Engage, don’t isolate 

Burma illustrates that sanctions are not just a blunt instrument but counterproductive

By Brahma Chellaney

Hindustan Times, April 2, 2008

This week’s visit of the Burmese junta’s vice-chairman, General Maung Aye, who is also the Army chief, will formalize an agreement to launch an India-funded multi-nodal transportation corridor linking northeast India with Burma’s Sittwe port. The $135-million Kaladan Corridor has been made imperative by Bangladesh’s refusal to grant India transit access — a blinkered approach holding up the BIMSTEC free-trade area accord.

Maung Aye’s visit is an occasion to remember that Burma today is one of the world’s most isolated and sanctioned nations — a situation unlikely to be changed by its junta scheduling a referendum next month on a draft constitution. The junta’s reclusive chairman, Than Shwe, announced last week that the military would hand over power to civilians after elections in two years’ time. But the junta still holds out the threat to debar opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi from contesting.

            Burma is an important state. First, size matters: this is not a Bhutan or a Brunei but a country that boasts the largest Indochina land area. Second, it is a resource-rich nation with copious natural-gas reserves. And third, it is a natural land bridge between South and Southeast Asia, and thus critical to the economic advancement of India’s restive northeast. Such is its vantage location that Burma forms the strategic nucleus between India, China and Southeast Asia.

            Burma’s present problems and impoverishment can be traced back to the defining events of 1962, when General Ne Win deposed elected prime minister, U Nu, an architect of non-alignment. Ne Win, a devotee of Marx and Stalin, sealed off Burma, banning most external trade and investment, nationalizing companies, halting all foreign projects and tourism, and kicking out the large Indian business community.

            It was not until more than a quarter-century later that a new generation of military leaders attempted to ease Burma’s international isolation through modest economic reforms. Such attempts, without loosening political controls, came after the military’s brutal suppression of the 1988 student-led protests that left several thousand dead or injured — a bloodbath that coincided with the numerology-dedicated Ne Win’s announcement of retirement on the ‘most auspicious’ day of August 8, 1988 (8.8.88).

Twenty years later, China, also addicted to the power of number 8, may be courting trouble by launching the Beijing Olympics on 8.8.08 at 8.08 am. The Games —   communist China’s coming-out party — have already been besmirched by the brutal crackdown on the monk-led Tibetan uprising, just six months after Burmese monks spearheaded a challenge to authoritarianism in their own country through street protests that had an underlying anti-Chinese tenor. In fact, Burma’s majority people, the ethnic Burmans, are of Tibetan stock. The resistance against repressive rule in both Burma and Tibet is led by an iconic Nobel laureate — a symbol of soft power standing up to hard power.

            Western penal actions against Burma began no sooner than the junta refused to honour the outcome of the 1990 elections, won by Suu Kyi’s party. But Burma became a key target of US sanctions policy only in this decade, as underlined by the 2003 Burma Freedom and Democracy Act (which bans all imports from that country) and a series of punitive executive orders. The new missionary zeal is due to a Burma activist in the White House — not the president but his wife.

            Laura Bush’s activism has only been aided by the junta’s remarkable short-sightedness. The regime invited a new wave of US-led sanctions by killing at least 31 people during last September’s mass protests. It continues to detain Suu Kyi, besides isolating itself from the public by moving the national capital to remote Nay Pyi Taw. With Burma’s 58 million people bearing the brunt of the sanctions, China — a friend to every pariah regime — has emerged the only winner.

            The oversized military fancies itself as the builder of a united Burma. In a country that has been at war with itself since its 1948 independence, the military has used the threat of Balkanization to justify its hold on politics. It trumpets its successes between the late 1980s and early 1990s in crushing a four-decade-long communist insurgency and concluding cease-fire agreements with other underground groups that left just a few outfits in active resistance. The period since has been viewed by the military as a time to begin state-building, while to the opposition it has been an unending phase of repression.

Given Burma’s potent mix of ethnicity, religion and culture, democracy can serve as a unifying and integrating force, like in India. After all, Burma cannot be indefinitely held together through brute might. But make no mistake: The seeds of democracy will not take root in a stunted economy, battered by widening Western sanctions.

Also, if the Burmese are to break their military’s vise on power, why has much of the world accepted the 1989 name change to Myanmar? As was evident from Ceylon’s 1972 renaming as Sri Lanka to give it a distinct Sinhala identity — a move that helped further alienate the Tamil minority — a name change represents powerful symbolism. The junta restored the traditional name, Myanmar, for nationalistic reasons. But a name change ought to have an elected government’s imprimatur.

The grim reality is that sanctions have put the Burmese society in a downward spiral of poverty and discontent while strengthening the military’s political grip. Burma is proof that sanctions hurt those they are supposed to protect, especially when they are enforced for long and shut out engagement. A calibrated approach is called for, with better-targeted sanctions and room for outside actors to influence developments within. Instead of targeting the junta, the widening sanctions have sought to choke off industries — from tourism to textiles — on which the livelihood of millions of Burmese depends. Many female garment workers made jobless by sanctions are being driven into prostitution, as one US official, Matthew Daley, warned as far back as 2003.

Yet, in the face of a visibly deteriorating humanitarian situation in Burma, Laura Bush has championed more sanctions, roping in the EU. Her husband, underscoring how power respects power and the weak get bullied, spits fire at Burma but accepts despotic China’s invitation to the Olympics. He should see how the Burma sanctions are holding its people “economic hostage”, as Burmese author Ma Thanegi told Stanley Weiss in an interview.

Such is Laura Bush’s ability not only to influence US policy but also to orchestrate an international campaign that she announced last December 10 that, “India, one of Burma’s closest trading partners, has stopped selling arms to the junta”. New Delhi has still to confirm that. Nor has it repudiated the ban. Who can contradict a first lady whose fury on Burma reputedly flows from a meeting with a minority-Karen rape victim and information from a relative with an erstwhile connection to that country?

If the Burmese are to win political freedoms, they need to be first freed from sanctions that rob them of jobs, cripple their well-being and retard civil-society development. Years of sanctions have left Burma bereft of an entrepreneurial class but saddled with the military as the only functioning institution. To avert a humanitarian catastrophe, the same international standard applicable to autocratic, no-less-ruthless regimes in next-door China, Laos and Bangladesh should apply to Burma — engage, don’t isolate.

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India should bring the Tibet issue to the centrestage

Brahma Chellaney

Expert, strategic affairs

Economic Times, March 21, 2008

No event since independence has more adversely affected India’s security than the fall of Tibet. Tibet’s annexation by China created a new geopolitical reality by bringing Han forces to India’s frontiers for the first time in history. Within 11 years of extending its full control over Tibet, China invaded India — a war whose wounds have been kept open by Beijing’s aggressive claims to additional Indian territories.

Today, China’s occupation gives it control over Tibet’s vast mineral and water resources. Tibet not only has 126 different minerals, but is also the source of rivers like the Brahmaputra, Sutlej and Indus — the ongoing damming of which allows Beijing to fashion water into a political weapon against India. Indeed, China’s reckless exploitation of Tibet’s natural resources carries serious ecological and climatic implications for India.

            The occupying power now is creating new demographic realities on the ground that would help accentuate India’s security challenge. Not content with having turned Lhasa into an overwhelmingly Han city, Beijing is pursuing a vigorous “Go West” Han-migration campaign, which is being facilitated by the new railway. Tibet’s Sinicization is helping marginalize Tibetans, sympathetic to India. Is it any surprise thus that Tibetans have risen in revolt against Beijing’s relentless repression?

            With the Tibetan rebellion having spread to remote parts of Tibet, and even beyond to the areas forcibly incorporated in Han provinces, China has responded with brute force, cutting off the Tibetan plateau from the rest of the world, killing scores of protestors and arbitrarily arresting many in an ongoing crackdown. India cannot stay a mute spectator to the bloodletting on the land of the pacifist Tibetan Buddhist culture. The autocrats in Beijing will not ease their crackdown unless international pressure is brought to bear on them. The world has no second option.

            Tibet is the core issue between India and China. So India should not hesitate to bring Tibet to the centerstage, and plan for the time when its ally, the aging Dalai Lama, is no longer on the scene.

(c) Economic Times, 2008

Unprincipled Principles

Brahma Chellaney

Asian Age, June 16, 2007

One passion of Chinese diplomacy is to go in for numbered policy pronouncements, like the “10-pronged strategy” unveiled in the joint declaration with India during President Hu Jintao’s visit last November. Another fetish is to enunciate diplomatic principles with another state and later, at an opportune time, reinterpret them unilaterally to add force to Chinese claims and ambitions.

Defining high-sounding principles to advance bilateral relations or dispute resolution helps Beijing to hold the other side to basic parameters, including a one-China policy, and foster a belief that the enunciation of cadenced concepts is progress by itself. Yet the idea behind formulating such principles is to bind the other party to them more than oneself. The principles devised are invariably so general and nebulous that Beijing, in any event, has ample room to reinterpret them or emphasize a single principle over the rest.

At times, the Chinese reinterpretation is nuanced, intended to bring the other state under transient pressure, with a particular aim in mind, such as to “correct” its behaviour. At other times, it is designed to be less subtle by signalling a diplomatic breakdown, as happened in the run-up to the 1962 Chinese invasion of India.

Beijing has proven an international past master in such diplomatic play. A fresh reminder of that was the message the new Chinese foreign minister, Yang Jiechi, conveyed to his Indian counterpart Pranab Mukherjee in Hamburg recently that the “mere presence” of settled populations does not affect Chinese claims on Indian territories.

Contrast that with what Premier Wen Jiabao had signed on to just two years ago in New Delhi. One of the six main principles defined in the much-touted “Agreement on the Political Parameters and Guiding Principles for the Settlement of the Boundary Question” mandates that the two sides “safeguard due interests of their settled populations in the border areas.”

While the message signals that Beijing is hardening its stance over the territorial disputes, should India be surprised by the development? The history of Sino-Indian relations, in fact, is largely a cyclic narrative of noble principles being framed, only to lull India into a false sense of complacency.

Consider the famed 1954 Panchsheel Agreement that defined the five principles of peaceful coexistence. Officially titled as the agreement on “trade and intercourse between Tibet Region of China and India,” the accord simplistically identified the following principles, without elaboration:

(i) “mutual respect for each other’s territorial integrity and sovereignty;”

(ii) “mutual non-aggression;”

(iii) “mutual non-interference in each other’s internal affairs;”

(iv) “equality and mutual benefit;” and

(v) “peaceful coexistence.”

No sooner had the accord been signed than China began finding new and different meanings in the Panchsheel principles. It laid claim to Indian border areas like Barahoti (located at the Uttarakhand-Tibet-Nepal tri-junction) and then stealthily intruded south of Niti and Shipki mountain passes — all specified border points in that accord. Before long, China began building a highway through India’s Ladakh region to link rebellious Tibet with another vast, occupied region, Xinjiang, home to Turkic-speaking Muslim ethnic groups.

Indeed, even as it started furtively encroaching on Indian territories, Beijing kept asking New Delhi to honour the principles of “mutual respect for each other’s territorial integrity and sovereignty” and “mutual non-interference in each other’s internal affairs.” That call only reflected the fact that everything about the Panchsheel Agreement was one-sided.

First, the Panchsheel was the first accord signed by any third party with China recognizing Tibet to be a “region of China”.

Second, the accord involved no give-and-take, only give from India’s side. It incorporated a formal Indian recognition of Chinese control over Tibet, without securing Beijing’s acceptance of the then-existing Indo-Tibetan frontier. When asked about the border having been left undefined, Jawaharlal Nehru blithely said: “All these are high mountains. Nobody lives there. It is not very necessary to define these things.”

Third, India forfeited all its extra-territorial rights and privileges in Tibet. The accord’s operative parts read as if victor China was imposing its will on vanquished India. Consider the following language: India “will be pleased to withdraw completely within six months from date of exchange of the present notes the military escorts now stationed at Yatung and Gyantse in Tibet Region of China;” “will be pleased to hand over to the Government of China at a reasonable price the postal, telegraph and public telephone services together with their equipment operated by the Government of India in Tibet Region of China;” “will be pleased to hand over to the Government of China at a reasonable price the 12 rest houses of the Government of India in Tibet Region of China;” and “will be pleased to return to the Government of China all lands used or occupied by the Government of India…”

Just eight years later, the Panchsheel principles went up in smoke when China invaded India.

Now fast-forward to the 2005 “guiding principles” for a border settlement. In substance, they are a tad less simplistic than the Panchsheel principles. But these six broad principles hardly lay the basis for a frontier settlement:

(i) “a fair, reasonable and mutually acceptable solution through consultations on an equal footing;”

(ii) “meaningful and mutually acceptable adjustments to their respective positions;”

(iii) “due consideration to each other’s strategic and reasonable interests;”

(iv) “take into account, inter alia, historical evidence, national sentiments, practical difficulties and reasonable concerns and sensitivities of both sides, and the actual state of border areas;”

(v) the “boundary should be along well-defined and easily identifiable natural geographical features to be mutually agreed upon;” and

(vi) “safeguard due interests of their settled populations in the border areas.”

Amazingly, it took several rounds of negotiations between the “special representatives” of the two countries to arrive at principles that are actually grist for the Chinese mill. A succession of three Indian national security advisers participated in this exercise in which, as is evident now, India struck a dry well. After 26 years of continuous border-related negotiations, a settlement is still no closer.

After every hardline action, be it the denial of a visa to any Arunachal Pradesh official or a provocative statement in public, like by Chinese Ambassador Sun Yuxi, Beijing repeats a platitudinous line borrowed from the so-called guiding principles: “We hold that the boundary issue be settled fairly and reasonably at an early date through friendly consultations.” When Prime Minister Manmohan Singh urged in his meeting with Hu Jintao in Berlin last week that the two sides adhere to the full set of guiding principles, the Chinese president merely repeated the “fair and reasonable” line.

The mechanical recitation of such bromides highlights that China neither wishes to settle issues with India fairly and reasonably nor seeks result-oriented consultations.

From Panchsheel to the border-related guiding principles, the road is littered with shattered principles. Yet the 1993 agreement to maintain “peace and tranquillity along the Line of Actual Control” — a line that has not been mutually defined up till now — repeated the defiled Panchsheel principles. How can peace and tranquillity be ensured if the frontline remains unclear and Chinese forces aggressively patrol certain sectors to sustain military pressure on India, not hesitating to carry out forays into, for instance, the Sumdorong Chu Valley?

Just as India tried unsuccessfully to persuade China between 1954 and 1962 to live up to the Panchsheel principles, it now seeks to promote the guiding principles. Yet China’s increasingly blunt assertion of claims to Arunachal Pradesh — a state more than twice the size of Taiwan — shows that those principles are already of little guidance.

All this begs a question: Why expend political capital, in the first place, to put together a set of principles, knowing that the strength of Chinese diplomacy is to design vain principles and then translate them in a way to suit Beijing’s convenience? What makes this question more troubling is that India, under Atal Bihari Vajpayee, agreed in 2003 to the diversionary Chinese proposal to shift the focus of the negotiations from the much-needed frontline clarification to the enunciation of principles for a border settlement.

Beijing’s partiality for numbered declarations, similarly, doesn’t mean it respects what it commits to. It continues to drag its feet on setting up what the “10-pronged” joint declaration of last November called for: “an expert-level mechanism to discuss interaction and cooperation on the provision of flood-season hydrological data, emergency management and other issues regarding trans-border rivers.” With China seeking to divert the waters of rivers flowing southward from the Tibetan plateau, a future conflict over the sharing of interstate water resources can no longer be ruled out.

Sardar Vallabhai Patel was the first Indian leader to grasp the enormity of the challenge from China. What he wrote 57 years ago still resonates today: “We have to take note of a thoroughly unscrupulous, unreliable and determined power practically at our doors… Any friendly or appeasing approaches from us would either be mistaken for weakness or be exploited in furtherance of their ultimate aim.”

© Asian Age, 2007

The Drag of a Dragon

Brahma Chellaney

© Asian Age, April 21, 2007

Coonoor, Tamil Nadu, India  

Yet another round of India-China border talks begins today in what is a 26-year saga of unending negotiations that of late are acquiring an even more laid-back spirit. Breaking the monotony of alternate meetings in New Delhi and Beijing, the two countries’ “special representatives” now confer in holiday hideaways, which have ranged from Kumarakom and Khajuraho in India to Xian in China. The latest meeting is in the hill station of Coonoor, in the Nilgiris.

            As if to publicize that India offers more exotic retreats than China, the Indian government is generously hosting a second consecutive round of talks. It will be remarkable if the Coonoor talks conclude in any way different from the houseboat diplomacy on the Kerala backwaters of Kumarakom — with warm handshakes, a statement applauding the “open, friendly, cooperative and constructive atmosphere,” and a promise to meet again. If stunning Khajuraho, Xian and Kumarakom failed to lift the talks to a higher plane, rugged Coonoor is unlikely to invigorate a wilting process.

         It has been almost 45 years since Mao Zedong’s regime launched a military invasion of India that led Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru — the world’s best-known panda-hugger until then — to make a national broadcast denouncing China as a “powerful and unscrupulous opponent.” That surprise aggression, and the ignominy it inflicted on the Indian state, followed the consolidation of Chinese hold over Tibet and three years of calculated efforts by Beijing to dispute the Tibetan frontier with India.

When the People’s Liberation Army had marched hundreds of miles south to annex independent Tibet and nibble at Indian areas, this, in Beijing’s eyes, was neither an expansionist nor forward policy. But when the outgunned and outmanned Indian army belatedly sought to set up posts along the mountain frontier to discourage further Chinese encroachments, Beijing and its friends dubbed it a provocative “forward policy” and proceeded to employ it as a rationalization for the attack.

Decades later, the Himalayan frontier is peaceful, but India and China are still not separated by a mutually defined frontline. Worse, the wounds of that war have been kept open by China’s publicly assertive claims to Indian territories, including some areas it overran in 1962, only to move back quickly so as not to overstretch its tenuous logistic and communication lines.

The invasion established firm Chinese control over the Aksai Chin plateau, with the ejection of Indian forces from the area of the Karakoram Pass, Pangong and Spanggur Lakes and Demchok. In NEFA (now Arunachal Pradesh), Beijing’s first offer, after the PLA advanced up to 65 kilometres into India, was for both sides to pull back 20 kilometres from the “line of actual control,” which it had refused to define — and which to this day it remains averse to delimit. While the PLA ultimately moved back to the McMahon Line in 1962, Beijing is still loath to exchange maps with India of the main sectors — the eastern and the western — so that the ambiguities plaguing the line of control are purged. In the western sector, China actually maintains an outer and inner line of control.

All in all, the ongoing process of border negotiations since 1981 redounds to China’s credit but not to India’s. There are three main reasons for this.

            ● First, a long, barren but continuing process chimes with the Chinese interest to keep India under strategic pressure. In assiduously seeking to drag out the negotiations indefinitely, Beijing is following the principle, “negotiate to engage the other side, not to reach accord.” This principle dovetails with China’s broader two-pronged strategy to present a friendly face while building up its power-projection force capability through military, economic and diplomatic means.

Rich in symbolism, the talks continue to be woefully short of progress on specific issues. Not only has there been little movement on reaching a settlement on the large chunks of territories in dispute, but also India and China remain the world’s only neighbours without a defined frontline. Their 4,057-kilometre frontier represents neither a line of “actual” control nor even a mutually agreed line in maps.

The Manmohan Singh-Hu Jintao joint declaration of last November committed India and China to pursue a “10-pronged strategy.” But in accordance with Beijing’s wishes, the declaration merely cited the need for an “early settlement of outstanding issues,” including “the boundary question,” without putting it among the strategy’s top five prongs. Instead of good fences making good neighbours, China believes that disputed fences help keep India in check.

● Second, China persuaded India in 2003 to shift from the practical task of clarifying the frontline to the abstract mission of developing “principles,” “concepts” and “framework” for a border settlement. This shift was designed to release Beijing from its commitment in 2001 to exchange maps with India of first the western sector and then of the eastern sector — a pledge it had already breached by missing the mutually agreed deadlines.

The fact is that the contours of a possible settlement have been known for long — a simple trade-off involving India foregoing its claims to territories it has lost to China, in return for Beijing’s abandonment of its claims to Indian-held areas. It was clear at the outset that an exercise to define “principles” and “concepts” would, at best, be academic — contributing little to settlement prospects — and, at worst, diversionary, holding up progress.

As Foreign Minister Pranab Mukherjee admitted at the Japan Institute of International Affairs in Tokyo last month, India and China have yet to reach agreement on “substantive” issues. Indeed, no sooner had the two countries identified six “guiding principles” in 2005 for a border settlement, including “due consideration to each other’s strategic and reasonable interests” and “safeguard due interests of settled populations in the border areas,” than Beijing scoffed at those very principles by publicly renewing its claim to Arunachal Pradesh, including Tawang.

Given its vantage point, China in unwilling to settle on the basis of the status quo. It knows no Indian government can cede even a slice of Arunachal, yet it persists with its egregious territorial claims with a twofold objective: to up the ante against India, and to keep progress at bay. By redirecting the process from frontline clarification to the enunciation of principles, and then cynically reinterpreting the agreed principles, Beijing, however, has laid bare its intentions.

            ● Third, India has sadly retreated to a more and more defensive position, bringing itself under greater Chinese pressure. Nobody is suggesting India adopt an aggressive posture. But if New Delhi is to engage Beijing on equal terms, the latter cannot have a monopoly on outrageous territorial claims that it pitchforks into the negotiations agenda to put the ball in India’s court and stall progress.

Far from adopting a nuanced position on the core issue, Tibet, to gain leverage, India continues to be excessively cautious and obliging in its diplomacy, arming Beijing with an open licence to demand more. It is bad enough that the Indian public is discovering after more than a quarter-century of border talks that China is unwilling to settle on the basis of the status quo. It is worse when India countenances such intransigence by opening negotiations on Chinese claims, however preposterous. 

Nothing better illustrates this than the separate statements earlier this year of two capable and level-headed officials — Pranab Mukherjee and National Security Adviser M.K. Narayanan — that because China lays claim to Tawang, that issue is on the agenda to find a final border resolution. The truth is that the Chinese claims epitomize a classical pursuit of incremental territorial expansion, with Beijing citing not any Han connection to Arunachal/Tawang but purported Tibetan ecclesiastical ties. India today militarily is a far cry from 1962, when the Chinese invaders poured through the mountain passes in a three-pronged drive that decimated the Indian brigade in Tawang. Yet it is no small irony today that Tibet’s exiled god-king says Tawang is part of India while New Delhi discusses Tawang with China in the border talks.

World history testifies that a border settlement has rarely been arrived at on the basis of the status quo when the more powerful party is overtly revisionist. It is only when both sides seek to alter the existing territorial control that a resolution respecting the status quo becomes possible.

Pitted against status quoist India are two irredentist regional adversaries. And because India has not sought to build and exploit counter-leverage, the advantage in negotiations tends to lie with these neighbours. The Sino-Indian negotiations have brought out in sharp relief that New Delhi’s acquiescence to China’s annexation of Tibet has come to haunt it, as Chinese claims on Indian territories are predicated on their alleged links with Tibet.

As the special representatives meet amidst tea plantations in Coonoor, their dialogue has gone from the agreed-but-now-contested guiding principles to another ethereal task — “finalizing an appropriate framework for a final package settlement.” Given that they are still discussing conceptual, not concrete, issues, the special envoys are likely to run out of new exotic retreats for their meetings even before they get to negotiate any real settlement package.

A periodic treat for the special representatives, in any event, cannot substitute for progress. Indeed such stagecraft hardly honours the memory of the 3,270 Indian army men killed by the Chinese invaders in 1962. What India needs is high-quality statecraft to ensure that no prime minister will tell the nation what Nehru did in 1962 — that China returned “evil for good.” The 32-day 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.

The border-talks process has yielded what it could — an agreement to maintain peace, tranquillity and stability along the Indo-Tibetan frontier, and the initiation of modest military-to-military cooperation. The process offers little more. Staying put in a sterile, everlasting process cannot become an end in itself for India. Indeed it only emboldens China to be publicly intractable and pugnaciously revanchist. Indira Gandhi, who initiated the process, would be turning in her grave over the way the negotiations have lost their direction, with India playing into China’s game plan.

Copyright: Asian Age, 2007

Lead us not into temptation

 India strives harder for external recognition than to build up its own strength

Hindustan Times

Manmohan Singh’s address to the US Congress will attract more attention in India, where it has been billed as a major event, than in the US. In this interregnum between the Fourth of July holiday recess and Congress’ month-long August break, many lawmakers will be absent, and their seats will be filled by congressional staffers and their friends to create an impression of a full audience.

            Few in the US take such an event seriously. This is not the equivalent of a US president addressing the Indian Parliament, as Bill Clinton did, with appreciative MPs in full attendance and a live telecast captivating the nation’s attention. Yet because the Indians make a big deal of such an event, as when Vajpayee addressed Congress, the Americans find it useful to pander to Indian pride through such a gesture.

            India’s craving for international recognition and status is so apparent that other powers play to that weakness through pleasing if empty gestures or statements. The best way a foreign power can get a good press in India is by mouthing sweet nothings on India or lavishing attention on a visiting Indian dignitary. Each time the US president has ‘dropped by’ his national security adviser’s meeting with a visiting Indian minister, India has read the gesture as a sign of its growing importance in US policy.  

            India has come a long way since the gloom of the 1960s, a decade in which the Chinese invasion shattered its confidence, socialism began to fail and US wheat aid caricatured it as a begging-bowl nation. Today, a buoyant India is a knowledge powerhouse, a nuclear-weapons state and a food exporter. But it still manifests some of the same weak spots that led it to the earlier depths of despair.

            Much of Indian foreign policy quintessentially remains a search for status, a recognition from rich foreigners that India is not an assemblage of poor people repeatedly conquered by bands of outside invaders for nearly a thousand years. In seeking to play a greater international role, India unsuspectingly displays signs of its long subjugation, including a psychological dependency on outsiders to assist its rise. Pakistan also seeks status, as recompense for lacking a national identity, but it has a clear and immediate goal — undermining India. That aim gives a distinct focus to its foreign policy.

In contrast to India’s fuzziness on goals, China, also ravaged by colonialism, has defined a clear objective for itself — to emerge as “a world power second to none” — and is expanding its capabilities at the fastest pace possible. India strives more for external recognition than to build up its own economic and military strength, even though status comes with might. Indeed, it began economic reforms, unlike China, not by choice but under external compulsion.

Much of the Indian discourse centres not on how India can grow strong and rich speedily but on gauging how popular the nation is becoming with foreigners — to which clubs it is being invited, which country is offering to sell what arms to it, the level of FII flows, and the latest ‘special’ gestures and laudatory references by a foreign power. India allows China to dump cheap manufactured goods but will not open up competition in labour-intensive manufacturing at home to provide productive employment to a quarter billion impoverished Indians who constitute the world’s largest underclass. All important powers subsidise their military modernisation through arms exports but such is the lure of kickbacks and foreign trips that India’s ruling classes have developed a vested interest in keeping the nation dependent on imports for almost all its main conventional weapons.   

The absence of clear, long-term strategic goals and political resolve only swells the longing for outside approbation and recognition. India is the only known country that overtly moulds its policies to win international goodwill. Even when faced with aggression, like in Kargil, India did not open a new front to relieve pressure and allowed the US to midwife an end to the war because its main concern was international goodwill. The desire for external endorsement and certification is deep-seated.

The rise and fall of great powers is testament to the critical role of vision, leadership, tenacious goals, capability growth and enabling ideas. India, however, faces a triple deficit in the key propellants of national power — a leadership deficit, a strategic foresight deficit and an idea deficit. Old, tired, risk-averse leadership operating on the lowest common denominator can hardly propel any nation to greatness.  

A nation’s influence and prestige are built on capability and what it stands for. Ideas and themes serve as the rationale to the assertive pursuit of national interest, providing the moral veneer to the ruthlessness often involved in such endeavour. The philosophy of non-violence, on which India was founded, was crushed in 1962. Non-alignment has become passé. India is left only with advertising itself as a liberal, secular democracy — a notable achievement but hardly a galvanizing element. Some may ask what sort of liberal democracy India represents when its president and prime minister are both bureaucrats who never won a single direct election and came to office by accident.

India has to start thinking the ideas that would enhance its appeal and help aid its rise as a great power. What does India wish to promote or offer internationally? Like in domestic policy, would India shy away from hard decisions if it were in the UN Security Council, as it should be in the seat of international power? The old ways of thinking are breaking down in India. But clear new political ideas are still to emerge in their place. The idea deficit has been laid bare by the PM’s homage to British colonial rule and the leader of the opposition’s homage to the founder of Pakistan — a double blow to the dogmas on which India was founded.  

India’s love of flattery makes it particularly vulnerable to seduction by praise. Remember the elation that greeted Washington’s offer — made the day it decided to sell F-16s to Pakistan — to “help India become a major world power in the 21^st century”? India has shown it can exercise power self-protectively to withstand external pressures. But the same India can be sweet-talked into ceding ground in a process of engagement. One act of defiance in May 1998, for instance, was followed by several acts of compliance, as Jaswant Singh fed the nation dreams sold to him by Strobe Talbott.

The itch to join every club, even if it’s just a talk-shop or doesn’t treat India fairly, needs to be contained. From showing up as an observer at the anaemic Shanghai Cooperation Organization to seeking membership of the US-led Nuclear Suppliers’ Group even as it remains its target, India weakens its leverage. On the way back from the G-8 meeting, the PM said India will “apply for membership” of the fusion-power consortium. India should join a group by invitation, not by application. An invitation, however, will not come to a supplicant. The best way India can end the nuclear embargo against it is not by flaunting its ‘impeccable non-proliferation credentials’, as it childlike does, but by employing proliferation as a strategic card like China.  

India should persist with its efforts to build a mutually beneficial strategic partnership with the US to help underpin its long-term interests. But if India allows process to matter more than results, the US will continue to play to its quest for status through syrupy promises while it develops aspects of the relationship beneficial to US interests. The warm ambience of Manmohan Singh’s meetings in Washington should not deflect India from insisting that the relationship progress in a balanced way so that it secures clear economic and strategic gains, not status-enhancing inducements.  

(c) The Hindustan Times

First published: July 18, 2005

Talleyrand, the illustrious foreign minister of Napoleon and the Bourbons, prescribed one basic rule for pragmatic foreign policy: by no means show too much zeal. In India’s case, gushy expectations, self-deluding hype, and oozing zealousness have blighted foreign policy since Independence, constituting the most enduring aspect of the Nehruvian legacy, other than the hold of the Nehru family dynasty over the Congress party and the continued strength of Indian democracy.

Zeal is to Indian diplomacy what strategy is to major powers. India has rushed to believe what it wanted to believe. Consequently, India is the only known country in modern history to have repeatedly cried betrayal, not by friends but by adversaries in whom it had reposed trust.

Reflecting India’s decline in its own eyes, however, while one ‘betrayal’ in 1962 hastened the death of Jawaharlal Nehru, another in 1999 kept Atal Bihari Vajpayee going as if it did not happen despite his public admission that his ‘bus to Lahore got hijacked to Kargil.’ It was finally the voters who decided they had had enough of Vajpayee.

Earlier, in 1972, even the strategist Indira Gandhi slipped up at Simla by trusting her opponent’s word on Kashmir.

Also Read: The Errors of Simla

The strength of any nation’s foreign policy depends on the health of its institutional processes of policy-making, on realistic goals, strategies, and tactics, and on the timely exploitation of opportunities thrown up by external conditions. Indian foreign policy, regrettably, has been characterised by too much ad hocism, risk aversion, and post facto rationalisations.

Institutional processes are operationally weak and there is no tradition of strategy papers to aid political decision-making. An uncritical media only encourages a political proclivity for off-the-cuff decisions.

In the absence of a set of clear, long-term goals backed by political resolve, Indian foreign policy has not been organised around a distinct strategic doctrine. Without realistic, goal-oriented statecraft, the propensity to act in haste and repent at leisure has run deep in Indian foreign policy ever since Nehru hurriedly took the Kashmir issue to the UN Security Council without realising that the Security Council, as the seat of international power politics, has little room for fair dealing.

From the Rediff Archives: ‘Jawaharlal, do you want Kashmir, or do you want to give it away?’

The India-China territorial dispute is another problem bequeathed by Nehru to future generations of Indians. Nehru’s first blunder was to shut his eyes to the impending fall of Tibet even when Sardar Patel had repeatedly cautioned him in 1949 that the Chinese Communists would annex that historical buffer as soon as they had installed themselves in power in Beijing. An overconfident Nehru, who ran foreign policy as if it were personal policy, went to the extent of telling Patel by letter that it would be a ‘foolish adventure’ for the Chinese Communists to try and gobble up Tibet — a possibility that ‘may not arise at all’ as it was, he claimed, geographically impracticable!

In 1962, Nehru, however, had to admit he had been living in a fool’s paradise. ‘We were getting out of touch with reality in the modern world and we were living in an artificial atmosphere of our creation,’ he said in a national address after the Chinese aggression.

Nehru had ignored India’s military needs despite the Chinese surreptitiously occupying Indian areas on the basis of Tibet’s putative historical ties with them and also establishing a land corridor with Pakistan-occupied Kashmir through Aksai Chin. Although Indian military commanders after the 1959 border clashes began saying that they lacked adequate manpower and weapons to fend off the People’s Liberation Army, Nehru ordered the creation of forward posts to prevent the loss of further Indian territory without taking the required concomitant steps to beef up Indian military strength, including through arms imports. Nehru had convinced himself grievously that China only intended to carry out further furtive encroachments on Indian territory, not launch a full-fledged major aggression.

In fact, Nehru accepted the Chinese annexation of Tibet in a 1954 agreement without settling the Indo-Tibetan border. While Nehru thought he had bought peace with China by accepting Chinese rule over Tibet on the basis of the five principles of peaceful co-existence, Mao and his team read this as a sign of India’s weakness and a licence to encroach on strategically important areas of Ladakh.

So betrayed was Nehru by the 1962 attack that he had this to say on the day the Chinese invaded: ‘Perhaps there are not many instances in history where one country has gone out of her way to be friendly and co-operative with the government and people of another country and to plead their cause in the councils of the world, and then that country returns evil for good.’

Also Read: Remembering the China War

Four decades after Nehru’s death at the age of 74, the Nehruvian legacy in foreign policy continues to influence Indian policy-making. Much before the recent national election made Sonia Gandhi the most powerful political figure in India, the Nehruvian legacy was intact in Vajpayee’s foreign policy. In fact, nothing pleased Vajpayee more than to be compared with Nehru.

Vajpayee’s foreign policy was in reality an updated, post-Cold War version of Nehruvian diplomacy.

Nehru and Vajpayee mistook casuistry and word games for statecraft, with the latter addicted to parsing and spinning his words. Both valued speech as a substitute for action or camouflage to concession. Vajpayee’s fascination with telling the world about the ‘greatness’ of Indian culture was his rendering of Nehru’s moralistic lectures to the mighty and powerful. Like Nehru, he was so enthralled by his own illusions and desire for international goodwill that he could not deal with ill will from India’s implacable adversaries. Even in war, Vajpayee declined — unlike Lal Bahadur Shastri — to take the fighting to the aggressor’s territory, battling the enemy on the enemy’s terms and relying on the United States to midwife a ‘victory’ in Kargil.

Also Read: The Kargil War

Except for a period under Indira Gandhi, India has found it difficult to kick its ‘hug, then repent’ proclivity. Take the case of the past decade. The 1990s began flamboyantly with the famous I K Gujral hug of Saddam Hussein and ended spectacularly with Jaswant Singh’s hug of the thuggish Taliban, as the then foreign minister chaperoned three freed terrorists to Kandahar. In the midst of the IC-814 hijacking saga, Jaswant Singh fed to the media his hallucinations about driving a wedge between the Taliban and its sponsor, Pakistan.

Also Read: The Hijacking of Flight 814

Until India fully absorbs the fundamentals of international relations, it will continue to get ‘evil for good.’ The fundamentals include leverage, reciprocity, and negotiating strategies that do not give away the bottom line. For five decades, India has put itself on the defensive by publicly articulating its Kashmir bottom line as the starting line — turning the LoC into the international border.

Some nations have a built-in craving for revision or hazardous gain, while others want only the status quo. Randall L Schweller, in his brilliant study Deadly Imbalances, labels the revisionist nations ‘wolves’ and ‘jackals’, while the status quo states are either ‘lambs’ or ‘lions’. India certainly qualifies as a ‘lamb,’ surrounded by ‘wolf’ China and ‘jackal’ Pakistan. The ‘lamb’ status is in keeping with its intrinsic disposition and meek objectives. Although its borders have shrunk since Independence and it is a poor state, India is, lamb-like, content with the status quo.

Only a ‘lamb’ state will make unilateral concessions and deal with invaders and hostage-takers on their terms. Again, only a ‘lamb’ will accept the outside portrayal of Kashmir as a bilateral dispute between India and Pakistan, condoning the third-party role of China, in occupation of one-fifth of J&K. A ‘lamb’ state is wary of traditional friends, but wishes to cuddle up to elusive new buddies or even enemies. Its diffidence makes external affirmation and certification important for its policies. A ‘lamb’ also assumes that others change their beliefs and policies as rapidly as it meanders to a new course.

http://in.rediff.com/news/2004/jun/02spec1.htm

Hindustan Times, November 27, 2006

While emphasizing cooperation, India needs to leverage its policy towards China

Mastering martial arts

By BRAHMA CHELLANEY

A key challenge for Indian foreign policy is to manage an increasingly intricate relationship with an ascendant China determined to emerge as Asia’s uncontested power. For different reasons, New Delhi and Beijing wish to play down the competitive dynamics of their relationship and put the accent on cooperation. This was on full display during Chinese President Hu Jintao’s New Delhi visit, which yielded a rhetoric-laden joint statement with nice jingles, such as “all-round mutually beneficial cooperation”.

            It makes sense for India to stress cooperation while working to narrow the power disparity with China. Cooperation holds special appeal to India, given that territorially it is a status quo state that has traditionally baulked at anchoring its foreign policy in a distinct strategic doctrine founded on a “balance of power”, or “balance of threat”, or “balance of interest”.

            By contrast, an accent on cooperation suits China because it provides it cover to step up a strategic squeeze of India from diverse flanks. It also chimes with its larger strategy to advertise its ‘peaceful rise’. China’s choir book indeed has been built around a nifty theme: its emergence as a great power is unstoppable, and it is incumbent on other nations to adjust to that rise.

            In keeping with India’s growing geopolitical pragmatism, the wooden-faced Hu received a friendly but formal welcome in New Delhi. The prime minister did not shy away from giving vent to India’s disquiet over the slow progress of the 25-year-old border negotiations by calling for efforts to settle the “outstanding issues in a focused, sincere and problem-solving manner”. And by urging that the progress in ties be made “irreversible”, the PM implicitly pointed to the danger that blunt assertion of territorial claims or other belligerent actions could undo the gains.

            Still, the visit was a reminder that Indian foreign policy has yet to make the full transition to realism. Consider the following two paragraphs in the joint statement:

“The Indian side recalls that India was among the first countries to recognize that there is one China and that its one-China policy has remained unaltered. The Indian side states that it would continue to abide by its one China policy. The Chinese side expresses its appreciation for the Indian position.

“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”.

Gratuitously and without any reciprocal Chinese commitment to a one-India policy, New Delhi again pledged to “abide by” a one-China policy despite the recent bellicose Chinese territorial claims. Needlessly and unilaterally, it reiterated its recognition of the central Tibetan plateau (what Beijing calls the “Tibet Autonomous Region”, or TAR) as part of China.

How can bilateral diplomacy become so one-sided that India propitiates and China merely records its ‘appreciation’? What about getting China to recognize Arunachal Pradesh, Jammu and Kashmir and Sikkim as part of the Republic of India? China has merely suspended its cartographic aggression on Sikkim without issuing a single statement thus far unequivocally recognizing it as part of India.

It is true that mistakes made in the past weigh down Indian policy. But should India continue or correct those slip-ups? Why should the present PM stick with his predecessor’s 2003 folly in recognizing TAR as “part of the territory of the People’s Republic of China”? In any event, Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s blunder did not come with an obligation for New Delhi to one-sidedly reaffirm that recognition at the end of every meeting between an Indian and Chinese leader.

A second clue of the Indian predilection to bend backwards was the manner New Delhi willingly shielded Hu from the media by permitting no questions at what was officially labelled an ‘interaction’ with the press. Knowing that Indian and foreign journalists would ask searching questions, among others, on China’s expansionist territorial demands, the Chinese side persuaded the hosts to limit the ‘interaction’ to a reading out of statements by Hu and the PM.

It is paradoxical that to welcome the world’s leading autocrat, the largest democracy cracked down on Tibetan demonstrators and allowed Hu to appear at a news conference in the scripted style he sets at home. Not that this won India any gratitude: the scattered Tibetan protests were enough to rankle Beijing to demand that New Delhi live up to its word not to let Tibetans wage political activity.

What makes Hu’s shielding by India more surprising is that the official talks brought out his hardline stance on the territorial disputes. Yet the next day at Vigyan Bhawan Hu disingenuously called for an “early settlement of the boundary issues”. The reason the two countries are locked in what is already the longest and most-barren negotiating process between any two countries in modern world history is that China — not content with the one-fifth of the original state of J&K it occupies — seeks to further redraw its frontiers with India, coveting above all Tawang, a strategic doorway to the Assam Valley.

Seeking to territorially extend the gains from its 1950 annexation of Tibet, Beijing has followed a bald principle in the border talks: ‘what is ours is ours to keep, but what is yours must be shared with us’. India, having thrust aside potential leverage due to an unfathomable reluctance to play its strategic cards, has retreated to an unviable position to ward off demands flowing from China’s insistence that what it covets is ‘disputed’ and thus on the negotiating table.

It is past time India started building needed room for diplomatic manoeuvre through counter-leverage, even as it keeps cooperation the leitmotif of its relations with Beijing. Without strategic leeway, India will remain on the defensive, locked in unproductive negotiations and exposed to the Chinese use of direct and surrogate levers to nip at its heels. It is not that India has only two options: either persist with a feckless policy or brace for confrontation. That is a false choice intended to snuff out any legitimate debate on the several options India has between the two extremes.

Military and economic asymmetry in interstate relations does not mean that the weaker side should bend to the diktats of the stronger or pay obeisance to it. If that were so, only the most powerful would enjoy true decision-making autonomy. Diplomacy is the art of offsetting or neutralizing the effects of a power imbalance with another state by building countervailing influence.

A realpolitik approach offers India multiple cards to exert a counteracting power. The PM’s scheduled visit to Japan next month is an opportunity to discuss adding strategic content to a fast-growing relationship with a natural ally. Through close strategic collaboration, Taiwan can be to India what Pakistan is to China. Prosperous, democratic Taiwan indeed offers better economic lessons than China.

New Delhi can begin modestly. Let it refine its Tibet stance to add some elasticity and nuance on an issue that defines the India-China chasm and forms the basis of Chinese claims on India. Without retracting its present Tibet position, can’t India propose to China that its path to greatness will be assisted if it initiated a process of reconciliation and healing in Tibet and reached a deal that ended the Dalai Lama’s exile? Seeking such a settlement is not a tactical ploy but a strategic necessity, because the Tibet issue will stay at the core of the India-China divide until it is resolved.