to be an unnecessarily gloomy view about Europe, as if it were under irreversible decline.

 

Asia’s rise has been looked at from a single index: GDP growth. But the concept of development is not one-dimensional. It is broad-based and comprises multiple indexes, including low-income disparity, respect for human rights and the rule of law, robust civil society, social equity, public transparency and accountability, gender equality, environmental protection, and secularism.

 

When such broader benchmarks are considered, Europe emerges as an example for Asia to emulate. That is underlined by the UNDP’s annual Human Development Reports, which show disparities in Asia are growing, along with environmental degradation. Such trends hold ominous implications for intrastate stability in Asia.

 

As far as larger security is concerned, there is a clear overlap between European and Asian interests. That is best symbolized by the Afpak belt, with NATO spearheading the Afghan war, in which forces of a number of European countries are involved. It is also symbolized by the presence of European and Asian navies in the western rim of the Indian Ocean to combat ocean piracy, especially off the coast of Somalia.

 

With 21 EU member-states in NATO, the military involvement of European countries in the Afghan war shows how Asian security issues can impinge on European interests.

 

Both Europe and Asia actually face important security challenges. For Europe, defining the relationship with NATO, including the scope for closer cooperation, is important for further developing the EU’s Common Security and Defense Policy (CSDP), formerly known as the European Security and Defense Policy.

 

Compared to Europe, Asia’s security challenges are far more pressing. Asia has not only the world’s fastest-growing economies, but also the world’s fastest- rising military expenditures, the most dangerous hot spots and the fiercest resource competition, both for energy and for water.

 

Asia may be coming together economically, as reflected in the plethora of free trade agreements in the region. But it is not coming together politically. If anything, it is becoming more divided.

 

To compound matters, there is neither any security architecture in Asia nor a structural framework for regional security. The regional consultation mechanisms remain weak, even though Asia needs to cope with entrenched territorial disputes, sharpening competition over scarce resources, maritime-security threats, expanding national military capabilities, increasingly fervent nationalism and the rise of religious extremism. Differences persist over whether a security architecture should extend across Asia or just be confined to an ill-defined regional construct, East Asia. China favors the latter, and the U.S., Japan, India and several other Asian states the former.

 

For its part, Europe has made slow progress in strengthening its security architecture or giving concrete shape to the CSDP. But the Asian challenges raise an important question: Is Asia going to be an arena of old-style, balance-of-power politics and thus crimp its ability to shape the new global order? Or will growing cooperation and economic interdependence, as well as prospects of shared prosperity and stability, propel Asian states to act as "responsible stakeholders" in the international system and help reform global institutions?

 

Brahma Chellaney is professor of strategic studies at the privately funded Center for Policy Research in New Delhi.

 

The Japan Times: Wednesday, July 21, 2010

(C) All rights reserved

Needed: A new political order in the Hindu-Kush region

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Time has come to accept the de facto partition of Afghanistan

Brahma Chellaney

The Sunday Guardian, July 18, 2010 

As the Afghanistan war approaches its 10th anniversary, it
is a reminder that this is the longest foreign war in American history. The
U.S. war effort is clearly faltering, to the extent that Afghan President Hamid
Karzai has started exploring the possibility of cutting his own deal with the
Taliban.

If defeat is beginning to stare the U.S. in the face, it is
largely because of President Barack Obama’s botched strategy. Obama has
designed his twin troop surges not to militarily rout the Afghan Taliban but to
strike a political deal with the enemy from a position of strength. But as CIA
director Leon Panetta admitted recently about the Taliban, “We have seen no
evidence that they are truly interested in reconciliation.”

Why would the Taliban be interested in negotiating a deal
with the Americans when Obama publicly declared, just weeks after coming to
office, that he was interested in a military exit from Afghanistan? The Taliban
and their sponsors, the Pakistan military, simply want to wait out the Americans.

Unable to bring the Taliban to the negotiating table, the
Obama administration is searching for credible options to fend off defeat.
While the U.S. has no cost-free option, its least bad option, according to
Robert Blackwill, is to accept the de facto partition of Afghanistan.
Blackwill, who served as U.S. ambassador to India, deputy national security
advisor for strategic planning and presidential envoy to Iraq in the George W.
Bush administration, says in an article that de facto partition offers the only
alternative to strategic defeat. That option means that the U.S. will end
ground operations in Afghanistan but use air power and its special forces to
attack Taliban strongholds in Afghanistan’s Pashtun-dominated south and east
while ensuring that the non-Pashtun northern and western Afghan regions retain
their present de facto autonomy.

Blackwill has picked up the de facto partition idea from
M.J. Akbar, who has been advocating it for a while. This idea meshes with the
thesis this writer has been propounding that the way to contain the scourge of
international terrorism is to stop treating as sacrosanct the existing
political borders of Afghanistan and Pakistan. There is continuing reluctance
in the international policy discourse to face up to a central reality: The
political border between these two problem countries has now ceased to exist in
practice.

The so-called Durand Line, in any event, was an artificial,
British-colonial invention that left the large Pashtun community divided into
two. Set up in 1893 as the border between British-led India and Afghanistan,
the Durand Line had been despised and rejected by Afghanistan for long as a
colonial imposition.

Today, that line exists only in maps. On the ground, it has
little political, ethnic and economic relevance, even as the
Afghanistan-Pakistan region has become a magnet for the world’s jihadists. A de
facto Pashtunistan, long sought by Pashtuns, now exists on the ruins of an
ongoing Islamist militancy but without any political authority in charge.

The disappearance of the Af-Pak political border seems
irreversible. While the writ of the Pakistani state no longer extends to nearly
half of that country (much of Baluchistan, large parts of the North-West
Frontier Province and the whole of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas),
ever-larger swaths of Afghanistan are outside the control of the government in
Kabul. The Pakistani army has lost increasing ground to insurgents in the
western regions not because it is weaker than the armed extremists and
insurgents but because an ethnic, tribal and militant backlash has resulted in
the state withering away in the Pashtun and Baluch lands. Forced to cede
control, the jihadist-infiltrated Pakistani military and its infamous
Inter-Services Intelligence agency have chosen to support proxy militant
groups, in addition to the Taliban.

The international reluctance to come to terms with the new
reality is because of the fundamental, far-reaching issues such acceptance
would throw open. It is simpler to just keep up the pretense of wanting to
stabilize Pakistan and Afghanistan within their existing political frontiers.

Take U.S. policy. As if determined to hide from this
reality, Washington is now pursuing, at least outwardly, a military approach
toward Afghanistan through a troop “surge” and a political strategy toward
Pakistan centered on the tripling of non-military aid. The plain fact is that
the entire war effort has been focused on the wrong side of the Durand Line. A
forward-looking Af-Pak policy demands consistency in approach toward these two
interlinked countries and recognition of the 2,640-kilometer Durand Line’s
disappearance. The ethnic genie cannot be put back in the bottle.

To arrest further deterioration in the Afghan war, the U.S.
military needs to focus less on al-Qaeda — a badly splintered and weakened
organization whose leadership operates out of mountain caves — and more on an
increasingly resurgent Taliban that operates openly and has sanctuaries and a
command-and-control structure in Pakistan.

The Obama administration complains that a weak, corrupt
government in Kabul is driving Afghans into the Taliban’s clutches. So, it has
sought to do business directly with provincial governors and tribal leaders and
seek their help to set up local, Iraq-style militias to assist the U.S. forces.
Yet in Pakistan it is doing the opposite: propping up a shaky, inept central
government while pampering the military establishment that is working to
undermine the civilians in power. Despite the generous U.S. aid, the 2010
Failed States Index ranks Pakistan as the 10th most failed state on Earth.

Let’s be clear: Pakistan and Afghanistan, two artificially
created states with no roots in history that have searched endlessly for a
national identity, constitute the most dangerous region on earth. They have
emerged as the global epicenter of transnational terrorism and narcotics trade.
Additionally, Pakistan is where state-nurtured terrorism and state-reared
nuclear smuggling uniquely intersect.

Yet, as if the forces of terror can be boxed in, the U.S. is
now scaling back its objective to regionally contain rather than defeat
terrorism — a strategy that promises to keep the Af-Pak problem as a festering
threat to global security.

Given that this region has become ungovernable
and borderless, it seems pointless to treat the existing political frontiers of
Afghanistan and Pakistan as sacrosanct when the Af-Pak fusion term itself
implies the two are no longer separate entities. The time has come to start
debating what kind of a new political order in the Hindu-Kush region could
create stable, moderate, governable and ethnically more harmonious states.
Accepting the de facto partition of Afghanistan can serve as a first step in
that direction.

China now exports its convicts

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HUMAN RIGHTS

CHELLANEY: China’s latest export innovation?

Send your convicts overseas

The Washington Times

By Brahma Chellaney

7:58 p.m., Tuesday, July 6, 2010

Illustration: Chinese labor by Alexander Hunter for The Washington Times

 

       

Relieving pressure on overcrowded national prisons by employing convicts as laborers at Chinese-run projects in the developing world is a novel strategy China has adopted – an approach that is certain to create a new backlash against Chinese businesses overseas in addition to highlighting the country’s egregious human-rights record.

China executes three times as many people every year as the rest of the world combined, according to Amnesty International, which in 2008 estimated that "on average China secretly executes around 22 prisoners every day."

China has evolved in important ways as a result of its economic "opening," with the new social pluralism prompting the state to cut back on totalitarian practices. Yet, with its Soviet-style autocratic structure intact, there is little space for political pluralism. Those who challenge government policies or practices or stage demonstrations against official highhandedness risk long imprisonment.

The forced dispatch of prisoners to work on overseas infrastructure projects raises new issues regarding China‘s human-rights record.

Thousands of Chinese convicts, for example, have been pressed into service in projects by state-run Chinese companies in Sri Lanka, a strategically important country for China, which is seeking a role in the Indian Ocean. Sri Lanka sits astride vital sea lanes of communication.China – in return for being allowed to make strategic inroads – providedSri Lanka offensive weapon systems that helped end the long civil war on that island nation. Now, Beijing is being rewarded with port-building, railroads and other infrastructure projects.

Chinese convicts also have been taken to a microstate in the Indian Ocean, the Maldives, where the Chinese government is building 4,000 houses on several different islands as a government-to-government "gift" to win influence there. So far, however, Beijing has failed to persuade the president of the archipelago of 330,000 people to lease it one of the 700 uninhabited Maldivian islands for setting up a small base for its navy.

The Chinese practice in overseas projects, including in Africa, is to keep the number of local workers to the minimum and to bring in much of the workforce from China. The novel twist is that some batches of laborers now being brought in are made up of convicts "freed" on parole for project-related overseas work.

The convict laborers, like the rest of the Chinese workforce, are housed near the project site. The Chinese logic is that if any convict worker escaped, it would be easy to find the runaway in an alien setting.

Chinese firms actually bring in more than just convict laborers and other workers at overseas projects. To help boost Chinese exports, they get all equipment, steel, cement and other construction material from China.

Such practices run counter to the Chinese commerce ministry’s August 2006 regulations – promulgated in response to the backlash against Chinese businesses in Zambia following the death of 51 Zambian workers in an explosion at a Chinese-owned copper mine – that called for "localization," including hiring local workers, respecting local customs and adhering to safety norms. During an eight-nation 2007 African tour, President Hu Jintao made a special point of meeting with Chinese businesses to stress the importance of corporate responsibility in their dealings at the local level.

Earlier, in October 2006, the State Council – China’s Cabinet – issued nine directives that Chinese businesses overseas, among other things, "pay attention to environmental protection," "support local community and people’s livelihood" and "preserve China‘s good image and its good corporate reputation."

Chinese domestic regulations, however, are sometimes promulgated to blunt external criticism, rather than actually be enforced, except when a case attracts international attention.

For example, China enacted an environmental-impact assessment law in 2003, which was followed up in 2008 with "provisional measures" to permit public participation in such environmental assessments. Yet it remains more zealous about promoting exports and economic growth at home than in protecting its air and water.

Similarly, despite the State Council’s 2006 nine good-conduct directives to Chinese companies engaged in overseas operations, the government and corporate priority still is to boost exports aggressively, even if such a push results in environmental and social costs for local communities. Indeed, as part of the government‘s "going global" policy, Chinese companies are offered major incentives and rewards for bagging overseas contracts and boosting exports.

The use of convict laborers adds a disturbing new dimension to the "going global" strategy, which was first unveiled in 2001.

As it is, some Chinese projects, especially dam-building schemes, have been embroiled in disputes with local communities in several countries, including in Botswana, Burma, Pakistan, Ghana and Sudan. In fact, several small bombs went off less than three months ago at the site of Burma’s Myitsone Dam, whose construction by a Chinese company in the insurgency-torn, northernmost Kachin state is displacing thousands of subsistence farmers and fishermen by flooding a wide swath of land.

China is not only the world leader in building dams at home but also the top dam exporter. It has no qualms about building dams in disputed territories like Pakistan-held Kashmir, in areas torn by ethnic separatism or in other human rights-abusing countries. But its use of convict laborers at dams and other infrastructure projects will create new rifts with local communities.

China‘s declaratory policy of ”non-interference in domestic affairs” serves as a virtual license to pursue projects that benefit governments known to repress their citizens. For example, in Sudan, where China has emerged as the principal backer of a regime accused of committing genocide in the arid western region of Darfur, 13 of the 15 largest foreign companies operating are Chinese, with Beijing making huge investments in the Sudanese economy – from hydropower to oil. It also has sold hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of weapons, including tanks and fighter-jets, to help prop up President Omar Hassan Ahmed Bashir, wanted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes in Darfur.

Chinese companies on their own cannot get prisoners released in thousands, let alone to secure passports and exit permits for them. It is obvious that the controversial practice of pressing convicts into service at overseas projects has been instituted by the Chinese government.

Until Beijing’s treatment of its own citizens and those of other countries is guided by respect for basic human rights and the rule of law, China is unlikely to command respect on the world stage.

Brahma Chellaney is the author of Asian Juggernaut (HarperCollins, 2010).

© Copyright 2010 The Washington Times, LLC. Click here for reprint permission.

India plays into China’s hands by staying engaged in useless border talks

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Clueless  on  China

 

Brahma Chellaney

The Sunday Guardian, July 4, 2010

 

Yet another round of India-China border talks is under way in Beijing. The unending and fruitless talks on territorial disputes underscore the eroding utility of this process. It is approaching three decades since China and India began these negotiations. In this period, the world has changed fundamentally. Indeed, with its rapidly accumulating military and economic power, China itself has emerged as a great power in the making, with Washington’s Asia policy now manifestly Sino-centric. Not only has India allowed its military and nuclear asymmetry with China to grow, but also New Delhi’s room for diplomatic maneuver is shrinking.

 

Power asymmetry in interstate relations does not mean the weaker side must bend to the dictates of the stronger or seek to propitiate it. Wise strategy, coupled with good diplomacy, is the art of offsetting or neutralizing military or economic power imbalance with another state.

But by staying engaged in the useless border talks, knowing fully well that Beijing has no intent to settle the territorial issues, India plays into China’s hands. The longer the process of border talks continues, the greater the space Beijing will have to mount strategic pressure on India and the greater its leverage in the negotiations. After all, China already holds the military advantage on the ground. Its forces control the heights along the long 4,057-kilometer Himalayan frontier, with the Indian troops perched largely on the lower levels. Furthermore, by building new railroads, airports and highways in Tibet, China is now in a position to rapidly move additional forces to the border to potentially strike at India at a time of its choosing.

 

Diplomatically, China is a contented party, having occupied what it wanted — the Aksai Chin plateau, which is almost the size of Switzerland and provides the only accessible Tibet-Xinjiang route through the Karakoram passes of the Kunlun Mountains. Yet it chooses to press claims on additional Indian territories as part of a grand strategy to gain leverage in bilateral relations and, more importantly, to keep India under military and diplomatic pressure.

 

At the core of its strategy is an apparent resolve to indefinitely hold off on a border settlement with India through an overt refusal to accept the territorial status quo. In not hiding its intent to further redraw the Himalayan frontiers, Beijing only helps highlight the futility of the ongoing process of political negotiations. After all, the territorial status quo can be changed not through political talks but by further military conquest. Yet, paradoxically, the political process remains important for Beijing to provide the façade of engagement behind which to seek India’s containment.

 

Keeping India engaged in endless talks is a key Chinese objective so that Beijing can continue its work on changing the Himalayan balance decisively in its favor through a greater build-up of military power and logistical capabilities. That is why China has sought to shield the negotiating process from the perceptible hardening of its stance toward New Delhi and the vituperative attacks against India in its state-run media. Add to the picture the aggressive patrolling of the Himalayan frontier by the People’s Liberation Army and the growing Chinese incursions across the line of control.

 

Over the decades, the Chinese negotiating tactics have shifted markedly. Beijing originally floated the swap idea — giving up its claims in India’s northeast in return for Indian acceptance of the Chinese control over a part of Ladakh — to legalize its occupation of Aksai Chin. It then sang the mantra of putting the territorial disputes on the backburner so that the two countries could concentrate on building close, mutually beneficial relations. But in more recent years, in keeping with its rising strength, China has escalated border tensions and military incursions while assertively laying claim to Arunachal Pradesh.

 

The present border negotiations have been going on continuously since 1981, making them already the longest and the most-barren process between any two countries in modern history. The record includes eight rounds of senior-level talks between 1981 and 1987, and14 Joint Working Group meetings between 1988 and 2002. The latest discussions constitute the 14th round of talks between the designated Special Representatives since 2003. 

 

The authoritative People’s Daily — the Communist Party mouthpiece that reflects official thinking — made it clear in a June 11, 2009 editorial: “China won’t make any compromises in its border disputes with India.” That reflects the Chinese position in the negotiations. But even when Beijing advertises its uncompromising stance, New Delhi refuses to heed the message.

 

What does India gain by staying put in an interminably barren negotiating process with China? By persisting with this process, isn’t India aiding the Chinese engagement-with-containment strategy by providing Beijing the cover it needs? While Beijing’s strategy and tactics are apparent, India has had difficulty to define a game-plan and resolutely pursue clearly laid-out objectives. Still, staying put in a barren process cannot be an end in itself for India.

 

India indeed has retreated to an increasingly defensive position territorially, with the spotlight now on China’s Tibet-linked claim to Arunachal Pradesh than on Tibet’s status itself. Now you know why Beijing invested so much political capital over the years in getting India to gradually accept Tibet as part of the territory of the People’s Republic. Its success on that score has helped narrow the dispute to what it claims. That neatly meshes with China’s long-standing negotiating stance: What it occupies is Chinese territory, and what it claims must be on the table to be settled on the basis of give-and-take — or as it puts it in reasonably sounding terms, on the basis of “mutual accommodation and mutual understanding.”

 

As a result, India has been left in the unenviable position of having to fend off Chinese territorial demands. In fact, history is in danger of repeating itself as India gets sucked into a 1950s-style trap. The issue then was Aksai Chin; the issue now is Arunachal. But rather than put the focus on the source of China’s claim — Tibet — and Beijing’s attempt to territorially enlarge its Tibet annexation to what it calls “southern Tibet,” India is willing to be taken ad infinitum around the mulberry bush. Just because New Delhi has accepted Tibet to be part of China should not prevent it from gently shining a spotlight on Tibet as the lingering core issue.

 

Yet India’s long record of political diffidence only emboldens Beijing. India accepted the Chinese annexation of Tibet and surrendered its own British-inherited extraterritorial rights over Tibet on a silver platter without asking for anything in return. Now, China wants India to display the same “amicable spirit” and hand over to it at least the Tawang valley.