U.S., India Reach Civil Nuclear Cooperation Agreement

Posted on July 27, 2007 by Chellaney

FRAIL DEAL BUILT ON WORDPLAY

Brahma Chellaney

Asian Age, July 28, 2007

While the Indian foreign minister has claimed “all concerns of India have been reflected and adequately addressed” in the just-concluded bilateral civil nuclear cooperation agreement under Section 123 of the US Atomic Energy Act (AEC), Washington has asserted that the accord safeguards US interests “from a variety of different perspectives.” In public comments and background briefings, the two governments have zealously sought to put their own spin. The true picture would be known once they unwrap the still-secret text. New Delhi in particular appears anxious to soften public opinion at home before releasing the fine print.

Two important points, however, have already been admitted by both sides — that the so-called 123 agreement expressly states that nuclear cooperation would be governed by “national laws” of the two parties; and that its text is within the parameters set by the India-specific, conditions-laden Hyde Act. As US Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns has bragged, “We’re very satisfied because we know the agreement is well within the bounds of the Hyde Act.”

In fact, US officials have gone to the extent of saying that the concessions they made in the fine print are more in the form of semantic guile than in substance, designed to help India address critics at home and seal the accord. The Washington Times, close to the White House, has quoted administration and congressional sources as saying that “some language is deliberately vague to help both sides save face” and that the text was “deliberately written in a way that can be interpreted differently by the two sides”.

In other words, both sides can claim success, while in reality the cooperation would be conditioned by the Hyde Act, euphemistically referred to in the text as the applicability of “national laws”. That is exactly what this columnist had warned in a two-part article last May 14-15 — that if the 123 agreement were to be in consonance with the Hyde Act and yet not rub salt on Indian wounds, there was only one way out: semantic subterfuge in the fine print. The reluctance to release the text more than a week after the agreement was concluded is a sign that there have been only semantic compromises on key issues. And US officials are saying so.

For India, this represents a major climb-down: having told Parliament that the Hyde Act contained provisions that were either “prescriptive” in ways incompatible with the July 18, 2005 joint statement or “extraneous” to engagement “between friends,” New Delhi has come round to accepting cooperation with the US on the basis of the onerous and grating conditions in the US legislation. Indeed, in defining India’s bottom-line in Parliament last August 17, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had admitted: “We have concerns over both the House and Senate versions of the Bill.”

However, once the US legislative process was completed without meeting most of the PM’s benchmarks, New Delhi readily entered the next stage — negotiations over a 123 agreement — by pretending that Dr. Singh’s assurances to Parliament could be addressed in that process. That was just a charade to buy political space, given that India’s deal-related commitments by then had already been expanded and turned into immutable legal obligations through US domestic law.

New Delhi was aware that even if the 123 agreement did not incorporate the controversial conditions of the Hyde Act, it would hardly free India from their obligations. America has always maintained that because such a bilateral agreement is a requirement not under international law but under US law, it cannot supersede American law. Washington has only reinforced its legal position by incorporating in the 123-agreement text the primacy of “national laws.”

New Delhi indeed knows from its bitter Tarapur experience that a 123 agreement has little sanctity in international law. The earlier Indo-US 123 accord, signed in 1963, was abandoned by Washington in 1978 — four years after the first Indian nuclear test — simply by enacting a new domestic law that retroactively overrode the bilateral pact. That broke with impunity a guarantee to supply “timely” fuel “as needed” for the US-built Tarapur plant.

Now, New Delhi claims it has secured assured fuel supply in the new 123 agreement, and that in the event of any disruption, the US would find an alternative source. But US officials are already disputing that. The Washington Times has quoted officials as saying “the language does not commit them to do anything specific. Rather, if there is an interruption because of technical or logistical difficulties, they will try to do what is appropriate.” That is in line with the Hyde Act, which says assured fuel supply covers only disruption due to “market failures or similar reasons,” not sanctions arising from India’s non-compliance with US-imposed conditions.

More broadly, it should not be forgotten that only after India has complied with all the Hyde Act’s preconditions that the US Congress would take up the final deal for approval. And although the Hyde Act provides for an up-or-down vote on a joint resolution — a practice that does not permit any amendment — the legislation’s own explanatory statement reserves the right for Congress to “pass a joint resolution of approval with conditions” by giving up “the expedited procedures offered by Sections 123 and 130 of the AEA.” That is exactly what happened with the US nuclear deal with China, when Congress attached three conditions to its 1985 joint resolution of approval, resulting in a nearly 13-year hold.

But before the final Indo-US deal can go before Congress, it has to secure approval from the 35-nation International Atomic Energy Agency board and the 45-state Nuclear Suppliers’ Group. Even in the best-case scenario, with all the remaining hurdles being crossed, the US will perpetually hang the threat of re-imposition of civil nuclear sanctions to enforce India’s compliance with the Hyde Act’s post-implementation conditions.

New Delhi is itching to enter into a new 123 agreement without resolving the outstanding issues from the earlier 123 accord. The Tarapur spent fuel has been accumulating for 36 years. Washington has neither compensated New Delhi for the large costs it continues to incur to store the highly radioactive spent fuel nor allowed India to reprocess it by accepting that IAEA safeguards can be effectively applied at the PREFRE facility specially built for this purpose.

While the PM had pledged to secure the removal of “restrictions on all aspects of cooperation,” including “reprocessing spent fuel,” the US, under the new 123 accord, has conceded only a theoretical right to India to reprocess, with the practical right to be worked out in negotiations with the US in the future. India would build a new reprocessing facility with safeguards involving US participation. This not only prolongs the Tarapur imbroglio but also raises a larger question: why acquiesce to the US having a political say on reprocessing when the issue of safeguards involves only the IAEA?

Take another issue — a perpetual nuclear test ban on India. Through the means of a domestic law, America today seeks to implicitly bind India to an international pact whose ratification the US Senate rejected in 1999 — the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.

Such a test ban, as both sides have admitted, cannot be, and has not been, diluted by the 123 agreement. Even the US “right to return” remains untouched. However, as the Washington Times puts it, “to help New Delhi save face domestically, the administration agreed to consult with the Indian government before taking any action in response to a test, officials said. The Indians presented that language as a major US concession, but US officials said consultations do not mean much in practice.”

New Delhi should be fully cognizant of what it is getting into. It would be effectively embracing CTBT-plus obligations that no nation has done. Although the PM had pledged that India is “not prepared to go beyond a unilateral voluntary moratorium on nuclear testing,” the Hyde Act seeks to enforce a tight, irrevocable test prohibition against India by actually going beyond the existing provisions of US law, which empower the president to continue exports on strategic grounds despite a test. By decreeing that the waiver for India will automatically terminate with any Indian test, the Hyde Act itself admits that it goes “beyond Section 129” of AEC.

Besides seeking “full and immediate use of US rights to demand the return of all nuclear-related items … if India were to test,” the Act goes beyond even the CTBT by specifying in technical terms what is prohibited for India. In the CTBT negotiations, the US had successfully opposed an Article I definition of a “nuclear explosion” to leave open loopholes for “permissible activities” of the type it carries out at its Nevada test site. While refusing to accede to the CTBT itself, the US would be enforcing CTBT-plus obligations on India. Once India has imported power reactors worth billions of dollars, the Hyde Act will effectively bear it down.

Against this background, the debate on the 123 agreement needs to be conducted in a sober, realistic way, not through spin and hoopla. By papering over fundamental differences, the deal could engender serious Indo-US discord in the years ahead. That danger is already manifest from the conflicting analysis of the still-secret 123 agreement by official briefers. One US congressional official is quoted as saying, “The way the Indians are reading it is not correct from the administration’s point of view.”

Too often in its independent history, India has rushed to believe what it wanted to believe, only to cry betrayal later.

Australia-India-Japan-US Quad

Posted on July 19, 2007 by Chellaney

Quad Initiative: An inharmonious concert of democracies

By BRAHMA CHELLANEY

The Japan Times

The newly launched Australia-India-Japan-U.S. "Quadrilateral Initiative" has raised China’s hackles, but its direction is still undecided owing to differing perceptions within the group over what its aims and objectives ought to be.

The quad, whose real architect is Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, is founded on the concept of democratic peace. This group of four held its inaugural meeting May 25 on the sidelines of the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF) gathering in Manila.

It is well documented in the international-relations literature that established democracies rarely go to war with each other, even though democratic governments may not be more wedded to peace than autocracies. Leaders in free nations have little political space to wage war against another democracy. This has led some scholars to contend that democratic peace is the closest thing we have to a law in international politics.

As a concept, democratic peace holds special value in Asia. Democracy may have become the political norm in Europe, but that can hardly be said of Asia. While the community in Europe has been built among democracies, the political systems in Asia are so varied, and some so opaque, that building political trust poses a major challenge.

Yet, if Asia is to enjoy durable peace and power equilibrium, the coming together of democracies to promote common norms is necessary. Such a constellation of democracies tied together through interlinked strategic partnerships could advance political cooperation and stability founded on a community of values.

No nation needs to be apologetic about promoting democratic peace. However, the quad’s first meeting was unpublicized so as not to upset the world’s largest autocratic state, China, which had earlier sent a demarche, or diplomatic note, to Tokyo, New Delhi, Canberra and Washington. The demarche demanded to know why such an initiative was being established.

Now, some quad members are straining hard to reassure Beijing that this initiative constitutes no axis of democracies. In fact, Australia, India and the United States, in different ways, have sought to downplay the strategic significance of the initiative. For example, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has claimed the quad carries "no security implication."

During a visit to New Delhi last week, Australian Defense Minister Brendan Nelson went to the extent of saying that Australia favored limiting the initiative to trade, culture and other issues outside the domain of defense and security. If a strategic initiative is to be limited to non-strategic issues, why establish it in the first place?

Australia appears ill at ease in this new grouping, given the objective of its present government to build strategic engagement with Beijing. Thanks to China’s ravenous import of resources, Australia has been reaping an unprecedented economic boom.

Indeed, Canberra has been at pains to emphasize that neither its March 2007 security agreement with Tokyo nor the extension of bilateral U.S. security dialogues with Australia and Japan into a formal Trilateral Security Dialogue since March 2006 is aimed at China. With Canberra still seeking to grasp the larger strategic ramifications of the trilateral security arrangements, it is not a surprise that it wants to go slow on the quad.

It an open question, however, how long Canberra would be able to juggle a strategic relationship with China with its new security agreement with Tokyo, while maintaining a robust alliance with the U.S. as the bedrock of Australian security. Would Canberra, for instance, be able to sustain cozy ties with Beijing while permitting Japanese troops to train in Australia under the new accord?

Today, the U.S. wants to ensure that China rises peacefully, without becoming an overt threat to American interests. At the same time, by deepening Japanese security dependency, it wishes to prevent Japan’s rise as an independent military power. It is also seeking to persuade India — with which the thawing of relations has been a key accomplishment of the Bush presidency — to move beyond the current strategic partnership to a military tieup.

Achieving these varied objectives won’t be easy for U.S. policy. As it is, the strategic underpinnings of the U.S.-Japan security alliance have begun to corrode. Unlike during the Cold War, the U.S. and Japan do not have a common enemy. While Japan feels increasingly threatened by the rapid accumulation of military power by China, which is "aiming to build capacity to perform operations in waters further and further from its shores" (in the words of the Japanese defense white paper released this month), America regards China as neither friend nor foe.

In fact, the U.S. and China, from being allies of convenience in the second half of the Cold War, have gradually emerged as partners tied by interdependence. America depends on Chinese surpluses and savings to finance its supersize budget deficits, while Beijing depends on its huge exports to America both to sustain its high economic growth and subsidize its military modernization. Politically, the U.S. shares key interests with China, as illustrated by the Beijing-brokered deal on the North Korean nuclear program in February 2007 that caught Tokyo unawares.

Doubts are surfacing in Japan whether it can rely on the U.S. nuclear and security umbrella protection in the future, especially if a conflict were to arise with China. Such doubts in turn are instilling security anxiety, which the U.S. has sought to staunch by upgrading the operational elements of the bilateral security arrangements and encouraging Australia to engage Japan in defense cooperation.

For the U.S., a security-oriented quad would hold little benefit in relation to Japan or China. Tokyo is already tied to bilateral and trilateral security arrangements. The expansion of these arrangements to a quadripartite format would do little to advance U.S. objectives vis-a-vis Japan but make it more difficult to win continued cooperation from China, which has been warning against the creation of an "Asian NATO."

It is also not clear that the U.S. desire to build India as an ally can be advanced through a quadrilateral-security framework. Through the bilateral approach, Washington has been gradually expanding its military-to-military cooperation with India, as underscored by the growing joint exercises and the impending Acquisition and Cross-Serving Agreement (ACSA). The U.S. attempt is to build functional interoperability with Indian forces.

Washington is also eyeing tens of billions of dollars in potential arms deals with India in the coming years, and has already notified Congress of the proposed sale to Indian special forces of six C-130J Super Hercules military aircraft and equipment for more than $ 1.3 billion. U.S. firms like Lockheed Martin and Boeing are currently lobbying to secure a deal with India for 126 fighter jets potentially worth up to $ 11 billion.

But as a country that has always prided its strategic autonomy, India is still reluctant to enter into too tight a strategic embrace with America. It wants to remain a strategic partner, rather than become an ally. U.S. progress in building defense cooperation with India will remain incremental, with the quad offering little advantage.

New Delhi’s own approach to the quad is low-key — tacitly supportive of building democratic peace but hesitant to do anything that could instigate China to step up direct or surrogate military pressure. Having committed in a joint declaration with Abe last December to "the usefulness of having dialogue among India, Japan and other like-minded countries in the Asia-Pacific region on themes of mutual interest," Prime Minister Singh revealed that at the Group of Eight Outreach Summit in Germany last month, he spoke with Chinese President Hu Jintao about the first quad meeting and "explained" that there was "no question of ganging up" against China.

When China undertakes actions designed to contain India, does it bother to "explain" them to New Delhi? Indeed, it determinedly presses ahead with steps antithetical to Indian interests, including a "string of pearls" strategy in the Indian Ocean rim that aims to pin down India.

For long, China cultivated North Korea and Pakistan as its twin fists to keep Japan and India at bay. To set up proxy military threats against India, Beijing went to the extent of transferring tested nuclear-weapon and missile designs to Pakistan.

If India can openly join hands with Russia and China in a Eurasian strategic triangle intended to help promote global power equilibrium, why should it be diffident about partnering other states to seek democratic peace and stability in Asia?

All this leaves Japan as the only enthusiastic quad member. In fact, the quad idea was conceived by Abe in his book, "Utsukushii Kunihe (Toward A Beautiful Country)," published a couple of months before he became prime minister. Given that Abe was born after World War II and his life has been shaped by democracy, the concept of democratic peace holds special appeal for him.

Despite the present Australian, American and Indian tentativeness, the quad represents the likely geopolitical lineup in the Asia-Pacific in the years ahead. It is no coincidence that the quad’s foundational meeting was preceded by the first-ever U.S.-Japan-India joint naval exercises near Tokyo and that all the quad members plus Singapore are to participate in naval maneuvers in the Bay of Bengal in September. The maneuvers, representing one of the largest multilateral war games ever conducted on the high seas, will involve three aircraft carriers — two from the U.S. and one from India.

The democracies of Asia are natural allies. Strategic partnerships between and among them will have a positive bearing on Asian security.

Brahma Chellaney, a professor of strategic studies at the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi, is a regular contributor to The Japan Times.

The Japan Times: Thursday, July 19, 2007

Should Pakistan Developments Worry India?

Posted on July 18, 2007 by Chellaney

Regional Peace Depends on Pakistan’s Very Future
Copyright: Economic Times, July 18, 2007

Brahma Chellaney
Strategic Affairs Expert

Barely 60 years after it was carved out of India, Pakistan’s future is looking increasingly uncertain owing to serious internal challenges and contradictions. Pakistan has now approached a critical turning point, with a choice between recouping from the present troubles or risking a free fall. Without a transition to democratic rule, Pakistan will find it hard to pull back from the brink.

Hobbled by military rule, militant Islam, endemic corruption and dependency on foreign aid, Pakistan remains a main breeding ground of global terror. Having spent the past 17 years trying to bleed India through its ‘war of a thousand cuts’, Pakistan today is itself bleeding — due to the threat from within. By setting up state-run terrorist complexes, Pakistan became its own enemy. The Frankensteins it created have come to haunt its own security.

Today, the battlelines pit jehadist puppeteers in the establishment against their jehadist puppets outside. The puppeteers have become the targets of those whom they reared for long.

Against this background, the central issue that will determine regional peace is not the state of Indo-Pak relations but Pakistan’s own future. Will Pakistan sink deeper in militarism, extremism and fundamentalism? Is it likely to fragment ethnically, given that it remains a state of five tribes in search of a national identity? Can it survive in its present shape?

The fight against international terrorism is very much tied to how the Pakistani state evolves in the coming years. Today, Pakistan is disparaged as “Problemistan”, “Terroristan” and “Al Qaidastan”, with Bush himself calling Pakistan “wilder than the Wild West”.

Pakistan’s fate has always been in the hands of three As — Allah, Army and America. Now Allah’s wrath has wrought havoc on what has become the playground of terrorists, while the spreading pro-democracy movement has the Army on the defensive. But the third factor, America, is still seeking to buck the popular tide by propping up military rule. New Delhi, however, can never make peace with the Pakistan military, whose power and prerogative flow from foiling peace with India.

http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/Should_Pak_developments_worry_India/articleshow/2212140.cms

Quartet Symbolizes Likely Geopolitical Line-Up In The Future

Posted on July 18, 2007 by Chellaney

This Quartet Has A Future

Despite problems, the new quad signals a concert of democracies

Brahma Chellaney

The newly launched Australia-India-Japan-U.S. “Quadrilateral Initiative”, founded on the concept of democratic peace, has raised China’s hackles but its direction is still undecided owing to differing perceptions within the group. Australia, India and the US have sought to assure Beijing that it constitutes no axis of democracies. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has claimed the quad carries “no security implication”. Australia wants the initiative to be limited to trade, culture and other issues outside the domain of defence and security. If a strategic initiative is to be limited to non-strategic issues, why establish it in the first place?

Australia appears ill at ease in this new grouping, given its desire to build strategic engagement with Beijing. Thanks to China’s ravenous import of resources, Australia has been reaping an unprecedented economic boom. Indeed, Canberra has been at pains to emphasize that neither its recent security agreement with Tokyo nor the launch of the trilateral US-Japan-Australia security dialogue since March 2006 is aimed at China. It an open question, however, how long Australia would be able to juggle a strategic relationship with China with its new security agreement with Japan, while maintaining a robust alliance with the US as the bedrock of Australian security. Would Canberra, for example, be able to sustain warm ties with Beijing while permitting Japanese troops to train in Australia under the new accord?

Washington’s own support to a security-oriented quad is less than unreserved. America’s implicit faith in democratic peace is offset by its desire to pursue what has been its key interest in the Asia-Pacific since 1898 when it took the Philippines as spoils of the naval war with Spain — the maintenance of a balance of power. Today, the US wants to ensure that China rises peacefully, without becoming an overt threat to American interests. At the same time, by deepening Japanese security dependency, it wishes to prevent Japan’s rise as an independent military power. It is also seeking to persuade India to move beyond the current strategic partnership to a military tie-up.

Achieving these varied objectives won’t be easy for US policy. As it is, the strategic underpinnings of the US-Japan security alliance have begun to corrode. While Japan feels increasingly threatened by China’s rapid and wild rise, America regards China neither as a friend nor a foe. In fact, the US and China, from being allies of convenience during the Cold War, have graduated to becoming partners tied by interdependence. America depends on Chinese surpluses and savings to finance its super-sized budget deficits, while Beijing depends on its huge exports to America to sustain its high economic growth and subsidize its military modernization. Politically, the US shares key interests with China, as illustrated by the Beijing-brokered deal on the North Korean nuclear programme that caught Tokyo unawares.

Doubts are surfacing in Japan over whether it can rely on the US nuclear and security umbrella protection in the future, especially if a conflict were to arise with China. Such doubts in turn are instilling security anxiety, which the US has sought to stanch by upgrading the operational elements of the bilateral security arrangements and encouraging Australia to engage Japan in defence measures.

For the US, a security-oriented quad would hold little benefit in relation to Japan or China. Tokyo is already tied to bilateral and trilateral security arrangements. Their expansion to a quadripartite format would do little to advance US objectives vis-à-vis Japan but make it more difficult to win continued cooperation from China, which has been warning against the creation of an “Asian NATO.”

It is also not clear that the US desire to build India as an ally can be advanced through a quadrilateral-security framework. Washington has been gradually expanding military-to-military cooperation with India. India, however, remains loath to enter into too tight a strategic embrace. It wishes to be a strategic partner, not an ally. US progress in building defence cooperation with India thus is likely to remain incremental, with the quad offering little advantage.

New Delhi’s own approach to the quad is low-key — tacitly supportive of building democratic peace but hesitant to do anything that could instigate China to step up direct or surrogate military pressure. Having earlier called for an Asian “arc of advantage and prosperity”, Dr. Singh “explained” to Chinese President Hu Jintao in Germany last month that the quad represents “no ganging up” against China. But does Beijing bother to “explain” any of its actions antithetical to Indian interests? Also, when India can join hands with Russia and China in a Eurasian strategic triangle intended to help promote global power equilibrium, why should it be diffident about seeking democratic peace in Asia?

All this leaves Japan as the only enthusiastic quad member. Indeed, the quad idea was conceived by Shinzo Abe in a book he published a couple of months before becoming prime minister. Given that Abe was born after World War II and his life has been shaped by democracy, the concept of democratic peace holds special appeal for him.

Despite the present Australian, American and Indian tentativeness, the quad symbolizes the likely geopolitical line-up in the Asia-Pacific in the years ahead, with Japan and India coming closer together.

The writer is a strategic affairs analyst

The Quad: Australia-India-Japan-U.S. Strategic Cooperation

Posted on July 2, 2007 by Chellaney

A Concert of Democracies

Brahma Chellaney

© Asian Age, July 3, 2007

In keeping with its growing geopolitical pragmatism, India ought to avail of multiple strategic options in international relations. Its long-standing preference for policy independence indeed demands a web of diverse partnerships with important players to pursue a wide variety of interests.

Having helped found the non-aligned movement, India today is positioning itself to be multi-aligned, while preserving the core element of nonalignment — strategic autonomy. In recent years, India has attempted to forge varied partnerships to pursue different objectives. It has sought multilayered engagement on the world stage — from a “strategic and global partnership” with Japan and a trilateral venture with Brazil and South Africa, to a Eurasian bloc involving Russia and China and an “Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate” with Australia, China, Japan, South Korea and the US.

If India is to be accepted as an important global player, it has to have a broad vision and extensive and active engagement with the world. The various partnerships India is building dovetail well with that imperative and with its security interests.

A new partnership — the Quadrilateral Initiative — is founded on the attractive concept of democratic peace. It is well documented in the international-relations literature that established democracies rarely go to war with each other, even though democratic governments may not be more wedded to peace than autocracies. Leaders in free nations have little political space to wage war against another democracy. This has prompted several scholars to hypothesize that the closest thing we have to a law in international politics is democratic peace.

The quad held its inaugural meeting in confidentiality in Manila on May 25 on the sidelines of the ASEAN Regional Forum gathering. It was this analyst who first unveiled that meeting in a June 2 column. Since then, this Australia-India-Japan-US initiative has hit the headlines. Significantly, the quad’s foundational meeting was preceded by the first-ever U.S.-Japan-India joint naval exercises near Tokyo.

As a concept, democratic peace holds special value in Asia. Democracy may have become the political norm in Europe, but that can hardly be said about Asia. While the community in Europe has been built among democracies, the political systems in Asia are so varied and some even so opaque that it is not going to be easy to build trust. India’s troubled neighbourhood bristles more with failing states than with democracies.

Yet, if Asia is to enjoy durable peace and power equilibrium, the coming together of democracies to promote common norms is necessary. Such a constellation of democracies tied together through interlinked strategic partnerships could be a guarantor of political cooperation and stability founded on a community of values.

No nation thus needs to be apologetic about promoting democratic peace. Yet the quad’s first meeting was unpublicized so as not to raise the hackles of the world’s largest autocratic state, China. Now, some quad members are straining hard to reassure Beijing that this initiative constitutes no axis of democracies.

Such defensiveness is unwarranted, given that what has happened so far is just one inaugural meeting over breakfast. In any event, the quad’s aim is not to establish a military alliance but a political network on shared values and concerns.

India has sought to assuage Beijing, privately and publicly, that it has no intent to work against Chinese interests. China, however, has set up proxy military threats against India, going to the extent of transferring tested nuclear-weapon and missile designs to achieve that objective. While New Delhi certainly has no desire to repay Beijing in the same coin, it is incumbent on the government to ensure that China does not continue to exercise a cost-free containment option.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh revealed last Wednesday that, at the recent G-8 Outreach Summit in Germany, he spoke with Chinese President Hu Jintao about the quad meeting and “explained” that there was “no question of ganging up” against China. The PM went on to deny the undeniable: “There is no security implication in the quadripartite group.”

If India can openly join hands with China and Russia in a Eurasian strategic triangle intended to help promote global power equilibrium, why should it be diffident about partnering other states to seek democratic peace and stability in Asia? When China pursues actions overtly designed to contain India, does it bother to “explain” its actions to New Delhi? Rather, it determinedly presses ahead with steps antithetical to Indian interests, including a “string of pearls” strategy that aims to pin down India.

Take the latest Chinese moves. Has Beijing cared to explain its new hardline stance on territorial disputes or its disinclination to set up what President Hu Jintao had agreed to during his visit to New Delhi last November — an interstate river-waters mechanism? Besides continuing to dam rivers upstream in Tibet without sharing any information with India, Beijing has repudiated a key principle of a 2005 agreement — that the two sides would craft a territorial settlement that safeguards “due interests of their settled populations in the border areas.”

Instead of shedding light on its increasing assertiveness toward India, China has taken to preaching the virtues of transparency, stating that the quad members should be “open and inclusive.” New Delhi certainly can learn from Beijing about an important building block of national power — the capacity to unswervingly pursue clear, long-term goals. But China’s lecturing on the values of openness is like an Al Capone instruction on law and order.

India’s response to such a jarring sermon should be to encourage China to democratize in order to qualify for membership in the evolving concert of democracies in the Asia-Pacific. Today, China’s rulers are reluctant to allow even the development of a civil society, fearful that such growth would unravel their dictatorship. China still executes more people every year than all other nations combined.

India should do what is strategically sound over the long run, not what appears easier in the near term. Despite being defensive on the quad formation, New Delhi has displayed refreshing candour on China’s land-grab strategy, with External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee cautioning recently that “the days of Hitler are over” and making clear that no government can constitutionally cede “any part of our land that sends representatives to the Indian Parliament.”

China has yet to learn that a muscular approach is counterproductive. By setting out to “teach India a lesson” in 1962, China helped lay the foundation of India’s political rise. Beijing has turned a pacifist, China-friendly, aid-doling Japan into a strategic rival in just the past decade. Now, China’s hardline stance on India threatens to achieve what it is seeking to stop: a US-India military tie-up.

An important component of India’s security strategy has to involve cooperation with likeminded states to advance democratic norms and practices in the Asia-Pacific. The democracies of Asia are natural allies. Strategic accommodation and partnership with Japan, for example, will not only materially aid India’s defence interests but also have a profoundly positive bearing on Asian security. Few countries face such implacably hostile neighbours as India and Japan do.

In fact, Tokyo was instrumental in helping expand the US-Japan-Australia security arrangements to include India. The quad idea was proposed by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in his book, Utsukushii Kunihe (Toward A Beautiful Country), published in July 2006, wherein he says: “It would not be a surprise if in another 10 years, Japan-India relations overtake Japan-US and Japan-China ties.” Tokyo also played a key role in frustrating Chinese opposition and getting India into the East Asia Summit (EAS) initiative, which is to fashion an East Asian Community (EAC).

Despite being a rising power, India cannot expect to balance the Asian power situation on its own. It is too reticent and internally engrossed to be a major power player by itself. It needs reliable partners to help build a stable Asian order. A key template in that endeavour would be a constellation of democracies working together to fashion what Dr. Singh calls “an arc of advantage and prosperity,” to which China itself might eventually belong as events from within and from without compel it to politically modernize.

To quote the PM, “If there is an ‘idea of India’ that the world should remember us by and regard us for, it is the idea of an inclusive and open society, a multicultural, multiethnic, multilingual society. All countries of the world will evolve in this direction as we move forward into the 21st century. Liberal democracy is the natural order of social and political organization in today’s world. All alternate systems, authoritarian and majoritarian in varying degrees, are an aberration.” The quad jibes well with the imperative to harness democratic values for strategic goals.

© Asian Age, 2007

PostGlobal Talks to Professor Brahma Chellaney

Posted on June 30, 2007 by Chellaney

(PostGlobal is produced jointly by Newsweek and Washingtonpost.com)

HOW THE WORLD SEES AMERICA

Amar C. Bakshi Talks to America’s Lovers and Haters Round the World

Disappointment on U.S.-India Nuclear Deal

By Amar C. Bakshi

Professor Disappointed by U.S.-India Nuclear Deal

India
is not “America’s ally,” Professor Brahma Chellaney emphasizes, it is
its "strategic partner.” India does not wish to be a client to
America’s patronage.

Watch interview on video at:

http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/postglobal/america/

India is not “America’s ally,” Professor Brahma Chellaney
emphasizes, it is its "strategic partner.” After World War II, Japan
and Germany were America’s allies obeying America in a “patron-client”
relationship because “they had no other choice.” That would have worked
in the 20th century, with countries defeated in war and — in the case
of Eastern Europe — running to America after the Cold War, “But in the
21st century…any new friend America makes…is going to seek a
semblance of equality in the relationship. It is important for U.S.
policy-makers to understand a different mindset in a country like India
and respect it.”

And anyway, Chellaney says, America doesn’t need so much
control to achieve its geopolitical objectives. In fact, Washington’s
forceful attitude and "outdated" mindset actually works against it. The
failing India-U.S. nuclear deal is a prime example…

Things
are complicated. Remember, Chellaney says, General Electric built the
first nuclear power plant in India in the 1960s. Yes, India refused to
sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1968, believing it
segregated the world into "nuclear have and have nots” but when India
tested its first nuclear weapon in 1974, at least it was “legal.” The
bomb was even codenamed “Smiling Buddha”
and Prime Minister Indira Gandhi called the test, perhaps
unconvincingly, the “peaceful nuclear explosion.” It’s about
deterrence, Chellaney says.

In response, the U.S. government, “came down with bricks on India”
imposing myriad technology export controls. And this, in Chellaney’s
view, became “the main impediment to developing the [U.S.-India]
relationship to its full potential.”

So when President Bush and Prime Minister Singh signed the nuclear
cooperation agreement removing restrictions on civilian nuclear
technology transfers in July 2005, Chellaney thought "a true global
strategic partnership between the U.S. and India could be formed.”

A disillusioned Chellaney opines in the Asian Age.

“There
was euphoria…in India when the deal was signed….There was a lot of
excitement that finally the U.S. and India would be close buddies.”
That didn’t last long. And today, after months have dragged into years
and many more provisions have bloated the bill in the U.S. Congress,
“people are disillusioned in India.”

Some military and policy elites in Delhi wonder whether America is
actually “using the deal to stymie the Indian nuclear deterrent
program” and “retard India’s nuclear deterrent capabilities vis-à-vis
China. This confuses a lot of Indians.” He explains it by saying the
U.S. has a long-term desire to support non-proliferation objects around
the world and “cap India’s nuclear missile program at the
sub-continental level” so in the years to come “India does not prove a
threat to U.S. security.”

The controlling nature of U.S. policy-makers particularly concerns
Chellaney. He says policy-makers in Washing realize they can use the
deal to gain significant leverage over India to advance U.S. foreign
policy objectives from punishing Iran to constructing gas pipelines
through U.S.-controlled lands in Afghanistan. They’re “milking” the
deal for every last drop, even if those drops have nothing to do with
nuclear power or civilian nuclear cooperation. This, ultimately, makes
Indians distrustful of America’s objectives in the deal. And this
undermines the very strategic partnership and act of good will it was
supposed to foster in the first place.

It’s a perspective worth considering as efforts to push the deal
through drag on. But does everyone think America’s doing this on
purpose, trying to hold India back? More perspectives to come on this
issue and on India’s diplomatic relationship with America the
superpower.

Resource Conflict: The Next Struggle

Posted on June 29, 2007 by Chellaney

Averting Water Wars in Asia

By Brahma Chellaney

International Herald Tribune

June 27, 2007

The sharpening Asian competition over energy resources has obscured another danger: Water shortages in much of Asia are becoming a threat to rapid economic modernization.

Water has emerged as a key issue that could determine if Asia is headed toward cooperation or competition. No country would influence that direction more than China, which controls the Tibetan plateau, the source of most major rivers of Asia.

Tibet’s vast glaciers and high altitude have endowed it with the world’s greatest river systems. Its rivers are a lifeline to the world’s two most-populous states — China and India — as well as to Bangladesh, Burma, Bhutan, Nepal, Cambodia, Pakistan, Laos, Thailand and Vietnam. These countries make up 47 percent of the global population.

Yet Asia is a water-deficient continent. Although home to more than half of the human population, Asia has less fresh water – 3,920 cubic meters per person – than any continent other than the Antarctica.

The looming struggle over water resources in Asia has been underscored by the spread of irrigated farming, water-intensive industries and a growing middle class that wants high water-consuming comforts like washing machines and dishwashers. Household water consumption in Asia is rising rapidly, although several major economies there are acutely water-stressed.

The specter of water wars in Asia is also being highlighted by climate change and environmental degradation in the form of shrinking forests and swamps that foster a cycle of chronic flooding and droughts. The Himalayan snow melt that feeds Asia’s great rivers could be accelerated by global warming.

While intrastate water-sharing disputes have become rife in several Asian countries — from India and Pakistan to Southeast Asia and China — it is the potential interstate conflict over river-water resources that should be of greater concern.

This concern arises from Chinese attempts to dam or redirect the southward flow of river waters from the Tibetan plateau, starting point of the Indus, the Mekong, the Yangtze, the Yellow, the Salween, the Brahmaputra, the Karnali and the Sutlej Rivers. Among Asia’s mighty rivers, only the Ganges starts from the Indian side of the Himalayas.

The uneven availability of water within some nations has given rise to grand ideas — from linking rivers in India to diverting the fast-flowing Brahmaputra northward to feed the arid areas in the Chinese heartland. Interstate conflict, however, will surface only when an idea is translated into action to benefit one country at the expense of a neighboring one.

As water woes have intensified in its north owing to intensive farming, China has increasingly turned its attention to the bounteous water reserves that the Tibetan plateau holds. It has dammed rivers, not just to produce hydropower but also to channel the waters for irrigation and other purposes, and is presently toying with massive inter-basin and inter-river water transfer projects.

After building two dams upstream, China is building at least three more on the Mekong, stirring passions in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia and Thailand. Several Chinese projects in west-central Tibet have a bearing on river-water flows into India, but Beijing is reluctant to share information.

Having extensively contaminated its own major rivers through unbridled industrialization, China now threatens the ecological viability of river systems tied to South and Southeast Asia in its bid to meet its thirst for water and energy.

The idea of a Great South-North Water Transfer Project diverting river Tibetan waters has the backing of President Hu Jintao, a hydrologist. The first phase of this project calls for building 300 kilometers of tunnels and channels to draw waters from the Jinsha, Yalong and Dadu rivers, on the eastern rim of the Tibetan plateau.

In the second phase, the Brahmaputra waters may be rerouted northward, in what be tantamount to the declaration of water war on lower-riparian India and Bangladesh. In fact, Beijing has identified the bend where the Brahmaputra forms the world’s longest and deepest canyon just before entering India as holding the largest untapped reserves for meeting its water and energy needs.

The future of the Tibetan plateau’s water reserves is tied to ecological conservation. As China’s hunger for primary commodities has grown, so too has its exploitation of Tibet’s resources.

And as water woes have intensified in several major Chinese cities, a group of ex-officials have championed the northward rerouting of the Brahmaputra waters in a book titled, "Tibet’s Waters Will Save China."

Large hydro projects and reckless exploitation of mineral resources already threaten Tibet’s fragile ecosystems, with ore tailings from mining operations beginning to contaminate water sources.

While China seems intent on aggressively pursuing upstream projects on interstate rivers, the forestalling of water wars demands a cooperative Asian framework among basin states to work toward common ownership of the resources.

Brahma Chellaney, a professor of strategic studies at the privately funded Center for Policy Research in New Delhi, is the author, most recently, of "Asian Juggernaut: The Rise of China, India and Japan."

Copyright: International Herald Tribune, 2007

Water as a Chinese Weapon

Posted on June 28, 2007 by Chellaney

China aims for bigger share of South Asia’s water lifeline

By BRAHMA CHELLANEY
Japan Times

Sharpening Asian competition over energy resources, driven in part by high growth rates in gross domestic product and in part by mercantilist attempts to lock up supplies, has obscured another danger: Water shortages in much of Asia are beginning to threaten rapid economic modernization, prompting the building of upstream projects on international rivers. If water geopolitics were to spur interstate tensions through reduced water flows to neighboring states, the Asian renaissance could stall.

Water has emerged as a key issue that could determine whether Asia is headed toward mutually beneficial cooperation or deleterious interstate competition. No country could influence that direction more than China, which controls the Tibetan plateau — the source of most major rivers of Asia.

Tibet’s vast glaciers and high altitude have endowed it with the world’s greatest river systems. Its river waters are a lifeline to the world’s two most-populous states — China and India — as well as to Bangladesh, Myanmar, Bhutan, Nepal, Cambodia, Pakistan, Laos, Thailand and Vietnam. These countries make up 47 percent of the global population.

Yet Asia is a water-deficient continent. Although home to more than half of the human population, Asia has less fresh water — 3,920 cubic meters per person — than any continent besides Antarctica.

The looming struggle over water resources in Asia has been underscored by the spread of irrigated farming, water-intensive industries (from steel to paper making) and a growing middle class seeking high water-consuming comforts like washing machines and dishwashers. Household water consumption in Asia is rising rapidly, according to a 2006 U.N. report, but such is the water paucity that not many Asians can aspire to the lifestyle of Americans, who daily use 400 liters per person, or more than 2.5 times the average in Asia.

The specter of water wars in Asia is also being highlighted by climate change and environmental degradation in the form of shrinking forests and swamps, which foster a cycle of chronic flooding and droughts through the depletion of nature’s water storage and absorption cover. The Himalayan snow melt that feeds Asia’s great rivers could be damagingly accelerated by global warming.

While intrastate water-sharing disputes have become rife in several Asian countries — from India and Pakistan to Southeast Asia and China — it is the potential interstate conflict over river-water resources that should be of greater concern. This concern arises from Chinese attempts to dam or redirect the southward flow of river waters from the Tibetan plateau, where major rivers originate, including the Indus, the Mekong, the Yangtze, the Yellow, the Salween, the Brahmaputra, the Karnali and the Sutlej. Among Asia’s mighty rivers, only the Ganges starts from the Indian side of the Himalayas.

The lopsided availability of water within some nations (abundant in some areas but deficient in others) has given rise to grand ideas — from linking rivers in India to diverting the fast-flowing Brahmaputra northward to feed the arid areas in the Chinese heartland.

As water woes have been aggravated in its north due to environmentally unsustainable intensive farming, China has increasingly turned its attention to the bounteous water reserves that the Tibetan plateau holds. It has dammed rivers, not just to produce hydropower but also to channel waters for irrigation and other purposes, and is currently toying with massive interbasin and inter-river water-transfer projects.

After building two dams upstream, China is building at least three more on the Mekong, inflaming passions in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia and Thailand. Several Chinese projects in west-central Tibet bearing on river-water flows into India, but Beijing is loath to share information.

Following flash floods in India’s northern Himachal Pradesh state, however, China agreed in 2005 to supply New Delhi data on any abnormal rise or fall in the upstream level of the Sutlej River, on which it has built a barrage. Discussions are on to persuade it to share flood-control data during the monsoon season on two Brahmaputra tributaries, Lohit and Parlung Zangbo, as it has done since 2002 on the Brahmaputra River, which it has dammed at several places upstream.

The 10 major watersheds formed by the Himalayas and Tibetan highlands spread out river waters far and wide in Asia. Control over the 2.5 million-square-km Tibetan plateau gives China tremendous leverage, besides access to vast natural resources. Having extensively contaminated its own major rivers through unbridled industrialization, China now threatens the ecological viability of river systems tied to South and Southeast Asia in its bid to meet its thirst for water and energy.

Tibet, which existed independently up to 1950, comprises approximately one-fourth of China’s land mass today, having given Han society, for the first time in history, a contiguous frontier with India, Myanmar, Bhutan and Nepal.

Tibet traditionally encompassed the regions of the central plateau, Kham and Amdo. After annexing Tibet, China separated Amdo (the present Dalai Lama’s birthplace) as the new Qinghai province, made the central plateau and eastern Kham the Tibet Autonomous Region, and merged the remaining parts of Tibet into the Chinese provinces of Sichuan, Yunnan and Gansu.

The traditional Tibet is not just a distinct cultural entity but also a natural plateau, the future of whose water reserves is tied to ecological conservation. As China’s hunger for primary commodities has grown, so too has its exploitation of Tibet’s resources. And as water woes have intensified in several major Chinese cities, a group of ex-officials have championed the northward rerouting of the waters of the Brahmaputra in a book enlighteningly titled "Tibet’s Waters Will Save China."

Large hydro projects and reckless exploitation of mineral resources already threaten Tibet’s fragile ecosystems, with ore tailings beginning to contaminate water sources. Unmindful of the environmental impact of such activities in pristine areas, China has now embarked on constructing a 108-km paved road to Mount Everest, located along the Tibet-Nepal frontier. This highway is part of China’s plan to reinforce its claims on Tibet by taking the Olympic torch to the peak of the world’s tallest mountain before the 2008 Beijing Games.

As in the past, no country is going to be more affected by Chinese plans and projects in Tibet than India. The new $ 6.2 billion Gormu-Lhasa railway, for example, has significantly augmented China’s rapid military-deployment capability against India just when Beijing is becoming increasingly assertive in its claims on Indian territories. This hardline stance, in the midst of intense negotiations to resolve the 4,057-km Indo-Tibetan border, is no less incongruous than Beijing’s disinclination to set up, as agreed during its president’s state visit to New Delhi last November, a joint expert-level mechanism on interstate river waters.

Contrast China’s reluctance to establish a mechanism intended for mere "interaction and cooperation" on hydrological data with New Delhi’s consideration toward downstream Pakistan, reflected both in the 1960 Indus Waters Treaty (which reserves 56 percent of the catchment flow for Pakistan) and the more recent acceptance of World Bank arbitration over the Baglihar Dam project in Indian Kashmir. Yet, as if to demonstrate that if you give an inch, it takes a mile, Islamabad has now raised objections to two more Indian hydropower projects — Uri 2 and Kishanganga.

No Indian project has sought to reroute or diminish trans-border water flows, yet Pakistan insists on a say in the structural design of projects upstream in India. New Delhi permits Pakistani officials to inspect such projects. By contrast, Beijing drags its feet on setting up an innocuous interaction mechanism. Would China, under any arrangement, let Indian officials inspect its projects in Tibet or accept, if a dispute arose, third-party adjudication?

If anything, China seems intent on aggressively pursuing projects and employing water as a weapon. The idea of a Great South-North Water Transfer Project diverting river waters cascading from the Tibetan highlands has the backing of President Hu Jintao, a hydrologist who made his name through a brutal martial-law crackdown in Tibet in 1989. In crushing protesters at Tiananmen Square two months later, Deng Xiaoping actually borrowed a leaf from Hu’s Tibet book.

The Chinese ambition to channel the Brahmaputra waters to the parched Yellow River has been whetted by what Beijing touts as its engineering feat in building the giant $ 25 billion Three Gorges Dam project, which has officially displaced a staggering 1.2 million citizens. While China’s water resources minister told a Hong Kong University meeting last October that, in his personal opinion, the idea to divert waters seems not viable, the director of the Yellow River Water Conservancy Committee said publicly that the mega-plan enjoys official sanction and may begin by 2010.

The Brahmaputra (Yarlung Tsangpo to Tibetans) originates near Mount Kailash and, before entering India, flows eastward in Tibet for 2,200 km at an average height of 4,000 meters, making it the world’s highest major river. When two other tributaries merge with it, the Brahmaputra becomes as wide as 10 km in India before flowing into Bangladesh.

The first phase of China’s South-North Project calls for building 300 km of tunnels and channels to draw waters from the Jinsha, Yalong and Dadu rivers, on the eastern rim of the Tibetan plateau. Only in the second phase would the Brahmaputra waters be directed northward. In fact, Beijing has identified the bend where the Brahmaputra forms the world’s longest and deepest canyon just before entering India as holding the largest untapped reserves for meeting its water and energy needs.

While some doubts do persist in Beijing over the economic feasibility of channeling Tibetan waters northward, the mammoth diversion of the Brahmaputra could begin as water shortages become more acute in the Chinese mainland and the current $ 1.2 trillion foreign-exchange hoard brims over. The mega-rerouting would constitute the declaration of a water war on lower-riparian India and Bangladesh.

The Japan Times: Tuesday, June 26, 2007

Chinese Diplomacy: Make Principles to Lull Your Foe

Posted on June 15, 2007 by Chellaney

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.”

China’s Rising Assertiveness: Lessons for India

Posted on June 7, 2007 by Chellaney

Dragon Fire

1962 war wounds kept open by China’s hardline claims

The Times of India, June 7, 2007

Brahma Chellaney

China is a rising power but also an increasingly truculent state on territorial or maritime disputes with its neighbours, unable to rise above narrow considerations. Having awakened India long ago from its Nehruvian dream that good intentions are sufficient to run foreign policy, Beijing is now helping New Delhi discover how Chinese diplomacy helps underpin assertive claims and ambitions. Even as India has become more accommodating and forbearing in its dealings with China, Beijing has hardened its position on territorial issues.

China’s assertiveness is mirrored in its refusal to grant visa to any official from Arunachal Pradesh and aggressive patrolling of the still-fuzzy Himalayan frontier. In recent days, a flustered New Delhi has had to cancel a China visit by 107 elite civil servants and also respond to charges by two opposition MPs from Arunachal that Chinese forces have been nibbling at Indian territory there. In seeking to deny that claim, New Delhi has made an unusual revelation — that China maintains more than one line of control and sends regular patrols right up to the outer claimed perimeter.

Through its forcefulness on Arunachal, China is signalling that the ongoing negotiations with India cannot centre merely on border demarcation, even if both sides still call them “border talks”. Recent events indeed highlight the lack of real progress in these epic, 26-year-old negotiations.

Sharing one of the world’s longest and most rugged frontiers, India and China are the only two countries whose entire border is in dispute, without a mutually defined line of control separating them. China continues to lay claim to more Indian territories, even as it holds on to Himalayan areas it seized furtively or by conquest in the 1950s and early 1960s. It occupies one-fifth of the original state of Jammu and Kashmir.

India and China are old civilizations but new neighbours. It was the 1951 Chinese annexation of the historical buffer, Tibet, that brought Chinese troops to what is now the Sino-Indian frontier. Just 11 years later, China invaded India. Today, both countries have built a stake in maintaining the peaceful diplomatic environment on which their economic modernization and security depend. Yet the wounds of the 1962 war have been kept open by China’s publicly assertive claims to Indian territories. As long as China is unwilling to accept the status quo, it will keep alive the memory of 1962.

That China is not a status quo power, at least territorially, is evident from the way it has placed Taiwan under a permanent threat of force and asserted land and maritime claims vis-à-vis other neighbours. Its claims on India, however, involve the largest chunks of territory. Arunachal alone is more than double the size of Taiwan.

For almost half of the period they have been neighbours, India and China have pursued negotiations to resolve their territorial disputes. Since 1981, the two countries have been engaged in regular border-related talks in what is the longest and most-barren negotiating process in modern world history. Of late, however, China has pugnaciously pressed its claims. A classic instance was last November when the Chinese ambassador — backed by his foreign ministry — publicly renewed China’s claim on Arunachal, stoking an unusual diplomatic spat on the eve of President Hu Jintao’s visit to India.

Sino-Indian negotiations, although rich in symbolism, have yielded little progress for three main reasons. First, China has sought to stretch the talks to keep India under strategic pressure. It has employed negotiations as a diplomatic tool to engage India, not to reach accord. This tactic dovetails with China’s broader strategy to present a friendly face while building up its capabilities to go on the offensive.

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 an overall border settlement. This shift was intended to release Beijing from its 2001 commitment 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 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. But given its hegemonic intent, China is loath to settle on the basis of the status quo.

Third, India has needlessly retreated to a more and more defensive position, bringing itself under greater Chinese pressure. Rather than gain leverage by adopting a nuanced position on the core issue of Tibet, India continues to be overcautious in its diplomacy, even when Beijing acts antagonistically. New Delhi’s acquiescence to China’s annexation of Tibet has come to haunt it, as Chinese claims on Indian territories are openly predicated on their alleged historical or ecclesiastical links with Tibet. Seeking to territorially extend the gains from its Tibet annexation, Beijing pushes a bald principle: What is ours is ours to keep, but what is yours must be shared with us.

India can no longer shy away from making hard diplomatic choices. With an overly ambitious and revisionist China on the offensive, India needs to discriminate between appeasement and diplomacy.

The writer is a security affairs analyst.