Defending against martial arts

After Arunachal Pradesh, China is testing Indian defences in Sikkim

Brahma Chellaney

Hindustan Times, June 6, 2008

After Arunachal Pradesh, Sikkim has become a symbol of China’s hardening stance on territorial disputes with India. The only portion of the 4,057-kilometre Himalayan frontier with India that Beijing accepts as settled is the small 206-kilometre Sikkim-Tibet border, defined by the 1890 Anglo-Sikkim Convention. Yet, that has not prevented China from seeking to drag Sikkim into its boundary disputes with India. Consider the following developments:

One, Chinese forces last November destroyed some makeshift Indian army bunkers near Doka La, at the Sikkim-Bhutan-Tibet trijunction. Two, China now has laid claim to the “Finger Area”, a 2.1-square-kilometre tract that protrudes like a finger over the Sora Funnel valley, at Sikkim’s northernmost tip. Three, it has coupled a threat to destroy the Finger Area’s stone demarcations with a surge in cross-border forays. And four, it has objected to India’s move to beef up defences in the vulnerable Siliguri Corridor — the chicken neck that connects mainland India with the northeast.

Leverage, not soundness or legitimacy, has always defined China’s claims. Take the 1914 McMahon Line, which set the border between the then-independent Tibet and the northeastern stretch of the British Indian Empire extending into Burma. Beijing has accepted the McMahon Line with Burma but not with India, finding it more profitable to rail against that colonial-era line. While playing the Tibet card against India by laying claim to Arunachal on the basis of its putative historical ties to Tibet, China has employed its non-recognition of the McMahon Line to deter New Delhi from utilizing the Tibet card against it.

Before Sikkim merged with the Indian Union in 1975, Beijing had publicly accepted the 19th-century border line between Sikkim and Tibet. That is how Beijing got saddled with contradictory positions: rejection of the McMahon Line with India as a colonial imposition but acceptance of the Anglo-Sikkim Convention of older colonial vintage, even though the convention had been imposed on the Manchu Qing dynasty when it was unravelling. But given its revisionist craving against a status-quoist India, China is not the one to allow any contradiction to tame its primordial territorial urge.

India’s lamb-like approach has only been grist to the Chinese leverage-building mill. From Nehru’s grudging acceptance of Chinese suzerainty on Tibet to Vajpayee’s blithe recognition of Chinese sovereignty over Tibet, India has incrementally shed its main card — Tibet — and thereby allowed the aggressor state to shift the spotlight from its annexation of Tibet and Aksai Chin to its claim on Arunachal and assertiveness on Sikkim. Not surprisingly, India has failed to persuade China to agree even to a mutually defined line of control.

Take Sikkim. It is New Delhi that turned Sikkim into a bilateral issue, arming Beijing with leverage. Although Beijing had declined to accept Sikkim’s change of status from an Indian protectorate to an Indian state, no PM until Vajpayee attempted to raise that issue with China. The Sino-Indian disputes involve large chunks of territory, while Sikkim is not only a tiny state, but also Beijing has neither laid claim to it nor disputed its boundary. So China’s insistence on ploughing a lonely furrow on Sikkim was of little consequence.

If Beijing’s depiction of Sikkim as independent was germane to any issue, it was to its own oft-thrown bait of a “package settlement” with India. Sikkim, and the trans-Karakoram tract in occupied Kashmir that Pakistan ceded to China in 1963, do not fall in any of the three Chinese-identified sectors with India — eastern, middle and western. It was to probe whether the “package settlement” idea was a diversionary ruse or a plausible proposal that Indian negotiators, from the time the ongoing border talks began way back in 1981, quietly sought clarity on China’s Sikkim stance. The steadfast Chinese refusal to enter into a discussion either on the specifics of a possible package or on the gaps, as on Sikkim, showed that the ostensible offer was little more than rhetorical bait.

India’s China policy, however, was steered into uncharted waters in June 2003, when Vajpayee visited Beijing, two months after he had reversed course on Pakistan. Desperate in the twilight of his political career to fashion a legacy as a peacemaker, Vajpayee kowtowed in Beijing. He shifted India’s long-standing position on Tibet from it being an “autonomous” region within China to it being “part of the territory” of China. He linked his Tibet concession with supposed Chinese flexibility on Sikkim. Having turned Sikkim from a non-issue into a bilateral issue, he claimed credit for beginning “the process by which Sikkim will cease to be an issue in India-China relations”.

Five years later, China is seeking to ensure Sikkim will not cease to be a bilateral issue. After all, it has got what it wanted, including the Vajpayee-initiated reopening of the ancient Tibet-Sikkim trade route. It even got Vajpayee to accept a new border-talks framework focused on the illusive “package settlement”, allowing it to renege on its commitment to present maps showing its version of the frontline. That the border talks today have run aground is no accident: the new mechanism was intended to take India round and round the mulberry bush.

India’s diplomatic naïveté can be astonishing. During Premier Wen Jiabao’s 2005 visit, one of his officials handed a new Chinese map showing Sikkim in the same colour as India. Promptly, then Foreign Secretary Shyam Saran displayed that map before the media to triumphantly claim that Beijing had “recognized” Sikkim as part of India. He was followed by Manmohan Singh, who told the Lok Sabha on April 20, 2005: “During my meeting with Premier Wen, he stated that China regarded Sikkim as an ‘inalienable part of India’, and that Sikkim was no longer an issue in India-China relations”.

But has Beijing itself made any such statement to date unequivocally recognizing Sikkim as part of India? The answer is no. The clever practitioner of diplomacy that it is, Beijing has broken the Sikkim issue into umpteen parts, doling out two morsels to get New Delhi to open trade through the strategic Nathula Pass — a one and only reference to the “Sikkim state of the Republic of India”, found in a trade-related paragraph in a 2005 joint statement; and its cessation of cartographic aggression without any formal statement recognizing Sikkim’s present status, thus leaving open the option to resume the cartographic mischief at a later date if circumstances warrant. Also, the trade-related reference to the Sikkim state of India is as empty as the 1954 Panchsheel Agreement’s reference to specific mountain passes and posts, which Nehru misconstrued as Chinese recognition of the Indo-Tibetan frontier despite Beijing saying it had signed a border-trade accord and not a border accord.

Contrast this wily approach with the callow way India has forfeited its bargaining chips. The more India has stripped itself of leverage, the more emboldened and hardline China has become. The government conceded in the Lok Sabha on April 22 that Chinese forces have stepped up “regular cross-border activities” in the past “three years”. More than three dozen Chinese forays into Sikkim alone have been reported so far this year.

Today, as China aggressively probes Indian defences in Sikkim and keeps New Delhi under psychological pressure, India ought to realize its own contribution to encouraging such assertiveness. The newly opened army memorial near Nathula to the 267 martyrs who laid down their lives defending Sikkim against attacking Chinese forces in 1958, 1962 and 1967 is also a cenotaph to India’s reluctance to learn from the past.

(c) Hindustan Times.

Stabilize A Faltering Burma

Brahma Chellaney

Asian Age, May 10, 2008

Cyclone-wracked Burma stands out as one of the world’s critically weak states that could become a transnational security problem without international stabilization efforts. Yet the tide of Western criticism its junta is facing over the cyclone-related relief operations and constitutional referendum rules out an early lifting of the sanctions against Burma. The referendum and national elections in 2010 are part of the junta’s purported seven-step “roadmap to democracy,” whose implementation within a timeframe, paradoxically, had been demanded by United Nations special envoy Ibrahim Gambari.

Burma is a significant state in size, strategic importance and natural resources. It forms the strategic nucleus between India, China and Southeast Asia. Burma is where Asia’s main regions converge — South, Southeast and East Asia. But Burma is also a corrupt, dysfunctional state, although its state machinery, run by a predatory military elite monopolizing power, appears strong enough to wage political repression at home.

Both the annual Failed States Index (FSI) by the Washington-based group, The Fund for Peace, and the Brookings Institution’s new Index of State Weakness in the Developing World list Burma among their top 20 failing states. The Berlin-based Transparency International ranks Burma as the world’s most corrupt state, along with Somalia.

Since the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the United States, it has been increasingly recognized that threats to international peace and security now emanate more and more from the world’s weakest states. Tellingly, two of the world’s critically weak states, North Korea and Pakistan, are members of the nuclear club. It has become routine for the major players to reiterate their commitment to pull critically sick nations back from the precipice of state failure.

It is that argument — to stabilize a failing state — that the Bush administration has used to pour some $11 billion in aid since 9/11 into terror-exporting Pakistan, ranked No. 33 in the Brookings’ Index of State Weakness in the Developing World. The White House now is considering throwing its weight behind Senator Joseph Biden’s call for a $2.5 billion package of additional non-military aid to Pakistan.

Can a different logic or argument be applied to Burma? Or should the stabilization of a failing state only begin when that country actually starts posing — like Pakistan — a threat to international security?

International responses to separate cases of failing states need not be cut from the same cloth because every nation’s situation tends to be different from the others. Still, the undeniable fact is that Burma represents a case of grave state corrosion, with international sanctions having had the effect, however unintended, to lower the living standards of ordinary Burmese.

Another question relates to the extent to which sanctions should be employed. Should punitive actions preclude engagement? Without the Bush administration engaging Pyongyang, to give just one example, would it have been possible to achieve the progress, however tentative it might seem at this stage, on the North Korean nuclear programme? It is nobody’s case that Burma is worse than North Korea.

Foreign trade, investment and tourism exert a liberalizing influence on a regime. External investment helps build private enterprises, boosts employment and wages, and aids civil-society development. But the US-led sanctions against Burma have sought to throttle investment and tourism flows and choke its exports, including textiles, precious gemstones and high-quality tropical hardwoods.

The military has been in power in Burma for 46 long years. But the Western penal approach toward Burma began shaping up only in the 1990s. In fact, it was not until this decade that Burma became a major target of US sanctions, reflected in the congressional passage of the 2003 Burma Freedom and Democracy Act and the enforcement of several subsequent punitive executive orders dating up to May 1, 2008.

Some U.S. measures put in place against the junta before 2003 included a ban on new investment and an American veto on any proposed loan or assistance by international financial institutions. That ban on new U.S. investments was imposed in 1997 — the same year ASEAN admitted Burma as a member. The Clinton administration could take that decision in 1997 because at that time the US had minimal trade with Burma and a total investment of only $225 million.  

Indeed, until the advent of the Bush administration, Burma was not among the key targets of sanctions, with the broadest U.S. sanctions being directed at countries identified as supporting terrorism: Cuba, Iran, Libya, North Korea, Syria and Sudan. But Bush, prodded by his wife, has made Burma key US target.

Laura Bush’s Burma activism — manifest from the unprecedented manner the first lady came to the White House briefing room this week and addressed a news conference on the cyclonic disaster in another country — is tied to the Christian fundamentalist beliefs that have long coloured her and her husband’s thinking. Her ire against a predominantly Buddhist Burma and its military, which sees itself as the upholder of the country’s unity and cultural identity, reputedly has sprung from information from some of the Christian churches that have a sizable number of ethnic-minority adherents in that country and from a meeting with a Karen rape victim.

Laura Bush’s first-ever visit to the White House briefing room was not to announce an aid package for Burma but to hurl insults at its rulers and accuse them of callousness in going ahead with the referendum. Actually, the junta has delayed the vote until May 24 in the cyclone-battered areas, where a third of the population lives. As one American newspaper columnist wrote, when a country has been “laid low by a massive natural disaster, the diplomatic thing to do is to respond with a show of compassion. Not kick ’em when they’re down.”

While the European Union has also slapped sanctions on Burma, especially after the brutal way the September 2007 monk-led protests were suppressed, the blunt fact is that no nation thus far has emulated the extent to which United States has gone in imposing penal actions. In fact, U.S. sanctions against Burma have followed a now-familiar pattern in American policy — first imposing an array of unilateral sanctions against a pariah regime, then discovering that the sanctions aren’t working and, therefore, turning to allies and partners to join in the penal campaign, and finally threatening sanctions against firms from third countries if those nations refuse to toe the U.S. line.

Interestingly, the history of Western sanctions against Burma underscores the manner the penal approach got shaped not by a cause — bringing an end to the military rule — but by the political travails of an iconic personality, Aung San Suu Kyi, the daughter of Burma’s founding father, Aung San, the Japanese-trained commander of the Burmese Independence Army.

Suu Kyi has had close ties with India since her student days. Because her mother, Khin Kyi, became Burma’s ambassador to India in 1960, Suu Kyi studied at a high school and college in New Delhi. Then, in the mid-1980s, Suu Kyi and her British husband, Michael Aris, a scholar in Tibetan and Himalayan studies, were fellows at the Indian Institute of Advanced Studies at Simla.

Burma’s present problems can be traced back to the politically cataclysmic events of 1962, when the military under General Ne Win ousted an elected government and thereafter sought to introduce autarky by cutting off the country from the rest of the world. Yet the West, not unhappy that the military had ousted a founding leader of the non-alignment movement, Prime Minister U Nu, imposed no sanctions on Burma.

More than a quarter-century later, even a bloodbath that left several thousand student-led demonstrators dead or injured in Rangoon did not invite Western sanctions. For the democratic opposition, August 8, 1998 — the day of the bloodbath — symbolized the launch of the Burmese democracy movement. Its 20th anniversary thus will be commemorated on the same day the Beijing Olympics kick off with an opening ceremony that some world leaders are threatening to boycott over China’s brutal repression in Tibet.

When the bloodbath happened, the then UK-based Suu Kyi was in Rangoon to take care of her stroke-stricken mother. Within days, she was addressing her first public meeting. Having been accidentally thrown into the vortex of national politics, Suu Kyi then went on to inspire and mould the Western punitive approach toward Burma.

The junta’s detention of her from July 1989 onward and its refusal to honour the people’s verdict in the May 1990 national elections brought Suu Kyi to the centre of world attention. She received several international awards in quick succession — the Rafto Human Rights Prize in October 1990; the European Parliament’s Sakharov Human Rights Prize in July 1991; and the Nobel Peace Prize in October 1991.

A major trigger in galvanizing international opinion was clearly the junta’s brazen refusal to cede power despite the May 1990 national elections, which gave the detained Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD) party 59 percent of the votes but 82 percent of the seats in Parliament. By keeping her in detention for nearly 13 of the past 19 years, the junta has itself contributed to building Suu Kyi as an international symbol of the Burmese struggle for political freedoms.

The personality-shaped nature of the sanctions approach can also be explained by the fact that before Suu Kyi, there was no unifying figure to challenge the military’s domination in all spheres of the state and to lead a national movement for the restoration of democracy. The Nobel Prize greatly increased her international profile and domestic clout. Western aid cut-offs and other penal actions thus began only in the period after the junta refused to honour the results of the 1990 elections.

How a personality can help shape the sanctions approach was further underlined by the way Suu Kyi’s personal rapport with U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright helped spur President Bill Clinton to reluctantly impose a ban in 1997 on new American investments to develop Burma’s resources. That ban was slapped even though international pressure, and the Clinton administration’s own intervention, had made the junta to release Suu Kyi in July 1995 after six years in house detention.

Even Laura Bush cited Suu Kyi this week to justify her Burma activism, announcing that President Bush would soon sign legislation conferring Congress’s highest civilian honour on her, just months after he had personally presented the same prize — the Congressional Gold Medal — to the Dalai Lama.

Not only has the sanctions approach been personality-driven, but also a personality hue has been put on the internal struggle in Burma. That struggle has been portrayed, simplistically, as a battle between Suu Kyi and the junta’s reclusive chairman, General Than Shwe, a fight between good and evil, and a tussle between the forces of freedom and repression. While such a portrayal is useful to draw international attention to a remote country that is peripheral to the interests of all except its neighbours, it helps obscure the complex and multifaceted realities on the ground.

Despite Suu Kyi’s central role in shining an international spotlight for 19 years on the military’s repressive rule, the grim reality is that years of tightening sanctions against Burma haven’t helped loosen the military’s grip on polity and society. If anything, the sanctions have only worsened the plight of ordinary Burmese.

Far from the people gaining political freedoms, an again-detained Suu Kyi’s personal freedom has remained an outstanding issue. While ordinary Burmese have been its main losers, the sanctions-centred approach has proven a strategic boon for China, creating much-desired space for it to expand its interests in and leverage over Burma.

In the period since the West began implementing boycotts, trade bans, aid cut-offs and other sanctions, it has seen its influence in Burma erode. Even as it has become fashionable to talk about better-targeted sanctions, the sanctions instrument, in reality, has become blunter. Sanctions were intended to help the citizens of Burma, yet today it is the ordinary people who bear the brunt of the sanctions.

Because Burma is poor, vulnerable and isolated, it only reinforces its attraction as a sanctions target. Still, Burma has proven an exceedingly difficult case on what the outside world can do, underscoring the limits of securing results through punitive pressures alone.

Building democracy in Burma is vital not only to end repression and empower the masses, but also to facilitate ethnic conciliation and integration in a much divided society that has been at war with itself since its 1948 independence. There is need for greater unity and coordination among the major democracies on adopting a pragmatic Burma strategy. A good idea would to build a concert of democracies working together on Burma, serving as a bridge between the U.S., European and Asian positions and fashioning greater coordination in policy actions.

Without a structured and more-progressive international approach, Burma will stay on the present deplorable path, with the military continuing to call the shots. As American analyst Stanley A. Weiss wrote after recently visiting Rangoon, sanctions against Burma “may feel right, but they have helped produce the wrong results. Encouraging Western investment, trade and tourism may feel wrong, but maybe — just maybe — could produce better results. That might be politically incorrect, but at least it wouldn’t be politically futile.”

In an era of a supposed global village, why deny the citizens of Burma the right to enjoy the benefits of globalization and free trade? A more dysfunctional Burma is not in the interest of anyone.

© Asian Age, 2008.

Revolution By Intimidation

Brahma Chellaney

Guest column, India Today, April 28, 2008

The Maoist victory in Nepal elections represents another setback for India in a troubled neighbourhood and calls into question the sustainability of its open-border policy.

Having helped sow the wind in Nepal, India now will reap the Maoist whirlwind. New Delhi first ceded strategic space in Nepal to outside powers and the United Nations and then, in an intimidation-plagued environment, encouraged a process that has sprung a nasty surprise.

Yet, no sooner had the Maoists triumphed in the elections than New Delhi’s after-the-fact rationalizations began.

Nepal is not just another neighbour but a symbiotically linked state with close cultural affinity and open borders with India that permit passport-free passage. The Indo-Nepal equation is deeper than between any two European Union members. Indeed, ever since the1950 Chinese annexation of Tibet eliminated the outer buffer, Nepal has served as an inner buffer between India and China.

The Maoist victory presents India with new potential challenges. It is likely to embolden other revolutionaries in the red corridor from Pashupati to Tirupati that the way to secure power is to wage unbridled violence until the established order gives in to a political and constitutional restructuring.

Equally significant is that India now will have to openly vie with China for influence in a state that had been its security preserve for more than half a century. Maoist leader Prachanda’s pledge of “equidistance between India and China” despite Nepal’s 1950 security treaty with New Delhi underscores Beijing’s gain. At a time when China is still battling a Tibetan uprising, the Nepal events arm it with additional leverage to dissuade New Delhi from playing the Tibet card.

It is karmic justice that the monarchy, which for long sought to play the China card against India, now faces extinction from the very forces — the Maoists — it initially helped rear to counter the India-friendly Nepali Congress.

The poll outcome raises the spectre that radicalization could extend from the polity to the military, as the victors seek to integrate their former fighters into the security forces. The Maoists’ stint in office, however, could help gradually defang them by making them indistinguishable from other politicians.

The new situation signals three likely developments. First, Nepal’s rocky and troubled path to democracy since 1990 is unlikely to end, with the polls marking only the newest chapter in a blemished experiment. Second, India’s relationship with Nepal is set to become more complicated, with little progress likely on addressing Indian security concerns or harnessing hydropower reserves for mutual benefit. And third, the Maoists’ hard part comes now on the twin issues of governance and Constitution framing.

Those who sought to bring about a revolution by chipping away at state institutions are being called upon to reverse state atrophy. It won’t be easy for them to embrace what the situation demands — consensus building. If anything, they are likely to make India a convenient scapegoat for their failures in office.

Despite its proverbial aversion to hard decisions, India today is left with no soft options. An open-border policy is sustainable only if India moves its security perimeter to the Nepalese frontier with Tibet. The onus must be placed on the Maoists to show through actions that the government they lead deserves sustained Indian assistance, or else these revolutionaries will take Indian aid and also damn India.

New Delhi ought not to shy away from employing the immense leverage it holds: Nepal’s topography, with mountainous terrain sliding southward into plains, shapes its economic dependence on India. The ethnic Madhesis who populate the Terai, Nepal’s food bowl, are India’s natural constituency, and that card is begging to be exercised.

The author is professor of strategic studies at the Centre for Policy Research.

The scrutiny that will accompany the 2008 Beijing Olympics could be the spur that brings change to China.

By BRAHMA CHELLANEY

Japan Times, March 27, 2008

The monk-led Tibetan uprising,
which spread across Tibet and beyond to the traditional Tibetan areas
incorporated in Han provinces, marks a turning point in communist
China’s history. It is a rude jolt to the world’s biggest and longest
surviving autocracy, highlighting the signal failure of state-driven
efforts to pacify Tibet through more than half a century of ruthless
repression, in which as many as a million Tibetans reportedly have lost
their lives.

The open backlash against the Tibetans’ economic
marginalization, the rising Han influx and the state assault on Tibetan
religion and ecology constitutes, in terms of its spread, the largest
rebellion in Tibet since 1959, when the Dalai Lama and his followers
were forced to flee to India. Even in 1989, when the last major Tibetan
uprising was suppressed through brute force, the unrest had not spread
beyond the central plateau, or what Beijing calls the Tibet Autonomous
Region. Now, the state’s intensifying brutal crackdown across the
Tibetan plateau — an area more than two-thirds the size of Western
Europe — dwarfs other international human-rights problems like Burma
and Darfur, Sudan.

Indeed, the current revolt openly challenges China’s
totalitarian system in a year when the Beijing Olympics are supposed to
showcase the autocracy’s remarkable economic achievements. It is a
defining moment for a system that has managed to entrench itself for 59
long years and yet faces gnawing questions about its ability to survive
by reconciling China’s dual paths of market capitalism and political
monocracy. The longest any autocratic system has survived in modern
history was 74 years in the Soviet Union.

The latest events have laid bare the strength of the
Tibetan grassroots resistance despite decades of oppression, including
the demolition of monasteries, the jailing of independent-minded monks
and nuns, the state’s wanton interference in the mechanics of Tibetan
Buddhism, and the forced political re-education of Tibetan youth and
monks. Tibet’s rapid Sinicization today threatens to obliterate the
Tibetan culture in ways the previous decades of repression could not.
That threat has only sharpened the Tibetan sense of identity and
yearning for freedom.

For Chinese President Hu Jintao, who owes his swift
rise to the top of the party hierarchy to his martial law crackdown in
Tibet in 1989, the chickens have come home to roost. The fresh
uprising, coinciding with Hu’s re-election as president, epitomizes the
counterproductive nature of the Hu-backed policies — from seeking to
change the demographic realities on the ground through the "Go West"
Han migration campaign, to draconian curbs on Tibetan farmland and
monastic life.

The Tibetans’ feelings of subjugation and loss have
been deepened as they have been pushed to the margins of society, with
their distinct culture being reduced to a mere showpiece to draw
tourists and boost the local economy, which benefits the Hans.

The natives also have been incensed by atheistic
China’s growing intrusion into Tibetan Buddhist affairs, as exemplified
by Beijing’s recent proclamation making itself the sole authority to
anoint lamas — traditionally a divine process to select a young boy as
a Buddha incarnation. Having captured the institution of the Panchen
Lama, the second-ranking figure in Tibetan Buddhism, Beijing is
preparing the ground to install its own puppet Dalai Lama after the
present aging incumbent passes away. So shortsighted is this approach
that the rulers in Beijing don’t realize that such a scenario will
surely radicalize Tibetan youth and kill prospect of a peaceful
settlement of the Tibet issue.

The ongoing crackdown, behind the cover of a Tibet
that has been cut off from the outside world, symbolizes what the
communist leadership itself admits is a "life and death struggle" over
Tibet. The likely further hardening of the leadership’s stance on
Tibet, as a consequence of the uprising, will only help mask a serious
challenge with wider political implications. At a minimum, the
crackdown by a regime wedded to the unbridled exercise of state power
promises to exacerbate the situation on the ground.

The muted global response thus far to the bloodletting
and arbitrary arrests in Tibet is a reflection of China’s growing
clout, underscored by its burgeoning external trade, rising military
power and unrivaled $1.5 trillion foreign-exchange reserves, largely
invested in U.S. dollar-denominated assets. Given that even the 1989
Tiananmen Square massacre did not trigger lasting international trade
sanctions, the lack of any attempt to penalize China for its continuing
human-rights violations in Tibet should not come as a surprise.

But Tibet’s future will be determined not so much by the international response as by developments within China.

After all, the only occasions in history when Tibet
was clearly part of China was under non-Han dynasties — that is, when
China itself had been conquered by outsiders: the Mongol Yuan dynasty,
from 1279 to 1368, and the Manchu Qing dynasty, from mid-17th century
onward. It was only when the Qing dynasty began to unravel at the
beginning of the 20th century that Tibet once again became an
independent political entity.

What Beijing today asserts are regions "integral" to
its territorial integrity are really imperial spoils of earlier foreign
dynastic rule in China. Yet, revisionist history under communist rule
has helped indoctrinate Chinese to think of the Yang and Qing empires
as Han, with the result that educated Chinese have come to feel a false
sense of ownership about every territory that was part of those
dynasties.

The truth is that Tibet came under direct Han rule for
the first time in history following the 1949 communist takeover in
China. Just as the politically cataclysmic developments of 1949 led to
Tibet’s loss of its independent status, it is likely to take another
momentous event in Chinese history for Tibet to regain its sovereignty.

That event could be the unraveling of the present
xenophobic dictatorship and the synthetic homogeneity it has implanted,
not just in institutional structures but also in the national thought
process. Today, the Chinese autocrats are able to fan ultranationalism
as a substitute for the waning communist ideology because the central
tenet of the communists’ political philosophy is uniformity, with Hu’s
slogan of a "harmonious society" designed to underline the theme of
conformity with the republic. The Manchu’s assimilation into Han
society and the swamping of the natives in Inner Mongolia have left
only the Tibetans and Turkic-speaking Muslim ethnic groups in Xinjiang
as the holdouts.

With 60 percent of its present landmass comprising
homelands of ethnic minorities, modern China has come a long way in
history since the time the Great Wall represented the Han empire’s
outer security perimeter.

Territorially, Han power is at its pinnacle today.
Yet, driven by self-cultivated myths, the state fuels territorial
nationalism, centered on issues like Tibet and Taiwan, and its claims
in the South and East China Seas and on India’s Arunachal Pradesh state
— nearly thrice the size of Taiwan. Few realize that China occupies
one-fifth of the original state of Jammu and Kashmir.

Tibet, however, is a reminder that attempts at
forcible assimilation can backfire. That was also the lesson from
Yugoslavia, a model of forced integration of nationalities. But once
its central autocratic structure corroded, Yugoslavia progressively but
violently fell apart. It will require a similar collapse or loosening
of the central political authority in China for Tibet to reclaim
autonomy.

Those who gloomily see the battle for Tibetan
independence as irretrievably lost forget that history has a way of
wreaking vengeance on artificially created empires. The Central Asian
states got independence on a platter, without having to wage a
struggle. Who in Central Asia had dreamed of independence in mid-1991?
Yet months later, the Soviet empire had unraveled. The Baltic states of
Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania twice lost their independence to an
expanding Russian empire, only to regain it each time due to a
cataclysmic event — World War I and the 1991 Soviet collapse.

The post-1991 flight of Russians from large parts of
Central Asia is a testament that the Sinicization of the Tibetan region
is not an unalterable process.

The Tibetan struggle, one of the longest and most
powerful resistance movements in modern world history, exposes China’s
Achilles’ heel. The reverberations from the latest bloodshed on the
land of the pacifist Tibetan Buddhist culture will be felt long after
Chinese security forces have snuffed out the last protest.

Hu knows that the Tibetan uprising has the potential
to embolden Han citizens in China to demand political freedoms — a
campaign that would sound the death knell of single-party rule. The
last time he suppressed a Tibetan revolt, his then boss, Deng Xiaoping,
had to borrow a leaf from Hu’s Tibet book to crush prodemocracy
protesters at Tiananmen Square two months later. Hundreds were slain.

This year could prove a watershed in Chinese history.
Just as the 1936 Berlin Olympics set the stage for Nazi Germany’s
collapse, the 2008 Beijing Games — communist China’s coming-out party
that has already been besmirched by the crackdown in Tibet — may be a
spur to radical change in that country.

The contours of a new geopolitical line-up in the
Asia-Pacific are becoming clearer

Differential
equations

The Hindustan Times, February 13, 2008

By Brahma Chellaney

At a time
when a qualitative
reordering of power is reshaping international equations, major players in the
Asia-Pacific are playing down the risk that contrasting political systems could
come to constitute the main geopolitical dividing line, potentially pitting a
China-led axis of autocracies against a constellation of democracies. The
refrain of the players is that pragmatism, not political values, would guide
their foreign-policy strategy. Yet the new Great Game under way plays up regime
character as a key element.

India has already faced such a values-based
geopolitical divide in its region, but singly. The Sino-Pakistan nexus against India is unique:
Never before in history has one country armed another with nuclear weapons and
missiles so as to contain a third nation with which the two share common
frontiers. Authoritarian bonds have also been employed in more recent years to
try and open a new Chinese flank against India
via Burma.

Indeed, the stated aim of the 1962 Chinese invasion — “to teach India
a lesson” — was rooted in a geopolitical divide centred on incompatible political
values. For Mao Zedong, that war was a means to humiliate and demolish India as an alternative democratic model to
totalitarian China.
The 32-day aggression, which Harvard professor Roderick MacFarquhar has dubbed "Mao’s India War", helped boost China’s image
at India’s
expense.

More
than 45 years later, the speed and scale of Asia’s economic rise is bringing
new players, including India,
into the world’s geopolitical marketplace. The eastward movement of power and
influence, once concentrated in the West, has been accompanied by a high-stakes
competition for new strategic tie-ups and greater access to resources, making
strategic stability a key concern in Asia.

In the absence of a common identity or institutional structures, one
challenge Asia faces is to develop shared
norms and values, without which no community can be built. Yet, with only 16 of
the 39 Asian countries free, according to Freedom House, creating common norms is a daunting
task, especially when some states still flout near-universal values.

A bigger Asian challenge is to banish the threat of hegemony by any single power (as Europe
has done) so that greater political understanding
and trust could be built. This challenge pits two competing
visions. On one side is the mythical ‘Middle Kingdom’
whose foreign policy seeks to make real the legend
that drives its official history — China’s
centrality in the world. Its
autocrats believe that in their calculus to make China
a “world power second to none”, gaining pre-eminence in
Asia is vital. On the other side
is the interest of many Asian nations and outside powers in a cooperative order
founded on power equilibrium. 

Ordinarily, the readiness to play by international rules
ought to matter more than regime form. But regime character often makes playing
by the rules difficult. As a new book, China’s
Great Leap, edited by Minky Worden, reveals, China won the right to host the
2008 Olympics on the plea that awarding the Games would help improve its human-rights
record. Instead, it has let loose new repression. But just as the 1936 Berlin
Olympics set the stage for Nazi Germany’s collapse, the 2008 Games could help
trigger radical change in China.

Today, Beijing’s
best friends are fellow autocracies while those seeking to forestall power
disequilibrium happen to be on the other side of the value divide. Political
values thus could easily come to define a new geopolitical divide. What may
seem implausible globally, given America’s lingering tradition of
propping up dictators in the Muslim world, is conceivable in the Asia-Pacific
theatre as a natural corollary to the present geopolitics. But for the
divergent geopolitical interests at play, the differing political values would
not matter so much. 

It was China
that took the lead in 2001 to form the Shanghai Cooperation Organization to
help unite it with the Eurasian strongmen in a geopolitical alliance. Designed
originally to bring the Central Asian nations — the so-called Stans — under the
Chinese sphere of influence, the SCO is shaping up as a potential ‘NATO of the
East’. Yet, when Australia, India, Japan
and the US last year started
the exploratory ‘Quadrilateral Initiative’, Beijing was quick to cry foul and see the
apparition of an ‘Asian NATO’. A Chinese demarche
to each Quad member followed.

Through sustained diplomatic pressure, mounted on the back of growing
economic clout, Beijing
has sought to wilt the Quad. A new opening has come with the Mandarin-speaking
Kevin Rudd being elected Australia’s
prime minister. With the Australian economic boom being driven by China’s ravenous resource imports, the previous
John Howard government wasn’t exactly enthused by the Quadrilateral Initiative,
as Beijing had already taken a dim view of Canberra’s US-backed bilateral and trilateral defence
tie-ups with Tokyo.
But the new Rudd government, as reflected in its foreign minister’s remarks
last week, is signalling a wish to turn its back on the Quad. 

Australia’s growing wariness is no different
than India’s.
After having called liberal democracy “the natural order of social and
political organization in today’s world”, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh now says the Quad “never got going”. Even the
US
has downplayed the initiative, whose real architect, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo
Abe, was driven out of office last fall. Yet, the Quad staged week-long war games
in the Bay of Bengal, roping in Singapore.

Rudd, though, is so mesmerized by his Mandarin fluency that he feels an inexorable
itch to cosy up to Beijing.
In a strange spectacle, Canberra has proclaimed
it will sell uranium to Beijing (without fail-safe
safeguards against diversion to weapons use) but not to New
Delhi, even if the Nuclear Suppliers’ Group were to carve out an
exemption for India.
The reason proffered for overturning the Howard government’s decision is that “India has not
signed the NPT”. That rationale is flawed: While the NPT carries an Article I
prohibition on transfer of nuclear military technology outside the club of five
recognized nuclear powers, its state-parties are actually enjoined by Article
IV to pursue peaceful nuclear cooperation with all countries. 

If Rudd has read the NPT, it probably was a Chinese translation, because
there is nothing in its official text that forbids civil cooperation under
safeguards with a non-signatory. But why blame Canberra for trotting out an indefensible
excuse when the Indian foreign minister is smitten by the same myth? Pranab
Mukherjee told Parliament in December that the Hyde Act was passed because “the
US
cannot enter into any civilian
nuclear cooperation with any country which is not a signatory to the NPT”.
Unknown to the minister, US
law does not condition cooperation to NPT membership.

The Quad was never intended to be a formal institution, although John
McCain has vowed to institutionalize it as US president. Founded on the
historically valid hypothesis of democratic peace, it is supposed to serve as
an initial framework to promote security dialogue and interlinked partnerships
among an expanding group of Pacific Rim
democracies. Such collaboration is already being built. As an idea, the Quad will
not only survive the current vicissitudes, but it also foreshadows the likely
geopolitical line-up in the years ahead. For India,
close strategic cooperation with Quad members plus Russia holds the key to Asian peace
and stability.                                                                 

© Hindustan Times, 2008
http://www.hindustantimes.com/StoryPage/StoryPage.aspx?id=2fb04386-d250-4d29-802c-1bc1f82c0ab5

Mixed Signals

Brahma Chellaney

DNA newspaper, February 6, 2008

http://www.dnaindia.com/report.asp?newsid=1149345 

The periodic summit meetings between India and China are deceptively all sweetness
and light. During Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s recent visit, there was no
forward meeting on any contentious issue, but the accent was on the positive.
That should surprise no one. Although
the underlying wariness and suspicions remain, the two giants, for
different reasons, feel the need to publicly play down the competitive dynamics of their
relationship and emphasize cooperation.

           Yet, the
conciliatory words that come out from the bilateral summitry are a poor
substitute to the glaring lack of progress on the issues that divide IndiaChina, like the territorial
disputes. If anything, the rhetoric at times is a painful reminder of the empty
slogans of the 1950s that helped blind India
to China’s furtive
territorial encroachments and subsequent surprise invasion in 1962, which Jawaharlal
Nehru characterized as Beijing’s
return of “evil for good”.

   The wounds of that 32-day war have
been kept open by Beijing’s assertive claims to Indian
areas, even as it holds on to the territorial gains
of that conflict. China’s
unwillingness to settle the border
dispute on the basis of the status quo has drawn further strength from then Prime
Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s 2003 recognition of Tibet
as “part of the territory of the People’s Republic of China”.
Emboldened by that recognition, which stripped India
of diplomatic leverage, Beijing has become
publicly assertive on its claim to Arunachal Pradesh, a state more than twice
the size of Taiwan.
Now it insists that India
cede at least the Tawang valley
— a critical corridor between Lhasa and Assam of immense military import because it
overlooks the chicken-neck that connects India with its northeast.

            In that
light, Dr. Singh has done well to visit Arunachal, becoming the first PM in 12 years to tour that isolated but strategically located state. But he would
have strengthened his hands had he visited Arunachal, “the land of the rising
sun”, before going to Beijing,
rather than upon his return. Also, instead of having omitted Tawang from his
tour of Arunachal, the PM ought to have made a stop there to send out a needed
signal to Beijing. 

            Employing
the doctrine of incremental territorial annexation, Beijing
has laid claim to Tawang on the basis of that area’s putative historical ties
to Tibet.
By 1951, China had fully
occupied the Tibetan plateau, yet no Chinese
set foot in Tawang until the invading Chinese
army in 1962 poured through the NamkhaValley,
close to the tri-junction of Tibet,
India and Bhutan. In pouring forces into Tawang, China
scoffed at India’s
contention that, in conformity with
the McMahon Line, the border in that region ran along the high Thagla Ridge.
Still, after halting its aggression, Beijing
withdrew from Tawang, as it did from the rest of Arunachal (then NEFA), while
keeping its territorial gains in Ladakh. That was in line with the punitive aim
of its aggression, which Premier
Zhou Enlai had admitted was “to teach India a lesson”.

Significantly, Dr. Singh is the
first Indian PM to return from Beijing without
making any unwarranted reference to Tibet to please his hosts. The ‘T’
word is conspicuously missing from the joint communiqué — a key point the media
failed to catch. Contrast that with the last joint communiqué issued when
President Hu Jintao visited New Delhi: “The Indian side
reiterates that it has recognized the Tibet Autonomous Region as part of the
territory of the People’s Republic of China, and that it does not
allow Tibetans to engage in anti-China political activities in
India.
The Chinese side expresses its
appreciation for the Indian position”.

The only way India can build counter-leverage against Beijing
is to gently shine a spotlight on the Tibet
issue and China’s
failure to grant promised autonomy to the Tibetans. This can be done by India in a way that is neither provocative nor
confrontational. New Delhi ought to make the point
that China’s security will be
enhanced if it reached out to Tibetans and concluded a deal that helped bring back the Dalai Lama from his long exile in India.

          A first step for India to help reclaim leverage and stop being
overtly defensive is to cease gratuitously referring to Tibet as part of China. In doing just that, Dr.
Singh has shown good judgement. He even sent the foreign secretary to
Dharamsala last Sunday to brief the Dalai Lama on his Beijing discussions. That the Dalai Lama
remains an invaluable asset for India
can be seen from his public repudiation of China’s
claim that Arunachal, including Tawang, were traditionally part of Tibet. 

The writer is a strategic affairs expert.

© DNA, 2008