Category Archives: Diplomacy

India’s “graduated” approach to talks with Pakistan

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Can’t Take Eyes Off Reality

Brahma Chellaney

The Economic Times, February 26, 1010

NORMALLY, diplomatic talks between any two neighbouring countries should be routine. But with the Pakistani military establishment continuing to sponsor crossborder terrorism in India behind a nuclear shield — a situation unparalleled in the world — Indo-Pakistan talks are anything but normal.

The renewed talks between the Indian and Pakistani foreign secretaries have attracted attention for eight reasons. The first reason is the U-turn in Indian policy. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had said “some Pakistani official agencies must have supported” the November 2008 Mumbai terror attacks. His surprise decision to renew talks was greeted in Pakistan as a major diplomatic climbdown by India.

A second reason is that the shift in the Indian position occurred without the government so much as offering a reasoned explanation to the public for the switch. Indeed, the shift occurred at a time when, as the PM has admitted, the level of crossborder infiltration by terrorists is increasing.

A third reason is a disturbing one: No sooner had India announced its decision to resume talks with Pakistan than a major terrorist strike in Pune happened. And a day after the foreign secretaries met in New Delhi, terrorists killed nine Indians, including two army doctors, in an attack on two Kabul guesthouses. That attack is believed to be the handiwork of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency, which earlier was behind the July 2008 bombing of the Indian Embassy in Kabul.

What the Pune and Kabul attacks highlight was that when Pakistan is kept under pressure, with the threat of Indian retaliation hanging like a sword over its head, it is able to rein in terrorist elements and prevent any terror attack occurring in India. But the moment the pressure is lifted against it and an air of triumphalism begins to reign in Islamabad, terrorist attacks against Indian targets are orchestrated, breaking a 14-month lull. Yet Prime Minister Manmohan Singh says, “There is no alternative to dialogue to resolve the issues that divide us.”

This proves that the terrorist elements, far from being autonomous, are very much under the control of the Pakistani military establishment, which is able to use them at will.

The fourth reason is that the Indian decision seemed designed to aid America’s Af-Pak strategy. The publicly acknowledged U.S. strategy to reconcile with the Pakistan-backed Afghan Taliban has only increased U.S. reliance on the Pakistani military and intelligence. That strategy indeed received international imprimatur at the London conference.

At a critical time when the U.S. is seeking greater Pakistani military and intelligence assistance to build pressure on the Afghan Taliban commanders and bring them to the negotiating table, Washington has advised New Delhi to lend a helping hand by placating Islamabad through a resumption of talks.

As the top U.S. military commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, has admitted, the aim of the American military surge is to bring the Afghan Taliban to the negotiating table, not to beat back the insurgency. The “surge first, then negotiate” U.S. strategy seeks to strike a political deal with the enemy from a position of strength.

For the talks with the Afghan Taliban to be successful, the U.S. intends to squeeze the Taliban first. Towards that end, the U.S. military’s ongoing Marjah offensive in Afghanistan represents a show of force.

After persuading the Indians to agree to resume talks with Islamabad, the U.S. not only launched the Marjah offensive, but also got Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) to assist in the “capture” of several Afghan Taliban leaders. They include Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, the Afghan Taliban’s alleged operations chief; Mullah Abdul Kabir, a deputy prime minister in the former Taliban regime; Mullah Abdul Salam, an alleged Taliban shadow governor for Afghanistan’s Kunduz province; and Mullah Mohammad of Baghlan province.

The stage-managed arrests of these mullahs from Pakistani cities, including Karachi and Nowshera, showed that Afghan Taliban leaders are operating from urban centres in the heartland of Pakistan, not from mountain caves along the Af-Pak frontier.

A fifth reason is that India has not only dovetailed its Pakistan policy to America’s Af-Pak strategy, but also outsourced it to Washington. Instead of applying direct leverage against Pakistan, India is depending on the U.S. to lean on Islamabad.

India has been loath to use economic and security levers against Pakistan. Its decision to resume talks with Pakistan shows it also is reluctant to employ the diplomatic card.

Yet Indian reliance on the U.S. carries high risk. After all, American policy in southern Asia is being driven by narrow, politically expedient considerations, as illustrated by the manner the Obama administration is propping up Pakistan through generous aid and lethal-arms transfers. As U.S. ex-senator, Larry Pressler, has warned, “When the U.S. leaves Afghanistan, India will have a Pakistan ‘on steroids’ next door and a Taliban state to deal with in Afghanistan.”

The sixth reason is that the Indian government has sought to pull the wool over the eyes of the Indian public by claiming that the resumed dialogue process is centred on terrorism when in reality it is about the usual issues, including Kashmir. Nothing better illustrates this than the fact that New Delhi bent backwards to arrange a meeting between the visiting Pakistani foreign secretary and Hurriyet leaders, including Syed Ali Shah Geelani. In fact, the Pakistani foreign secretary came to New Delhi for two sets of dialogue: One with the Indian government, and the other with Geelani and his fellow Hurriyet leaders. What did the Pakistani foreign secretary convey to Geelani and company? The answer: Pakistan has not given up its plans to further shrink India’s frontiers.

The seventh reason is that New Delhi is engaging not the actors that wield real power in Pakistan — the military establishment — but a civilian government that neither is responsible for the terror attacks against India nor in a position to stop them. Yet, New Delhi has begun a “graduated” process of talks with the Pakistani government, effectively giving the Pakistani military a carte blanche to continue to wage its war by terror. With External Affairs Minister S.M. Krishna telling Parliament that the foreign secretary-level talks were an “encouraging step” towards restoring full discourse, New Delhi is headed toward resuming the composite-dialogue process before long.

The eighth and final reason is that such talks only reinforce the India-Pakistan pairing when the need is for India to de-hyphenate itself from the quasi-failed, terror-exporting Pakistan, which is a crucible of extremism and fundamentalism. More than Washington it is New Delhi’s unimaginative diplomacy that is responsible for the continued India-Pakistan hyphenation internationally. 

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

India’s strategic partners

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A system of Asian partnerships

India must pursue multiple relationships that can build on each other, as the region’s balance of power changes

Brahma Chellaney

Mint newspaper, January 13, 2010

Asia today is the pivot of global geopolitical change, but its myriad challenges are playing into international strategic challenges. With the world’s fastest growing economies, fastest rising military expenditures, most volatile hot spots and the fiercest resource competition, a resurgent Asia actually holds the key to the future global order.

The reordering of power under way in Asia is apparent from several developments: China’s increasing assertiveness, underscored by a new muscular confidence and penchant for regional brinkmanship; the new Japanese government’s demand for a more equal alliance with the US and its interest in creating an East Asian community extending up to India and Australia; the sharpening China-India rivalry that has led to renewed Himalayan frontier tensions, but which New Delhi has sought to publicly muffle by cutting off all information on the border situation since last September; and the constraints in the US’ Asia policy arising from a growing interdependence with Beijing, with the Barack Obama administration’s catchphrase “strategic reassurance” signalling a US intent to be more accommodative of China’s ambitions.

Illustration: Jayachandran / Mint

Such developments are a reminder of the need for like-minded countries to help underpin the power equilibrium in Asia by forming a web of bilateral or triangular strategic partnerships that feed into each other. After all, China’s own trajectory will depend on how its neighbours and other players such as the US manage its growing power. Such management—independently and in partnership—will determine if China stays on the positive side of the ledger, without its power sliding into authoritarian arrogance.

A multi-aligned India pursuing omnidirectional cooperation for mutual benefit with key countries is best positioned to advance its interests in a fluid Asia. Advancing strategic partnerships indeed was a key issue in the summit meetings of the past two months: with Australia on 12 November; the US on 24 November; Russia on 7 December; and with Japan on 29 December.

The Indo-Australian summit resulted in a decision to elevate the relationship to a formal strategic partnership, with a new security agreement being unveiled. A close India-Australia strategic relationship is a critical link in the larger Asia-Pacific picture, given the common security interests that bind the two democracies in several spheres.

To help underline the significance of their new accord, India and Australia have agreed to “policy coordination” on Asian affairs and long-term international issues, and to work together in initiatives such as the East Asia Summit and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean) Regional Forum. They are instituting regular defence policy talks, including consultations between their national security advisers, and setting up a joint working group on counterterrorism. They also have agreed to cooperate on maritime and aviation security and participate in military exercises and other service-to-service exchanges.

In New Delhi, Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd contended disingenuously, though, that his refusal to sell India uranium is “not targeted at any individual country”—though India is the only country affected by his policy. Worse still, he proffered a specious justification—India’s non-membership in the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT). That treaty has no explicit or implicit injunction against civil nuclear cooperation with a non-signatory. Rather, it enjoins its parties to positively facilitate “the fullest possible exchange of equipment, materials and scientific and technological information for the peaceful uses of nuclear energy”, so long as safeguards are in place.

Any restriction is not in NPT but in the revised 1992 rules of the 45-nation Nuclear Suppliers Group that, paradoxically, were changed with Australian support in 2008 to exempt India. So, Canberra is likely to come round eventually to selling India uranium.

The Indo-US summit, highlighted by the first state dinner of Obama’s presidency, received intense media attention—but yielded little, partly because the US-India strategic partnership already is on a firm footing. That partnership, founded on the June 2005 defence framework accord and the July 2005 civil nuclear deal, has resulted in growing cooperation in various spheres. However, differences in some areas persist, and New Delhi is dissatisfied with US counterterrorism assistance and its tacit neutrality on the Arunachal Pradesh border issue with China.

With little room for any dramatic breakthrough, the Indo-US summit received attention either for the wrong reason (the manner three persons managed to “crash” into the White House dinner), or for being light on substance but heavy on symbolism. The state dinner, clearly, was intended to pander to India’s collective ego, which had sensed a Sino-centric tilt to US policy ever since Obama became President. But the summit’s lack of tangible result left an unwelcome impression that, while China gets respect from the US and Pakistan gets billions of dollars in annual US assistance, India gets just a sumptuous dinner.

That impression needs to be dispelled through greater cooperation on common areas of interest. The apparent crisis facing the US-Japan alliance, with some in Washington seeking to play hardball with Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama’s government, has made further progress in the US-India partnership vital for Asian strategic stability and to hedge against the danger that a more-powerful China might turn aggressive.

The third recent summit centred on Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s visit to Russia, which he had once called a “tried and tested friend” of India. Russia, with its vantage location in Eurasia and matching strategic concerns, is a natural ally of India. A robust relationship with Moscow will help New Delhi to leverage its ties with both Beijing and Washington.

In their summit declaration, Russia and India pledged to “raise their strategic partnership to the next level”. But this won’t be easy, given the three problems that plague that partnership. The first is that Indo-Russian trade, like the Indo-Japanese trade, is low, even as Sino-Russian, Sino-Indian and Sino-Japanese trade continues to gallop.

This, of course, shows that booming trade in today’s market-driven world does not necessarily connote political cosiness, and that close strategic bonds can go hand-in-hand with low trade levels. Still, the new target to boost Indo-Russian trade from $7.5 billion to $20 billion by 2015 is unlikely to be met, partly because of Russia’s own economic woes.

The second problem is the lopsided nature of the partnership, with military hardware sales and co-production constituting the dominant element. A robust partnership demands multifaceted collaboration and interdependence that can help underpin a mutual stake. The broadening of the Indo-Russian partnership also is being necessitated by India’s increasing purchases of US and Israeli arms. In 2008 alone, according to the Indian ambassador to the US, India placed orders worth a staggering $3.5 billion to buy American arms.

The third problem the partnership faces is that, for Russia, India principally is a client, even if a privileged one. A true strategic partnership has to break free from the patron-client framework—a challenge also confronting the US-India partnership. After all, the US values India more as a market for its goods and services than as a collaborator on pressing strategic issues.

As China’s immediate neighbours, India and Russia do share common concerns about that country’s rapidly accumulating power. Prime Minister Vladimir Putin famously described the Soviet collapse as the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe” of the 20th century. But by eliminating a menacing empire and opening the way for Beijing to rapidly increase strategic space globally, that event left China as the biggest beneficiary. Furthermore, Russia’s decline in the 1990s became China’s gain. Today, the Sino-Russian dissonance may not be as eye-catching as the India-China rivalry. But the Sino-Russian honeymoon has given way to suspicion and competition.

The fourth summit at the year end was like a toast to the New Year, with India and Japan unveiling an “action plan” with specific measures to implement their 2008 security agreement. Hatoyama’s visit, intended to fulfil a 2006 bilateral commitment to hold an annual summit meeting, indicated that Japan will maintain its priority on closer engagement with India, despite the sea change in Japanese politics. Hatoyama’s election was even more historic than Obama’s because his Democratic Party of Japan ousted the Liberal Democratic Party that had held power almost without interruption for more than five decades.

India’s security relationship with Japan is one of the fastest growing, with the two countries holding an annual strategic dialogue between their foreign ministers, an annual defence ministerial meeting and other service-to-service dialogues. Now under their otherwise modest “action plan”, they have agreed to an annual senior-level 2+2 dialogue involving foreign and defence ministry officials together on both sides.

Economic ties also are taking off, with India overtaking China as the magnet for the largest Japanese foreign direct investment since 2008. The highlight of the Indian Prime Minister’s Tokyo visit this year could be the signing of a free trade agreement, if the remaining differences are sorted out in the ongoing negotiations.

The Indo-Japanese security agreement actually was modelled on the 2007 Australia-Japan defence accord. Now, the new India-Australia security accord mirrors the structure and large parts of the content of the Indo-Japanese and Australian-Japanese agreements. All three are in the form of a joint declaration on security cooperation and obligate their signatories to work together on security in Asia, while recognizing a common commitment to democracy, freedom, human rights and the rule of law.

These bilateral accords open the possibility of strategic triangles working in concert with each other—India-Japan-US, India-Australia-US, India-Japan-Australia and Australia-Japan-US. An India-Russia-Japan strategic triangle also can greatly contribute to Asian stability, but so long as Japanese-Russian ties remain hostage to history there is little hope of such a configuration. Last year’s Russia-Japan nuclear deal, though, offered a glimmer of hope.

The changing Asian balance of power underscores the imperative for India to forge closer strategic partnerships with varied countries to pursue a variety of interests in different settings and equations. A strategic partnership, however, cannot mean an exclusive relationship. The US, for example, is not allowing its new partnership with India or its long-standing alliance with Japan to come in the way of its growing strategic cooperation with China. Pragmatism in foreign policy demands multiple partnerships with interlocking interests, thereby guaranteeing mutual benefit and one’s own strategic autonomy.

Strategic partnerships are an aid, not a substitute to a nation discharging its primary duty to secure its frontiers and economic interests. Inadequate capabilities to deter an armed attack or an undue security dependency on a third party can easily negate the value of multiple strategic partnerships. Thus, to pre-empt aggression, a nation must have its own requisite strength and clout.

Brahma Chellaney is professor of strategic studies at the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi. Comments are welcome at theirview@livemint.com

India must break out of Nehruvian straitjacket

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From nonalignment to a pragmatic foreign policy

 

COMMENTARY

Brahma Chellaney

Mail Today, January 12, 2010

 

The world has changed fundamentally in the past quarter-century since the advent of the Information Age and the fall of the Berlin Wall. Yet there are some in India who still want the country to hew to the half-century-old traditions of the Nehruvian foreign policy. Fortunately, India has progressed from doctrinaire nonalignment to geopolitical pragmatism, with its foreign, economic and others policies reflecting growing realism.

 

The very essence of a forward-thinking, effective foreign policy is dynamism. A static foreign policy attached to an old school of thought — even if that school was associated with a great personality — can hardly advance a country’s interests.

 

Actually, the struggle between realism and idealism has been a constant phenomenon in independent India, starting from the contrasting approaches of the first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, and his deputy prime minister, Sardar Patel. That struggle still manifests itself in policymaking.

 

While important countries have pursued strategies of “balance of power”, “balance of threat” or “balance of interest”, Indian foreign policy has not been organized around a distinct strategic doctrine, except for a period under Indira Gandhi.  It is not uncommon for Indian policymakers to feed to the nation dreams sold to them by others. Nor are flip-flops uncommon in Indian foreign policy. Despite imbibing greater realism, India has yet to strategically pursue its wider interests with the requisite unflinching resolve.

 

In the absence of goal-oriented statecraft, the propensity to act in haste and repent at leisure still runs deep in Indian foreign policy.  It has ignored the sound advice of Talleyrand: “By no means show too much zeal”.

 

The blunt fact is that India is still in transition from the practices of Nehruvian diplomacy to a post-Nehruvian approach to world affairs. India, for example, has given up the Nehruvian didactic approach, or at least tried to. But it hasn’t as yet fully embraced realpolitik. Nor is it an assertive pursuer of self-interest, in the way China is.

 

Indeed, India — home to more than one-sixth of the human race — continues to punch far below its weight. Internationally, it is a rule-taker, not a rule-maker. Yet, in the past decade, India’s growing geopolitical importance, high GDP growth rate and abundant market opportunities have helped increase its international profile. As a “swing” geopolitical factor, India has the potential to play a constructive role by promoting collaborative international approaches.  

 

Its foreign policy seems headed in the right direction. Through dynamic diplomacy, India — the world’s most-assimilative civilization — can truly play the role of a bridge between the East and the West, including a link between the competing demands of the developed and developing worlds.

 

In the coming years, India will increasingly be aligned with the West economically. But, strategically, it can avail of multiple options, even as it moves from the Nehruvian mindset and attitudes to a contemporary, globalized practicality.

 

In keeping with its long-standing preference for policy independence, India is correctly pursuing the option to forge different partnerships with varied players to pursue a variety of interests in diverse settings. That course means that from being non-aligned, it is likely to become multialigned, while tilting more towards Washington, even as it preserves the core element of nonalignment — strategic autonomy. Put simply, India is likely to continue to chart its own destiny and make its own major decisions.

 

A multialigned India pursuing omnidirectional cooperation for mutual benefit with key players will be best positioned to advance its interests in the changed world.

 

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

Obama should speak up for India in Beijing

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Obama should stop China from provoking India

By Brahma Chellaney

Financial Times, November 13 2009

The economic rise of China and India draws ever more attention. But the world has taken little notice of the rising border tensions and increasingly visible differences between the two giants.

With Barack Obama, US president, headed to Beijing and the Dalai Lama’s tour of the remote north-eastern Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh provoking an angry Chinese response, the China-India-US triangle and Tibet have emerged at the centre of escalating 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 4,057km frontier with India through frequent incursions.

Beijing seems to be drawing the analogy that 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. China became India’s neighbour not by geography but guns – by annexing buffer Tibet in 1951. Today, Beijing is ready to whip up 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 cause of the more muscular Chinese stance towards India is the US-Indian tie-up, unveiled in 2005.

Since then, the official Chinese media has started regurgitating the coarse anti-India rhetoric of the Mao Zedong era, with one commentator this week warning New Delhi not to forget 1962, when China humiliated India in a 32-day, two-front war.

Yet the Obama administration is reluctant to take New Delhi’s side in its disputes with Beijing. Washington has also shied away from cautioning Beijing against attempts to change the territorial status quo forcibly.

Mr Obama is committed to the partnership with India as part of which New Delhi has placed arms-purchase orders worth $3.5bn last year alone. But he has also signalled that any relationship will not be at the expense of fast-growing ties with Beijing.

Washington now intends to abandon elements in its ties with New Delhi that could rile China, including a joint military drill in Arunachal or a 2007-style naval exercise involving the US, India, Australia, Japan and Singapore. Even US naval manoeuvres with India and Japan are out. Washington is charting a course of tacit neutrality on the Arunachal issue.

As his secretary of state did in February, Mr Obama has started his Asia tour in Japan and will end in China – the high spot – while skipping India. But playing to India’s well-known weakness for flattery, he will honour it with his presidency’s first state dinner later this month.

Left to fend for itself, New Delhi has steered clear of confrontation with Beijing. It has sought to damp down military tensions and cut off all information to the media on the Himalayan border situation, including Chinese intrusions.

But faced with attacks at home for being “soft” on China, the government has asserted itself politically. It rebuffed repeated Chinese diplomatic appeals and allowed the Dalai Lama to travel to Arunachal. It also announced an end to the practice of Chinese companies bringing thousands of workers from China to work on projects in India.

But India cannot afford to be isolated. With Mr Obama pursuing a Sino-centric Asia policy, and with China-friendly heads of government in Australia, Japan and Taiwan, New Delhi’s diplomatic calculations have gone awry. But the hardline Chinese approach reinforces the Indian thinking that engendered Chinese belligerence: that India has little option other than to align with the US.

New Delhi has to manage its relationships with Beijing and Washington wisely so it does not lose out. Meanwhile, the US cannot ignore the pattern of Sino-Indian border provocations and new force deployments similar to what happened 47 years ago when China, taking advantage of the Cuban missile crisis, routed the Indian military in a surprise invasion.

When Mr Obama is in Beijing, his message should be that any military adventure will prove costly and trigger the rise of a militaristic, anti-China India. Mr Obama should propose a US-China-India initiative and encourage his hosts to begin a process of reconciliation and healing in Tibet.

Brahma Chellaney, professor of strategic studies at the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi, is the author of ‘Asian Juggernaut: The Rise of China, India and Japan’

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009. Print a single copy of this article for personal use. Contact us if you wish to print more to distribute to others.

After the Berlin Wall’s fall, Asia gained salience

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As the Wall fell, Asia rose

The Berlin Wall’s collapse changed many things, but it also helped shift the balance of power towards Asia

 

Brahma Chellaney

Mint newspaper, November 9, 2009

 

On its 20th anniversary, the fall of the Berlin Wall stands out as the most momentous event in post-World War II history. By triggering the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union, it helped transform global geopolitics. It also set in motion developments that helped significantly raise Asia’s profile in international relations, with the two demographic titans — China and India — benefiting in important but different ways.

 

Globally, some nations lost out, but many others gained. The events arising from the Berlin Wall’s fall transformed Europe’s political and military landscape. But no continent benefited more than Asia, as has been epitomized by its dramatic economic rise — the speed and scale of which has no parallel in world history.

Illustration: Jayachandran / Mint

At a time when tectonic global power shifts are challenging strategic stability, Asia has become the world’s main creditor and economic locomotive. With the world’s fastest growing markets, fastest rising military expenditures and most volatile hot spots, a resurgent Asia today holds the key to the future global order. The Asian economic renaissance has been accompanied by a growing international recognition of Asia’s soft power, as symbolized by its arts, fashion and cuisine. Even so, Asia faces complex security, energy and developmental challenges in this era of globalization and greater interstate competition.

An important post-1989 development was the shift from the primacy of military power to a greater role for economic power in shaping international geopolitics. That helped promote not only an economic boom in Asia, but also led to an eastward movement of global power and influence, with Asia emerging as an important player on the world stage.

Global power shifts, as symbolized by Asia’s ascent, are now being spurred not by military triumphs or geopolitical realignments but by a factor unique to our contemporary world—rapid economic growth. Rapid economic growth also was witnessed during the Industrial Revolution and in the post-World War II period. But in the post-Cold War period, rapid economic growth by itself has contributed to qualitatively altering global power equations. So, economic power is now playing a unique role in instigating contemporary power shifts, even as the United Nations Security Council’s permanent-membership structure continues to undergird the importance of military power.

Another defining event in 1989 was the Tiananmen Square massacre of pro-democracy protesters in Beijing. But for the end of the Cold War, the West would not have let China off the hook over those killings.

The Cold War’s end, however, facilitated the West’s pragmatic approach to shun trade sanctions and help integrate China with global institutions through the liberalizing influence of foreign investment and trade. Had the United States and its allies pursued the opposite approach centred on punitive sanctions, like they are still doing against Cuba and Burma, the result would have been a less-prosperous, less-open and a potentially destabilizing China. 

 

China’s phenomenal economic success — illustrated by its emergence with the world’s biggest trade surplus, largest foreign-currency reserves and highest steel production — thus owes a lot to the West’s decision not to sustain trade sanctions after Tiananmen Square. Without the expansion in U.S.-Chinese trade and financial relations, China’s growth would have been much harder. Today, having vaulted past Germany to become the world’s biggest exporter, China is set to displace Japan as the world’s No. 2 economy. Yet, for the foreseeable future, Japan — with its nearly $5-trillion economy, impressive high-technology skills, Asia’s largest navy and a per-capita income more than 10 times that of China — is likely to stay a strong nation.

 

India’s rise as a new economic giant also is linked to the post-1989 events. India was so much into barter trade with the Soviet Union and its communist allies in Eastern Europe that when the East bloc began to unravel, India had to start paying for imports in harsh cash. That rapidly depleted its modest foreign-exchange reserves, triggering a severe balance-of-payments crisis in 1991. The financial crisis, in turn, compelled India to embark on radical economic reforms, which laid the foundation for India’s economic rise.

 

More broadly, the emblematic defeat of Marxism in 1989 allowed Asian countries, including China and India, to overtly pursue capitalist policies. Although China’s economic-modernization programme already had begun under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping, the Chinese Communist Party, after 1989, was able to publicly subordinate ideology to wealth creation. That example, in turn, had a constructive influence on surviving communist parties in Asia and beyond.

 

Geopolitically, the post-1989 gains extended far beyond the West. China and India were both beneficiaries. For China, the Soviet Union’s sudden collapse came as a great strategic boon, eliminating a menacing empire and opening the way to rapidly increase strategic space globally. Russia’s decline in the 1990s became China’s gain.

 

For India, the end of the Cold War triggered a foreign-policy crisis by eliminating the country’s most reliable partner, the Soviet Union. But as in the economic realm, that crisis had a positive outcome: It led to a revamped foreign policy.

 

The crisis compelled India to overcome its didactically quixotic traditions and inject greater realism and pragmatism into its foreign policy — a process still on. Post-Cold War India began pursuing mutually beneficial strategic partnerships with all key players in Asia and the wider world, including European powers and Japan. The new Indo-U.S. “global strategic partnership” — a defining feature of this decade — was made possible by the post-1989 shifts in Indian policy thinking.

 

As India has moved from Jawaharlal Nehru’s nonalignment to a contemporary, globalized practicality, it is becoming multialigned, while tilting more towards the West. But it intends to preserves the core element of nonalignment — strategic autonomy. A multialigned India pursuing omnidirectional cooperation for mutual benefit with key players, clearly, is better positioned to advance its interests in the changed world.

 

In that light, it is hardly a surprise that Russia remains India’s “tried and tested friend” — a relationship whose value for both sides is being reinforced by the China factor. By contrast, the escalating India-China rivalry and tensions over the Himalayan territorial disputes run counter to the U.S. interest to build closer ties with both sides and not to overtly side with New Delhi. It is not an accident that Washington, locked in deepening symbiosis with Beijing, is today quietly charting a course of tacit neutrality on the Arunachal dispute.

 

To be sure, not all developments post-1989 were positive. For instance, the phenomenon of failing states, which has affected Asian security the most, is a direct consequence of the end of the Cold War. While the Cold War raged, weak states were propped up by one bloc or the other. But with the disappearance of the Soviet Union, the U.S. got out of that game.

 

That is the reason why, suddenly, dysfunctional or failing states emerged in the 1990s — a phenomenon that has since contributed to making such nations a threat to regional and international security because they are home to transnational pirates (Somalia) or transnational terrorists (Pakistan and Afghanistan), or they defy global norms (such as North Korea and Iran). Asia has suffered more casualties from the post-Cold War rise of international terrorism than any other region.

 

Between 1988 and 1990, as the Cold War was winding down, pro-democracy protests broke out in several parts of the world — from China and Burma to Eastern Europe. The protests helped spread political freedoms in Eastern Europe and inspired popular movements elsewhere that overturned dictatorships in countries as disparate as Indonesia, South Korea, Taiwan and Chile. After the Soviet disintegration, even Russia emerged as a credible candidate for democratic reform.

 

Although the overthrow of a number of totalitarian or autocratic regimes did shift the global balance of power in favour of democratic forces, not all the pro-democracy movements were successful. Indeed, the subsequent “colour revolutions” only instilled greater caution among the surviving authoritarian regimes, prompting them to set up measures to counter foreign-inspired democratization initiatives.

 

Two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the spread of democracy unmistakably has stalled. Aside from the feared retreat of democracy in Russia, China — now the world’s oldest and largest autocracy — is demonstrating that when authoritarianism is deeply entrenched, a marketplace of goods and services can stymie the marketplace of political ideas. A new model, authoritarian capitalism — now well-established in Asian countries as different as Singapore, Malaysia and Kazakhstan — has emerged as the leading challenger to the international spread of democratic values.

 

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

(c) Mint, 2009

Why shoot the messenger?

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To China’s
delight, India
reins in its media

The Indian government doesn’t deny recurrent Chinese cross-frontier
border incursions, yet it has unfairly accused the media of overplaying such
border provocations, says Brahma Chellaney

India Abroad and Rediff.com
http://ow.ly/tzWe

At a time
when border tensions with China
have risen, the Indian government has tried to pull the veil over the
Himalayan-frontier situation by targeting the media for allegedly overplaying
Chinese cross-border incursions. Note: No one in the government has denied such
incursions are occurring. Yet the media is being accused of hyping such
incursions, even as a tight-lipped government remains reluctant to come clean
on the actual extent and frequency of the Chinese intrusions.

To
the delight of the autocrats in Beijing, who
tightly control the flow of information in their country, including through
online censors, New Delhi
has reined in its home media. In response to the governmental intervention at the highest level,
Indian news organizations essentially have clamped down on further reporting of
the Chinese incursions. The message this sends to Beijing, however
inadvertently, is that when the world’s biggest autocracy builds up pressure,
the world’s largest democracy is willing to tame its media coverage, even if it
entails dispensing half-truths and flogging distortions.

Beijing is sure to be emboldened by the precedent that
has been set. Next time when it is unhappy with Indian media coverage of another
issue sensitive to its interests, it simply will issue a diplomatic demarche to
New Delhi to
discipline its media the way it did on the border tensions.

Given Beijing’s
growing hardline stance towards India
since 2006, New Delhi’s
attempt to sweep serious issues under the rug is baffling. The facts, even if unpalatable, should be allowed to
speak for themselves. New Delhi’s
oft-repeated line in recent weeks has been that Chinese incursions are at last
year’s level, so there is no need to worry. But 2008 brought a record number of
incursions, with the Indian defence establishment reporting that the number of
such intrusions went from 140 in 2007 to 270 last year, or almost double. In
addition, there were 2,285 reported instances of “aggressive border patrolling”
by Chinese forces in 2008. This summer, as the army chief publicly said, there were “21
incursions in June, 20 in July and 24 in August.”

The key point to note is that
China has opened pressure points against India across the Himalayas, with border incidents occurring in all the four sectors — Ladakh,
Uttarakhand-Himachal, Sikkim and Arunachal Pradesh. Yet, such is the Indian government’s continuing
opacity that it is loath to clarify the actual border situation, even as it
conveniently blames the media for overplaying the incursions, although the
information about them has been coming from official channels.

If the threat from an increasingly assertive and ambitious China is to be contained, India must have
an honest and open debate on its diplomatic and military options, including how
gaps in its defenses can be plugged and what it will take to build a credible
deterrent. The media has a crucial role to play in such a debate, both by
bringing out the facts and providing a platform for discussion.

Still,
New Delhi has
sought to make its home media the scapegoat. Even more odd is that it has taken
its cue from Beijing.
It was the Chinese foreign ministry which first accused Indian media of
stirring up tensions. “I have noted that some Indian media are
releasing inaccurate information; I wonder what their aim is,” spokeswoman
Jiang Yu had said. Soon thereafter, Beijing
discreetly began exerting diplomatic pressure on New Delhi to domesticate its media.

In response, Indian
government functionaries have rushed, one by one, to make light of the Chinese
incursions, although the Chinese leadership has
studiously kept mum on border-related developments. Not a word has come from
any Chinese leader. By contrast, the almost entire Indian security leadership from
the prime minister down has gone public — not to clarify what is happening
along the border, but to claim there is no cause for alarm. But by being
disturbingly opaque, New Delhi
only adds to the public unease.

The Indian public
indeed has been offered mostly one-line statements from government
functionaries. Here’s a sample:

■ In
September’s first week, the neophyte external affairs minister offered this
one-liner: ‘‘Let me go on record to say that this
has been one of the most peaceful boundaries that we have had as compared to
boundary lines with other countries.” From the Maurya Sheraton’s presidential
suite, where S.M. Krishna was ensconced for more than 100 days, everything
looks “most peaceful,” not just the India-China border.

■ In the
following week, the foreign secretary claimed there has been “no significant
increase” in Chinese incursions. That suggests the incursions have increased
but not significantly. But who is to judge whether any increase is significant
or insignificant if those in authority divulge no information?

■ The foreign secretary was followed by the prime
minister, who laconically indicated he was in touch with the “highest levels”
of the Chinese government while implicitly acknowledging that a better flow of
government information was necessary to improve media reporting.

■ A day
later, the army chief was asked to speak up. “The
Prime Minister has just made a statement that there has not been any more
incursions or transgressions as compared to last year. They are at the same
level. So there is no cause of worry or concern,” Gen. Deepak Kapoor declared
on September 19. If the level of intrusions remains at last year’s level, that
should be a cause for concern because it shows China
is keeping India
under unremitting pressure.

■ Then came
the national security adviser, who was loquacious but not enlightening in a TV
interview. “Almost all the so-called incursions
which have taken place have taken place in areas which in a sense are viewed as
being disputed by one side or the other,” said M.K. Narayanan. Really? What
about Sikkim, whose border
with Tibet is formally
recognized by China?
And what about Uttarakhand —  the middle
sector — where the line of control was clarified through an exchange of maps
with China
in 2001? More fundamentally, why should New Delhi offer explanations or
justifications for the Chinese incursions? If such intrusions really are due to
differing perceptions about the line of control, let the Chinese say that. But
note: Beijing
hasn’t proffered that excuse.

Significantly, the NSA admitted the Chinese have started intruding a
“little deeper” than before, even as he maintained the government’s
now-familiar line that there has been “hardly any increase” in Chinese
cross-frontier forays. He went on to say, “China certainly sees us as a rival. They wish to be numero uno in this part of the world.”
Yet he complacently concluded, “I don’t think there is any reason for us to
feel particularly concerned as to what’s happening.” Didn’t such smugness bring
the surprise 1962 invasion?

Unfortunately, even while denying any media
report, New Delhi
tends to be so economical with words that it leaves questions hanging. For
example, the government has yet to categorically deny that Chinese forces
opened fire across the settled Sikkim
border in late August. It merely described as “factually inaccurate” a
September 15 newspaper report that two Indo-Tibetan Border Police soldiers were
wounded in such firing. But another national newspaper had earlier front-paged
on August 28 the trading of cross-border fire in the same Sikkim area — Kerang.

If New Delhi
wants to ensure Himalayan peace, pulling the wool on public eyes is certainly not the way. It is the government’s responsibility to keep the public
informed through media of new security threats and the steps it is taking to
effectively defend the borders.

Journalists seeking
information from the government on the Himalayan frontier complain they get the
runaround. Rather than stonewall or obfuscate, the
government ought to readily disseminate information. Not all information
released in the public domain can be venomous to diplomacy.

Good public diplomacy, at home and abroad,
indeed can complement official diplomacy and defense preparedness. Indian
opacity on Chinese-triggered border incidents only helps bolster China’s projection of its “peaceful
rise."

By trying to mask the actual border situation, New Delhi seriously risks playing into Beijing’s hands and spurring on greater
Chinese belligerence.

Brahma Chellaney,
professor of strategic studies at the independent, privately funded Centre for
Policy Research, is the author, most recently, of “Asian Juggernaut: The Rise
of China, India and Japan.”

India’s China problem

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Lest we are caught napping, 1962-style

Brahma Chellaney

Covert magazine, October 1-14, 2009

Recent developments are a sharp reminder that China is muscling up to India. The
rising number of Chinese military incursions and other border incidents, the
hardening of China’s
political stance and the vicious anti-India attacks in the Chinese
state-controlled media underscore that. So, even as China
has emerged as India’s
largest trading partner, the Sino-Indian strategic dissonance and border
disputes have become more pronounced. Beijing
seems intent on strategically encircling and squeezing India by employing its rising clout in Pakistan, Burma,
Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Nepal.

The Chinese border provocations have resulted both from India’s
political pusillanimity and the withdrawal of army divisions from China-related
duty. For example, the 8th Mountain Division, tasked with defending Sikkim, was moved from northern Bengal to Jammu and Kashmir and
took part in the Kargil War. Similarly, a mountain division was moved from
Nagaland/Arunachal area to J&K for counterinsurgency operations. Tank
forces also were moved out from Sikkim.
All those force withdrawals seem to have emboldened the Chinese. The current
Indian moves to beef up defences against China largely involve the return of
the forces that were withdrawn a decade or more ago.

Diplomatically, India is unable to get its act
together. In the face of growing Chinese cross-border forays, the foreign
minister claimed in public the Himalayan border was “most peaceful.”

The External Affairs Ministry (MEA) reacted to the
provocative “dismember India”
essay posted on a quasi-official Chinese website. But the MEA kept mum when the
authoritative People’s Daily taunted India
for lagging behind China in
all indices of power and asked New Delhi to
consider “the consequences of a potential confrontation with China.”
Criticizing the Indian moves to strengthen defences, the paper peremptorily
declared: “China won’t make
any compromises in its border disputes with India.” A subsequent commentary in
that paper warned India to
stop playing into the hands of “some Western powers” by raising the bogey of a
“China
threat.”

Dismember India
is an old failed project China
launched in the Mao years when it trained and armed Naga, Mizo and other
guerrillas. Although such assistance ceased after Mao’s 1976 death, China seems to be coming full circle today, with
Chinese-made arms increasingly flowing to guerrilla ranks in northeast India, including via Burma. India
last year raised this matter with Beijing
at the foreign minister level. Indeed, Pakistan-based terrorists targeting India now carry
Chinese-made grenades and assault rifles.

Like Pakistan,
China has long believed that
the best way to contain India
is to keep it internally preoccupied. In initiating its proxy war against India, Pakistan merely took a leaf out of
the Chinese book. But as Pakistan
has sunk deeper into a jihadist dungeon, China’s
surrogate card against India
has weakened. This, coupled with China’s
economic success going to its head, has helped spawn direct Chinese pressure on
India.

As a power rising faster than India,
China
sees no need to compromise. But even if it is weaker side, India does not need to blur the line between
diplomacy and appeasement, or give greater weight to show than to substance in
its interactions with Beijing.
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 is the
art of offsetting or neutralizing power imbalance with another state.

But while Beijing’s
strategy and tactics are apparent, India has had difficulty to define
a game-plan. It has stayed stuck in increasingly meaningless border talks that
have been going on for nearly three decades. To compound matters, India is to observe 2010 — the 60th anniversary
of China becoming India’s neighbour by gobbling up Tibet — as the “Year of Friendship with China.”

We know China
is seeking to constrict India’s
strategic space and stunt its rise. Indeed, China’s
intermittent cyberwarfare and cross-border military forays are nothing but
crude attempts to intimidate India.
Yet the more China acts
aggressively, the more India
assumes an air of injured innocence.

If India is not to be caught napping in 1962 style, it
has to inject greater realism into its China policy by shedding self-deluding
shibboleths, shoring up its deterrent capabilities and putting premium on leveraged
diplomacy.

 (c) Covert, 2009.

Deadlocked Sino-Indian border talks

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Clueless on China

Brahma Chellaney

India Abroad, September 18, 2009

The latest round of the unending and fruitless India-China talks on
territorial disputes was a fresh reminder of the eroding utility of this
process. It is approaching nearly 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. As the Indian navy chief, Admiral
Suresh Mehta, has put it plainly, the
power “gap between the two is just too wide to bridge and getting wider by the
day.”

Of course, 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 as Admiral
Mehta warned, “China
is in the process of consolidating its comprehensive national power and
creating formidable military capabilities. One it is done, China is likely
to be more assertive on its claims, especially in the immediate neighborhood.”

It is thus obvious that the longer the process of border-related talks continues
without yielding tangible results, 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 towards 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.

Let’s be clear: Chinese negotiating tactics have shifted markedly over
the decades. 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.
According to a recent report in Ming Pao, a Hong Kong paper with close ties to the
establishment in Beijing, China is seeking “just” 28 percent
of Arunachal. That means an area nearly the size of Taiwan.

In that light, can the Sino-Indian border talks be kept
going indefinitely? Consider two important facts.

First, 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, 14 Joint Working Group meetings between 1988 and 2002, and 13 rounds of
talks between the designated Special Representatives since 2003. 

It seems the only progress
in this process is that India’s
choice of words in public is now the same as China’s. “Both countries
have agreed to seek a fair, reasonable and mutually acceptable settlement of
this issue,” Indian External Affairs Minister S.M. Krishna told Parliament on
July 31. “The matter, of course, is complex and requires time and lots of
patience.” It was as if the Chinese foreign minister was speaking. Isn’t it odd
for India
— the country at the receiving end of growing Chinese bellicosity — to plead
for more time and patience after nearly three decades of negotiations?

Second, 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 when Beijing
is advertising its uncompromising stance, doesn’t New Delhi get the message?  The recent essay posted on a Chinese
quasi-official website that called for India
to be broken into 20 to
30 sovereign states cannot obscure an important fact: Dismember India is a
project China
launched in the Mao years when it trained and armed Naga and Mizo guerrillas. In
initiating its proxy war against India,
Pakistan
merely took a leaf out of the Chinese book. 

Today, China’s
muscle-flexing along the Himalayas cannot be
ignored. After all, even when China
was poor and backward, it employed brute force to annex Xinjiang (1949) and Tibet (1950), to raid South
Korea (1950), to invade India
(1962), to initiate a border conflict with the Soviet Union through a military
ambush (1969)
and to attack Vietnam
(1979). A prosperous, militarily strong China cannot but be a threat to its
neighbors, especially if there are no constraints on the exercise of Chinese
power.

So, the key question is: 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.

Take the period since the border talks were “elevated” to
the level of special representatives in 2003. India
first got into an extended exercise with Beijing
to define general principles to govern a border settlement, despite China’s
egregious record of flouting the Panchsheel principles and committing naked
aggression in 1962. But no sooner had the border-related principles been
unveiled in 2005 with fanfare than Beijing
jettisoned the do-not-disturb-the-settled-populations principle to buttress its
claim to Arunachal.

Yet, as the most-recent round of talks highlighted this
month, India has agreed to
let the negotiations go off at a tangent by broadening them into a diffused strategic
dialogue — to the delight of Beijing.
The process now has become a means for the two sides to discuss “the entire gamut of bilateral relations and regional and
international issues of mutual interest.”

This not only opens yet another chapter in an increasingly
directionless process, but also lets China condition a border settlement
to the achievement of greater Sino-Indian strategic congruence. Worse still, New Delhi is to observe 2010 — the 60th anniversary of China becoming India’s
neighbor by gobbling up Tibet
— as the “Year of Friendship with China”
in India.

(c) India Abroad,
2009.

Beware: Dragon Trap

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Dragon’s war dance

India is in serious danger of sliding into a 1962-type dragon trap. It needs high-quality statecraft to ensure that it does not get caught in China’s elaborate efforts to ratchet up border tensions, says Brahma Chellaney

DNA newspaper, September 11, 2009

The 32-day surprise Chinese invasion in 1962 lasted longer than the 1965 and 1971 wars with Pakistan and claimed the lives of more Indian soldiers than any other aggression faced by India since independence, with the exception of 1971. Yet the myth still being peddled internationally is that 1962 was a brief war. Today, as Chinese cross-frontier incursions grow and border tensions rise, the situation is becoming similar to the one that prevailed in the run-up to 1962. The several parallels raise the spectre of another Chinese attack.

First, like in the pre-1962 period, it has become commonplace internationally to speak of India and China in the same breadth. The aim of “Mao’s India war”, as Harvard scholar Roderick MacFarquhar has called it, was large political: To cut India to size by demolishing what it represented — a democratic alternative to the Chinese autocracy. The brute force with which Mao Zedong humiliated India helped discredit the Indian model, boost China’s international image and consolidate Mao’s internal power. The return of the China-India pairing decades later is something Beijing viscerally loathes.

Second, the Dalai Lama’s flight to India in 1959 — and the ready sanctuary he got there — paved the way for the Chinese military attack. Today, 50 years after his escape, the exiled Tibetan leader stands as a bigger challenge than ever for China, as underscored by Beijing’s stepped-up vilification campaign against him. With Beijing now treating the Dalai Lama as its Enemy No. 1, India has come under greater Chinese pressure to curb his activities and those of his government-in-exile. The continuing security clampdown in Tibet since the March 2008 Tibetan uprising parallels the harsh Chinese crackdown in Tibet during 1959-62.

Three, the present pattern of cross-frontier incursions and other border incidents, as well as new force deployments and mutual recriminations, is redolent of the situation that prevailed before the 1962 war. According to the Indian army chief, “This year, there were 21 incursions in June, 20 in July and 24 in August.” Such is the rising graph of Chinese cross-border forays that such intrusions nearly doubled in two years, from 140 in 2006 to 270 in 2008. Little surprise the defence minister warned as early as April 2008 that there is “no room for complacency” along the Himalayan frontier.

Four, the 1962 invasion occurred against the backdrop of China instigating and arming insurgents in India’s northeast. Although such activities ceased after Mao’s 1976 death, China seems to be coming full circle today, with Chinese-made arms increasingly flowing into guerrilla ranks in northeastern India, including via Burma. India has taken up this matter with Beijing at the foreign minister-level. Indeed, Pakistan-based terrorists targeting India now rely on Chinese arms — from the AK-56 assault rifles to the Type 86 grenades made by China’s state-owned Norinco firm. To add to India’s woes, Beijing has blocked efforts to get the United Nations to designate as a terrorist the Pakistan-based Jaish-e-Muhammad group chief, Masood Azhar.

Five, then-Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s slogan, “Hindi-Chini bhai bhai” (Indians and Chinese are brothers), is today matched by the “Chindia” concept, which — disregarding the rivalry and antagonisms — blends the two Asian giants together.

Sixth, just as India had retreated to a defensive position in the border negotiations with Beijing in the early 1960s after having undermined its leverage by accepting the “Tibet region of China” through the 1954 Panchsheel Agreement, New Delhi similarly has been left in the unenviable position today of having to fend off Chinese territorial demands. Whatever leverage India still had on the Tibet issue was surrendered in 2003 when it shifted its position from Tibet being an “autonomous” region within China to it being “part of the territory of the People’s Republic of China.” Little surprise the spotlight now is on China’s Tibet-linked claim to Arunachal Pradesh than on Tibet’s status itself.

That explains why Beijing invested so much political capital over the years in getting India to gradually accept Tibet as part of China. Its success on that score narrows the dispute to what it claims today. The issue in 1962 was Aksai Chin; the issue now is Arunachal, particularly Tawang. But had Beijing really believed Tawang was part of Tibet and hence belonged to China, the Chinese military would have held on to that critical corridor after its capture in 1962, just as it kept the territorial gains of that war in Ladakh.

With India in serious danger of sliding into a 1962-type dragon trap, the country needs high-quality statecraft to handle the present situation and ensure the nation is not again told what Nehru stated the day China attacked — that Beijing returned “evil for good.”

Brahma Chellaney is professor at the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi.

The right path on Burma: Constructive engagement

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Open new doors

Brahma Chellaney

DNA newspaper, August 21, 2009 

Burma, or Myanmar as its military junta calls it, is a country of critical importance to next-door India. The West can afford to pursue a punitive approach towards a Burma located far away because it has little at stake there.

That explains why the West applies one principle to the world’s largest autocracy, China — that engagement is the best way to bring about political change — but an opposite principle centred on sanctions to an impoverished Burma. In doing so, it unfortunately exposes democracy promotion as a geopolitical tool usually wielded against the weak and the marginalised.

Going after the small kids on the global block but courting the most-powerful autocrats is hardly the way to build international norms. India simply cannot afford to shut itself out of Burma, or else — with an increasingly bellicose China to the north, a China-allied Pakistan on the west, a Chinese-influenced Burma to the east and growing Chinese naval interest in the Indian Ocean — it will get fully encircled.

In that light, India must be pleased with the Obama administration’s tentative process of re-engagement with Burma, a strategically located country that US policy has increasingly pushed into China’s lap through an uncompromisingly penal approach since the mid-1990s.

The Obama team, reviewing US policy, has been exploring the prospect of gradual re-engagement with Burma, with American diplomats holding two separate meetings with the Burmese foreign minister.

A big step towards re-engagement came last weekend when senator James Webb visited Rangoon and Naypyidaw, the new Burmese capital. Webb, who heads the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on East Asia and Pacific Affairs, secured the release of an American military veteran who was recently convicted and sentenced to seven years of hard labour for illegally entering Burma and then swimming 3km across a lake to sneak into opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi’s heavily guarded home.

Driven by their legendary pioneering spirit, Americans do dangerous things and then create international crises over their arrests: Two female journalists strayed into North Korea; three students lost their way into Iran; and an ex-military man suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder swam a lake and spent two days at Suu Kyi’s home to supposedly warn her that he had had a vision in which she was killed by terrorists.

Their adventures, significantly, were directed at the three countries that face the most-severe US sanctions. But having over-employed the sanctions tool, Washington has dissipated its leverage against Burma, North Korea and Iran and run out of viable options.

Little surprise the new US administration has sought to open lines of communication with these countries. The humanitarian imperative to help free jailed Americans has provided the impetus to this political endeavour. The individuals’ dangerous exploits thus were a blessing in disguise for the US diplomacy, presenting an opportunity to try and open the door to engagement and providing the humanitarian shield to deflect attacks by those opposed to compromise.

Just this month, the US was able to reopen lines of communication with North Korea and Burma, with Bill Clinton’s trip to Pyongyang winning the release of the two women and Webb’s lower-profile mission actually yielding more tangible political results. A formal US opening to Iran, however, would have to await the outcome of the current intense power struggle there.

Webb held face-to-face discussions with the junta’s top leader, general Than Shwe. He also was allowed to meet Suu Kyi, just weeks after the UN secretary-general had been denied such a meeting. In fact, after Suu Kyi was convicted of violating the terms of her house detention by sheltering the American intruder, the junta instantly commuted her sentence to allow her to return to her villa and not spend time in a jail.

If Suu Kyi were to reverse her decision to boycott next year’s national elections, the generals might even be willing to lift her house detention. In any case, Suu Kyi is free to leave the country, but on a one-way ticket.

Just the way Washington today is reassessing its hardline towards Burma, India was compelled to shift course after a decade of foreign-policy activism from the late 1980s — but not before paying dearly. In the period New Delhi broke off all contact with the junta and became a hub of Burmese dissident activity, China strategically penetrated Burma, opening a new flank against India. That period’s sobering lessons have helped instill greater geopolitical realism in Indian policy.

While still seeking political reconciliation and democratic transition in Burma, New Delhi now espouses constructive engagement with the junta. Years of sanctions have left Burma bereft of an entrepreneurial class but saddled with the military as the only functioning institution.

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

http://www.dnaindia.com/opinion/main-article_open-new-doors_1284074