Troubling China-India Ties

A Tibetan woman in traditional costume

The already fraught China-India relationship appears headed for more turbulent times as a result of the two giants’ failure to make progress on resolving any of the issues that divide them. Earlier this month, during the first visit in more than four years of a Chinese leader to India, the two sides decided to kick all contentious issues down the road. Instead, Premier Wen Jiabao and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh agreed to expand bilateral trade by two-thirds over the next five years.

But the trade relationship is anything but flattering for India, which is largely exporting primary commodities to China and importing finished products, as if it were the raw-material appendage of a neocolonial Chinese economy. To make matters worse, India confronts a ballooning trade deficit with China and the dumping of Chinese goods that is systematically killing local manufacturing.

The focus on trade even as political disputes fester only plays into the Chinese agenda to gain bigger commercial benefits in India while being free to inflict greater strategic wounds on that country.

India-China relations have entered a particularly frosty spell, with New Delhi’s warming relationship with Washington emboldening Beijing to up the ante through border provocations, resurrection of its long-dormant claim to the northeastern Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh, and diplomatic needling. After initially seeking greater cooperation to help dissuade New Delhi from moving closer to the U.S., Beijing shifted to a more-coercive approach following the mid-2005 U.S.-India defense framework agreement and nuclear deal.

Last year relations sank to their lowest political point in more than two decades when Beijing unleashed a psychological war, employing its state-run media and nationalistic Web sites to warn of another armed conflict. The coarse rhetoric of the period leading up to the 1962 Chinese military attack also returned, with the Chinese Communist Party’s broadsheet, People’s Daily, for example, berating India for “recklessness and arrogance” and asking it to weigh “the consequences of a potential confrontation with China.”

Since then, Beijing has picked territorial fights with other neighbors as well, kindling fears of an expansionist China across Asia.

The only area where India-China relations have thrived is commerce. But the rapidly growing trade, far from helping to turn the page on old rifts, has been accompanied by greater Sino-Indian geopolitical rivalry and military tensions, resulting in India beefing up defenses. Tibet remains at the core of the Sino-Indian divide. While Chinese damming of international rivers has helped link water with land disputes, the 30-year-long negotiations to settle territorial feuds have hit a wall and gone off on a tangent.

Little surprise a 20-fold increase in trade in the past decade to $60 billion has yielded a more muscular Chinese policy. In fact, the more China’s trade surplus with India has swelled — jumping from $2 billion in 2002 to almost $20 billion this year — the greater has been its condescension toward India.

Trade in today’s market-driven world is not constrained by political disputes or even strained ties, unless artificial political barriers have been erected, such as through sanctions. The China-India relations actually demonstrate that booming trade is no guarantee of moderation or restraint between states. Unless estranged neighbors fix their political relations, economics alone will not be enough to create good will or stabilize their relationship.

Yet ignoring that lesson, China and India have left their political rows to future diplomacy to clear up, with Wen bluntly stating that sorting out the border disputes “will take a fairly long period of time.” On the eve of his visit, Zhang Yan, the Chinese ambassador to India, publicly acknowledged that, “China-India relations are very fragile and very easy to be damaged and very difficult to repair.”

Even as old rifts remain, new issues are roiling relations, including Chinese strategic projects and military presence in Pakistani-held Kashmir and a new policy by China (which occupies one-fifth of the original princely state of Jammu and Kashmir) to depict the Indian-administered portion of that state as de facto independent. It thus has been issuing visas to residents there on a separate leaf, not on their Indian passport. It also has stopped counting its 1,600-km border with Indian Kashmir as part of the frontier it shares with India.

In less than five years, China has gone from reviving the Arunachal Pradesh card to honing the Kashmir card against India. Thanks to China’s growing strategic footprint in Pakistani-held Kashmir, India now faces Chinese troops on both flanks of its portion of Kashmir. Indeed, the deepening China-Pakistan nexus presents India with a two-front theater in the event of a war with either country.

China is unwilling to accept the territorial status quo, or enter into a river waters-sharing treaty as India has done with downriver Bangladesh and Pakistan. Yet it wants to focus relations increasingly on commerce, even pushing for a free-trade agreement. With the Western and Japanese markets racked by economic troubles, the Chinese export juggernaut needs a larger market share in India, the world’s second fastest-growing economy.

But the current lopsided trade pattern — presenting a rising India as an African-style raw material source — is just not sustainable. China’s proven iron-ore deposits, according to various international estimates, are more than 2 1/2 times that of India. Yet China is conserving its own reserves and importing iron ore in a major way from India, to which, in return, it exports value-added steel products. As India ramps up its own steel-producing capacity over the next five years, China will have dwindling access to Indian iron ore.

At present, China maintains nontrade barriers and other mechanisms that keep out higher-value Indian exports, such as information technology and pharmaceutical products; it exports to India double of what it imports in value; it continues to blithely undercut Indian manufacturing despite a record number of antidumping cases against it by India in the World Trade Organization; and its foreign direct investment in India is so minuscule ($52 million in the past decade) as to be undetectable. Such ties amount to lose-lose for India and win-win for China.

As if to underline that such unequal commerce cannot override political concerns, India has refused to reaffirm its support for Beijing’s sovereignty over Tibet and Taiwan. India had been periodically renewing its commitment to a “one China” policy, even as Beijing not only declined to make a reciprocal one-India pledge. But in a sign of the growing strains in ties, Wen left for his country’s “all-weather” ally, Pakistan, with a joint communique in which India’s one-China commitment was conspicuously missing.

Growing Chinese provocations have left New Delhi with little choice but to play hardball with Beijing.

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

 The Japan Times: Wednesday, Dec. 29, 2010

Perils of becoming a republic of scandals

Corruption, the No. 1 national-security threat, is eating into the vitals of the state, enfeebling internal security and crimping foreign policy

Brahma Chellaney

The Hindu newspaper, December 7, 2010

India confronts several pressing national-security challenges. But only one of them — political corruption — poses an existential threat to the Indian state, which in reality has degenerated into a republic of mega-scandals. The pervasive misuse of public office for private gain is an evil eating into the vitals of the state, sapping India’s strength. When important decisions, from arms procurement to policy changes, are often tainted by corrupt considerations, it is inevitable that national security will get compromised.  If India today is widely seen as a soft state, much of the blame must be pinned on the corrupt and the compromised that lead it. Such ‘softening’ of India has made the country a tempting target for those seeking to undermine its security.

India’s situation is best explained by an ancient proverb, “A fish rots from the head down.” When the head is putrid, the body politic cannot be healthy. And when those at the helm remain wedded to grand corruption, clerks or traffic police cannot be singled out for taking small bribes. In fact, it is the self-perpetuating cycle of corruption at all government levels — federal, state and local — that has turned internal security into India’s Achilles’ heel. As the then chief justice of India pointed out last year, the plastic explosives employed in the deadly 1993 Bombay bombings were smuggled into the country due to local corrupt practices.

But it is the institutionalized corruption in high office that is eviscerating the Indian republic. When domestic policy is seriously stained by corruption, foreign policy can hardly be dynamic and proactive.

Such is the weakening of the state that India did a better job warding off regional-security threats when it was economically weak — like during Indira Gandhi’s reign — than it is able to do today, despite nearly two decades of impressive GDP growth. Economic liberalization, paradoxically, has whetted personal greed and brought in an era of big-bucks corruption, even as a system of arbitrary environmental stoppages and clearances has taken the place of the old “license-permit raj.”

India now is witnessing not mere corruption but national plunder. The consequence is that India is getting feebler institutionally. Yet scandals remain so recurrent that public ire with any malfeasance is short-lived. Indeed, one strategy often employed to ease public anger over revelations of a new mega-scandal is to start targeting second-tier corruption selectively. The misuse of government agencies remains rampant.

Corruption scandals now actually resemble television soaps, with engrossing but diversionary plots. To deflect public attention, the focus in the immediate aftermath is always on government processes related to probing a scandal, not on opening judicial paths to identify the real beneficiaries and quickly recover the loot. The latest scandal over the government’s second-generation allotment of telecom spectrum in 2008 falls in the same category, although the putative loss to the national treasury has been estimated at $39 billion, or 14.3 percent of India’s total current external debt. The sheer scale of this kickback scandal indicates that multiple political interests must have had a hand in the till. If there is any good news, it is the belated appointment of a clean professional as the telecom minister.

Make no mistake: The spiriting away of billions of dollars to international financial safe havens constitutes more than criminal wrongdoing. When economic contracts are signed or policy decisions taken so as to net handsome kickbacks, it constitutes a flagrant assault on national interest. India ranks among the top countries whose stolen national wealth is stashed in Swiss bank accounts. Yet no Indian politician has ever been convicted and hanged for waging such war on the state.

Let’s be clear: Corruption stalls development, undermines social progress, undercuts the confidence of citizens in the fairness and impartiality of public administration, impedes good governance, erodes the rule of law, distorts competitive conditions in business transactions, discourages domestic and foreign investment, fosters a black-market economy, and raises new security threats. In sum, corruption obstructs a country from realizing its goals and undercuts national security.

The cancer of corruption in India has alarmingly spread to elements within the two institutions that are central to the country’s future — the judiciary and the armed forces. Recent revelations have highlighted the deep corporate penetration of the major political parties and the manner big business influences policymaking and media coverage. The rot in the media — the nation’s supposed watchdog — stands exposed.  Even the integrity of national awards has been badly vitiated, with a Padma award no longer a badge of honour to flaunt.

But nothing illustrates the corrosive effects of the culture of corruption better than the palpable decay of state capacity. India’s economic dynamism is rooted in its private sector-led growth. But in stark contrast to China, India does poorly wherever the state is involved. The deterioration of the state is the principal constraint on India’s ability to secure its interests. That underscores the national-security costs of widespread corruption.

Today, a self-advertised “incredible India” has no articulated national-security strategy, or a defined defence policy, or a declared counterterrorism doctrine, yet it is the world’s only large country dependent on other powers to meet basic defence needs. Instead of seeking to build a first-rate military with strategic reach and an independent deterrent, India has allowed itself to become a money-spinning dumping ground for weapons it can do without. As a result, India has emerged as the world’s top arms importer in the past decade, even as its capacity to decisively win a war erodes.

The defence of India indeed has turned into an unending scandal. Even indictments by the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) have made little difference to the manner arms continue to be procured from overseas. Such imports, often clinched without transparency or open bidding, are a major source of political corruption.

India shows that the more corrupt a system, the greater is its corrupting power. A corrupt system quickly corrupts those who enter it, fixating them on the lure of kickbacks and on amassing pelf. Such metastasizing corruption cannot be controlled simply through public funding of political parties. After all, much of the big-bucks corruption is designed to line one’s own pockets, with no seeming limit to personal greed.  In fact, the series of scandals during the Atal Bihari Vajpayee-led government — from bribery-influenced arms imports and $1-billion urea contract with Oman to the loss of hundreds of millions of dollars to the state in allowing private mobile telephone operators to switch from fixed license fees to revenue sharing — served as a reminder of the growing concentration of powers in a few hands and the consequent disdain for integrated, holistic policymaking.

As in other national-security challenges, the principal causes of rampant corruption are leadership deficit and governance deficit. The only way corruption can be contained is through integrity of leadership; improved governance; measures to ensure fiscal transparency; strengthened anti-bribery enforcement; government accountability; and active public involvement. The independence of investigative agencies is a prerequisite to developing an anti-corruption culture in politics and business. Yet in India, these agencies are controlled by those whom they are supposed to keep in check or investigate when a scandal unfolds.

With corruption, nepotism and cronyism now endemic, Indian politics has become the safe, fast track to wealth. India freed itself from British colonialism only to come in the grip of an indigenous political class ruling the country on colonial-style principles and still functioning from colonial-era structures. It may take a second war of independence for India to gain true freedom from exploitation and pillage.

Brahma Chellaney is the author, most recently, of “Asian Juggernaut” (HarperCollins USA, 2010).

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?

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 14^th 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.