Obama should speak up for India in Beijing

Posted on November 15, 2009 by Chellaney

Obama should stop China from provoking India

By Brahma Chellaney

Financial Times, November 13 2009

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

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

China has resurrected its long-dormant claim to Arunachal Pradesh – almost three times as large as Taiwan – and stepped up military pressure along the 4,057km frontier with India through frequent incursions.

Beijing seems to be drawing the analogy that Arunachal is the new Taiwan that must be “reunified” with the Chinese state.

Tibet, however, has always been the core issue in Sino-Indian relations. China became India’s neighbour not by geography but guns – by annexing buffer Tibet in 1951. Today, Beijing is ready to whip up spats with western nations that extend hospitality to the Dalai Lama. But India remains the base of the Tibetan leader and his government-in-exile.

The key cause of the more muscular Chinese stance towards India is the US-Indian tie-up, unveiled in 2005.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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After the Berlin Wall’s fall, Asia gained salience

Posted on November 15, 2009 by Chellaney

As the Wall fell, Asia rose

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

Brahma Chellaney

Mint newspaper, November 9, 2009

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

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

Illustration: Jayachandran / Mint

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

India’s little-known role in Sri Lankan conflict

Posted on November 15, 2009 by Chellaney

India’s dirty role in Sri Lankan war

Brahma Chellaney

Covert magazine, November 1-4, 2009

Six months after Sri Lanka’s stunning military triumph in the 26-year-old civil war at the cost of thousands of
civilian lives in the final weeks alone, the peace dividend remains elusive, with President Mahinda Rajapaksa setting out — in the name of “eternal vigilance” — to expand by 50% an already-large military. China, clearly, was the decisive factor in helping end that war through its generous supply of offensive weapons
and its munificent bilateral aid. It even got its ally Pakistan actively involved in Rajapaksa’s war strategy.

India’s role, although it has received little international attention, was also deplorable. For years, India had pursued a hands-off approach toward Sri Lanka in response to two developments — a disastrous 1987-90 peacekeeping operation there; and the 1991 assassination of former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi. But
having been outmanoeuvred by China’s success in extending strategic reach to Sri Lanka in recent years, New Delhi got sucked into providing major assistance to Colombo, lest it lose further ground in that island-nation.

From opening an unlimited line of military credit for Sri Lanka to extending critical naval and intelligence
assistance, India provided sustained war support in defiance of a deteriorating humanitarian
situation there. A “major turning point” in the war, as Sri Lankan navy chief Admiral Wasantha Karannagoda acknowledged, came when the rebels’ supply ships were eliminated, one by one, with Indian naval intelligence inputs, cutting off all supplies to the rebel-held areas. That in turn allowed the Sri Lankan ground forces to make rapid advances and unravel the de facto state the Tigers had established in Sri Lanka’s north and east.

Indeed, Rajapaksa deftly played the China, India and Pakistan cards to maximize gains. After key Tamil Tiger leaders had been killed in the fighting, Rajapaksa — to New Delhi’s acute mortification — thanked China, India and Pakistan in the same breath for Sri Lanka’s victory. Today, India stands more marginalized than ever in Sri Lanka. Its natural constituency — the Tamils — feels not only betrayed, but also looks at India as a colluder in the bloodbath. India already had alienated the Sinhalese in the 1980s, when it first armed the Tamil Tigers and then sought to disarm them through an ill-starred peacekeeping foray that left almost three times as many Indian troops dead as the 1999 Kargil war with Pakistan.

India’s waning leverage over Sri Lanka is manifest from the way it now has to jostle for influence there with archrivals China and Pakistan. Hambantota — the billion-dollar port Beijing is building on Sri Lanka’s
southeast — symbolizes the Chinese strategic challenge to India from the oceans.

Even as some 250,000 displaced Tamils — equivalent to the population of Belfast — continue to be held incommunicado in miserable conditions in barbed-wire camps to this day, India has been unable to persuade Colombo to set them free. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said recently that India
has conveyed its “concerns in no uncertain terms to Sri Lanka on various occasions, stressing the need for them to focus on resettling and rehabilitating the displaced Tamil population at the earliest.” But India seems unable to make a difference even with messages delivered in “no uncertain terms.”

Yet, such has been the unstinted Indian support that even after the crushing of the Tigers, India went out the way to castigate the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay, in June for shining a spotlight on the deplorable human-rights situation in Sri Lanka. India accused Ms. Pillay — a distinguished
South African judge of Indian descent who has sought an independent international investigation into alleged war crimes committed by all sides in Sri Lanka — of going beyond her brief, saying “the independence of the high commissioner cannot be presumed to exceed that of the UN Secretary General.”
Subsequently, India voted in the IMF for a $2.8 billion loan desperately needed by cash-strapped Colombo.

The costs for lending such support have been high. New Delhi today is groping to bring direction to its Sri
Lanka policy, even as it struggles to respond to the Chinese strategy to build maritime choke points in the Indian Ocean region. The current upsurge of Sinhalese chauvinism flows from the fact that the Sri Lankan military accomplished a task whose pursuit forced the mightier Indian army to make an ignominious exit 19 years ago. Consequently, Colombo is going to be even less inclined than before to listen to New
Delhi.

Against this background, the least India can do is to help improve the humanitarian situation in Sri Lanka. It cannot impotently watch as the Sri Lankan government continues to hold more than a quarter of a
million innocent Tamil refugees as prisoners in internment camps in the north. The arrival of the annual winter monsoon rains is causing a further deterioration of living conditions in these camps, threatening the health and safety of the internally displaced persons (IDPs). To make up for the sins of its policy, India — more than 100,000 Sri Lankan refugees camping in Tamil Nadu — can do quite a few things.

●First, India must start exerting open, intense pressure on Colombo to free the more than 250,000 IDPs from internment. They must be granted freedom of movement. Also, the 11,000 suspected rebels being separately detained at military sites should be identified and not denied access to legal
representation.

●Second, it has to insist the government resettle the IDPs in their hometowns and villages. As Walter Kaelin, the UN secretary-general’s representative on the human rights of IDPs, recently said: “It is imperative to immediately take all measures necessary to de-congest the overcrowded camps in northern Sri Lanka with their difficult and risky living conditions. The IDPs should be allowed to leave these camps voluntarily and in freedom, safety and dignity to their homes. If this is not possible in the near future, the displaced must be allowed to stay with host families or in open transit sites.”

●Three, India must warn Colombo of serious consequences if it seeks to change local demography by settling Sinhalese in Tamil areas. With overt official encouragement, thousands of Sinhalese already have flocked to the east to regain farming and other land from which they claim to have been driven out in the 1980s by the Tamil Tigers. Attempts to “Sinhalise” the north and east will not only deprive local Tamils and Muslims of their livelihood, but also sow the seeds of another cycle of conflict. Rajapaksa, post-victory, has not only rejected federalism and regional autonomy, but also — to the chagrin of Tamils — demerged the northern and eastern provinces.

●Four, India should demand that the IDP camps be opened up for effective monitoring through the grant of full access to humanitarian organizations, including the UN and International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), and to the media.

●And five, India ought to join hands with the co-chairs of the so-called Friends of Sri Lanka — the US, European Union, Norway and Japan — to oppose further disbursement of the IMF loan until Colombo meets the commitments on IDP resettlement it made in its July letter of intent to the Fund. In the letter, it
pledged to resettle 70 to 80 per cent of the IDPs by the year-end — a further shift in its deadline. Democratic players must employ further disbursements as leverage to relieve a deteriorating humanitarian situation.

More broadly, India should lean on Rajapaksa to restore democratic freedoms. The wartime
suppression of a free press and curtailment of fundamental rights continues in peacetime, undermining democratic freedoms and creating a fear psychosis. Sweeping emergency regulations remain in place, arming the security forces with expansive powers of search, arrest and seizure of property. Individuals can
still be held in unacknowledged detention for up to 18 months.

For national reconciliation and healing to begin, it is essential the government shed its war-gained powers. Unfortunately, Colombo still seeks to hold onto its special powers while suppressing the truth. Peace sought to be achieved through the brutal humiliation of an ethnic community has always proven elusive in world history. If Sri Lanka is to go from making war to making peace, the present opportunity has to be
seized before there is a recrudescence of violence. That can happen only if Colombo is diplomatically nudged by an India that works in tandem with other important players. With its leverage undermined, New Delhi no longer can operate on its own.

How Asia became important in international relations

Posted on November 15, 2009 by Chellaney

Berlin, Birthplace of Modern Asia

Brahma Chellaney

A column globally syndicated by Project Syndicate

NEW DELHI – By marking the Cold War’s end and the looming collapse of the Soviet Union, the fall of the Berlin Wall 20 years ago transformed global geopolitics. But no continent benefited more than Asia, whose dramatic economic rise since 1989 has occurred at a speed and scale without parallel in world history.

For Asia, the most important consequence of the fall of the Berlin Wall was that the collapse of communism produced a shift from the primacy of military power to economic power in shaping the international order. To be sure, rapid economic growth also occurred during the Industrial Revolution and in the post-WWII period. But in the post-Cold War period, economic growth by itself has contributed to altering global power relations.

Another defining event in 1989 was the Tiananmen Square massacre of pro-democracy protestors in Beijing. If not for the Cold War’s end, the West would not have let China off the hook over those killings. Instead, the West adopted a pragmatic approach, shunning trade sanctions and helping to integrate China into the global economy and international institutions through the liberalizing influence of foreign investment and trade. Had the United States and its allies pursued an approach centered on punitive sanctions, as with Cuba and Burma, the result would have been a less prosperous, less open, and potentially destabilizing China.

Indeed, China’s phenomenal economic success – illustrated by its world-beating trade surplus, world’s largest foreign-currency reserves, and highest steel production – owes a lot to the West’s decision not to sustain trade sanctions after the Tiananmen Square massacre. Having vaulted past Germany to become the world’s biggest exporter, China now is set to displace Japan as the world’s second largest economy.

India’s rise as an economic giant is also linked to the post-1989 events. India was heavily involved in barter trade with the Soviet Union and its communist allies in Eastern Europe. When the East Bloc unraveled, India had to start paying for imports in hard cash. That rapidly depleted its modest foreign-exchange reserves, triggering a severe financial crisis in 1991, which in turn compelled India to embark on radical economic reforms that laid the foundations for its economic rise.

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

Geopolitically, the post-1989 gains extended far beyond the West. The Soviet Union’s sudden collapse was a strategic boon to Asia, eliminating a menacing empire and opening the way for China rapidly to pursue its interests globally. Russia’s decline in the 1990’s became China’s gain.

For India, the end of the Cold War triggered a foreign-policy crisis by eliminating the country’s most reliable partner, the Soviet Union. But, as with its 1991 financial crisis, India was able to emerge with a revamped foreign policy – one that abandoned the country’s quixotic traditions and embraced greater realism and pragmatism. Post-Cold War India began pursuing mutually beneficial strategic partnerships with other key players in Asia and the wider world. The new “global strategic partnership” with the United States – a defining feature of this decade – was made possible by the post-1989 shifts in Indian policy thinking.

Of course, not all post-1989 developments were positive. For example, the phenomenon of failing states, which has affected Asian security the most, is a direct consequence of the Cold War’s end. When the Cold War raged, one bloc or the other propped up weak states. But, with the Soviet Union’s disappearance, the US abandoned that game.

As a result, dysfunctional or failing states suddenly emerged in the 1990’s, constituting a threat to regional and international security by becoming home to transnational pirates (Somalia) or transnational terrorists (Pakistan and Afghanistan), or by their defiance of global norms (North Korea and Iran). Asia has suffered more casualties from the rise of international terrorism than any other region.

Moreover, two decades after the Berlin Wall fell, the spread of democracy has stalled. Between 1988 and 1990, as the Cold War was winding down, pro-democracy protests erupted far from Eastern Europe, overturning dictatorships in countries as different as Indonesia, South Korea, Taiwan, and Chile. After the Soviet disintegration, even Russia emerged as a credible candidate for democratic reform.

But, while the overthrow of totalitarian or autocratic regimes shifted the global balance of power in favor of the forces of democracy, not all the pro-democracy movements succeeded. And the subsequent “color revolutions” in places like Ukraine only instilled greater caution among the surviving authoritarian regimes, prompting them to implement measures to counter foreign-inspired democratization initiatives.

Aside from the retreat of democracy in Russia, China – now the world’s oldest autocracy – is demonstrating that when authoritarianism is entrenched, a marketplace of goods and services can stymie the marketplace of political ideas. Twenty years after communism’s fall, authoritarian capitalism has emerged as the leading challenger to the spread of democratic values.

Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2009.
http://www.project-syndicate.org

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The U.S.-China-India Strategic Triangle

Posted on November 6, 2009 by Chellaney

China-India tensions rising

By BRAHMA CHELLANEY

Japan Times, November 14, 2009

The India-China relationship has entered choppy waters due to a perceptible hardening in the Chinese stance. Anti-India rhetoric in the state-run Chinese media has intensified, even as China has stepped up military pressure along the disputed Himalayan frontier through cross-border incursions. Beijing also has resurrected its long-dormant claim to the northeastern Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh, nearly three times as large as Taiwan.

The more muscular Chinese stance clearly is tied to the new U.S.-India strategic partnership, symbolized by the nuclear deal and deepening military cooperation. As President George W. Bush declared in his valedictory speech, "We opened a new historic and strategic partnership with India."

The Obama administration, although committed to promoting that strategic partnership, has been reluctant to take New Delhi’s side in any of its disputes with Beijing. This has emboldened China to up the ante against India, with the Chinese Foreign Ministry employing language like "we demand" in a recent statement that labeled the Indian prime minister’s visit to Arunachal Pradesh a "disturbance."

New Delhi has hit back by permitting the Dalai Lama to tour Arunachal Pradesh and announcing an end to the practice of letting Chinese companies bring thousands of workers from China to work on projects in India. And in a public riposte to Beijing’s raising of objections to multilateral funding of any project in Arunachal, India has asked China to cease its infrastructure and military projects in another disputed region — Pakistan-held Kashmir.

The present pattern of border provocations, new force deployments and mutual recriminations is redolent of the situation that prevailed 47 years ago when China routed the unprepared Indian military in a surprise two-front aggression. Today, amid rising tensions, the danger of border skirmishes, if not a limited war, looks real.

Such tensions have been rising since 2006. Until 2005, China actually was eschewing anti-India rhetoric and pursuing a policy of active engagement with India, even as it continued to expand its strategic space in southern Asia, to New Delhi’s detriment. In fact, when Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao visited India in April 2005, the two countries unveiled six broad principles to help settle their festering border dispute. But after the Indo-U.S. defense-framework accord and nuclear deal were unveiled in quick succession in subsequent months, the mood in Beijing perceptibly changed.

That gave rise to a pattern that now has become commonplace: Chinese newspapers, individual bloggers, security think tanks and even officially blessed Web sites ratcheting up an "India threat" scenario. A U.S.-India military alliance has always been a strategic nightmare for the Chinese, and the ballyhooed Indo-U.S. global strategic partnership triggered alarm bells in Beijing.

The partnership, though, falls short of a formal military alliance. Still, the high-pitched Indian and American rhetoric that the new partnership represented a tectonic shift in geopolitical alignments apparently made Chinese policymakers believe that India was being groomed as a new Japan or Australia to America — a perception reinforced by subsequent arrangements and Indian orders for U.S. arms worth $3.5 billion in just the past year.

Clearly, New Delhi failed to foresee that its rush to forge close strategic bonds with Washington could provoke greater Chinese pressure and that, in such a situation, the U.S. actually would offer little comfort. Consequently, India finds itself in a spot today.

For one, Beijing calculatedly has sought to pressure India on multiple fronts — military, diplomatic and multilateral. For another, the U.S. — far from coming to India’s support — has shied away from even cautioning Beijing against any attempt to forcibly change the territorial status quo. Indeed, on a host of issues — from the Dalai Lama to the Arunachal dispute — Washington has chosen not to antagonize Beijing. That, in effect, has left India on its own.

The spectacle of the president of the most powerful country in the world seeking to curry favor with a rights-abusing China by shunning the Dalai Lama during the Tibetan leader’s Washington visit cannot but embolden the Chinese leadership to step up pressure on India, the seat of the Tibetan government in exile.

U.S. President Barack Obama also has signaled that America’s strategic relationship with India will not be at the expense of the fast-growing U.S. ties with Beijing. The Obama team, after reviewing the Bush-era arrangements, now intends to abjure elements in its ties with New Delhi that could rile China, including any joint military drill in Arunachal or a 2007-style naval exercise involving the U.S., India, Australia, Japan and Singapore. Even trilateral U.S. naval maneuvers with India and Japan are being abandoned so as not to raise China’s hackles.

As his secretary of state did in February, Obama is undertaking an Asia tour that begins in Japan and ends in China — the high spot — while skipping India. In fact, Washington is quietly charting a course of tacit neutrality on the Arunachal dispute. Yet Beijing remains suspicious of the likely trajectory of U.S.-India strategic ties, including pre-1962-style CIA meddling in Tibet.

This distrust found expression in the latest People’s Daily editorial that accused New Delhi of pursuing a foreign policy of "befriending the far and attacking the near." Left to fend for itself, New Delhi has decided to steer clear of any confrontation with Beijing.

Still, even as it seeks to tamp down tensions with Beijing, New Delhi cannot rule out the use of force by China at a time when hardliners there seem to believe that a swift, 1962-style military victory can help fashion a Beijing-oriented Asia.

Having declared that America’s "most important bilateral relationship in the world" is with Beijing, the Obama team must caution it against crossing well-defined red lines or going against its gospel of China’s "peaceful rise."

Brahma Chellaney is professor of strategic studies at the independent, privately funded Center for Policy Research in New Delhi and the author of "Asian Juggernaut: The Rise of China, India and Japan," published by HarperCollins, with a new U.S. edition scheduled for release in January.

The Japan Times: Saturday, Nov. 14, 2009

(C) All rights reserved

How post-1989 events transformed the world

Posted on November 3, 2009 by Chellaney

OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR November 4, 2009

Europe Got Freedom, Asia Got Rich

By BRAHMA CHELLANEY

NEW DELHI — On its 20th anniversary, the fall of the Berlin Wall stands out as the most momentous event in post-World War II history. The end of the Cold War transformed geopolitics, thereby changing the world. But no continent benefited more than Asia, as has been epitomized by its dramatic economic rise, the speed and scale of which has no parallel in world history.

An important post-1989 effect was the shift from the primacy of military power to a greater role for economic power in shaping global geopolitics.

That helped promote not only an economic boom in Asia, but also led to an eastward movement of global power and influence, with Asia emerging as an important player on the world stage.

Global power shifts, as symbolized by Asia’s ascent, are now being triggered not by military triumphs or geopolitical realignments but by a factor unique to our contemporary world — rapid economic growth.

Rapid growth was also witnessed during the Industrial Revolution and in the post-World War II period. But in the post-Cold War period, economic growth by itself has contributed to qualitatively altering global power equations.

The Cold War’s end, however, facilitated the West’s pragmatic approach to shun trade sanctions and help integrate China with global institutions through the liberalizing influence of foreign investment and trade. Had the United States and its allies pursued the opposite approach, centered on punitive sanctions — as have been applied against Cuba and Burma, for example — the result would have been a less-prosperous, less-open and a potentially destabilizing China. Instead, China now is set to displace Japan as the world’s No. 2 economy.

India’s rise as a new economic giant also is linked to the post-1989 events. India was heavily into barter trade with the Soviet Union and its Communist allies in Eastern Europe, so when the East bloc began to unravel, India had to start paying for imports in harsh cash.

That rapidly depleted its modest foreign-exchange reserves, triggering a severe financial crisis in 1991. The crisis, in turn, compelled India to embark on radical economic reforms, which laid the foundations for India’s economic rise.

More broadly, the emblematic defeat of Marxism in 1989 allowed Asian countries, including China and India, to overtly pursue capitalist policies. Although China’s economic renaissance already had begun under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping, the Chinese Communist Party, after 1989, was able to publicly subordinate ideology to wealth creation.

So, while Mao Zedong gave China unity, nationalism and self-respect, Deng helped make it prosperous. That example, in turn, has had a constructive influence on surviving Communist parties in Asia and beyond.

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

For India, the end of the Cold War triggered a foreign-policy crisis by eliminating the country’s most reliable partner, the Soviet Union, described as “a trusted and tested friend.” That crisis helped lay the base for a revamped foreign policy.

It compelled India to overcome its didactically quixotic traditions and inject greater realism and pragmatism into its foreign policy. Post-Cold War, India began pursuing mutually beneficial strategic partnerships with other key players in Asia and the wider world.

The new Indo-U.S. “global strategic partnership” — a defining feature of this decade — was made possible by the post-1989 shifts in Indian policy thinking.

To be sure, not all post-1989 developments were positive. The phenomenon of failing states, which has affected Asian security the most, is a direct consequence of the end of the Cold War. While the Cold War raged, weak states were propped up by one bloc or the other. Without the Soviet Union, the United States got out of that game.

That is the reason why dysfunctional or failing states began to emerge in the 1990s — a phenomenon that has contributed to making such states a threat to regional and international security either because they are home to transnational pirates (like Somalia) or transnational terrorists (Pakistan and Afghanistan), or because of their defiance of global norms (North Korea, Iran). Asia has suffered more casualties from international terrorism than any other region.

The overthrow of a number of totalitarian or autocratic regimes did shift the global balance of power in favor of the forces of democracy. But not all the pro-democracy movements were successful. And the subsequent “color revolutions” only instilled greater caution among the surviving authoritarian regimes, prompting them to set up countermeasures to foreign-inspired democratization initiatives.

Two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the spread of democracy has stalled. China, now the world’s oldest autocracy, is demonstrating that when authoritarianism is deeply entrenched, a marketplace of goods and services is able to stymie a marketplace of political ideas. Authoritarian capitalism indeed has emerged as the leading challenge to the international spread of democratic values.

Brahma Chellaney is professor of strategic studies at the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi and the author of “Asian Juggernaut: The Rise of China, India and Japan.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/04/opinion/04iht-edchellaney.html

Why the U.S. must re-frame its Afghanistan strategy

Posted on November 3, 2009 by Chellaney

An Unwinnable Battle

Brahma Chellaney The Times of India 3 November 2009

With no viable option in sight to salvage America’s faltering Afghan war, Barack Obama faces a critical test in his young presidency. Sending tens of thousands of more troops into battle, as the top US general in Afghanistan wants, risks a Vietnam-style quagmire. Slashing troop levels to concentrate on counterterrorist operations through air power and special ground forces will expose Obama to political attacks at home. Obama thus is searching for the illusory middle ground.

Going big and going long in Afghanistan will serve no country’s interests other than Pakistan’s. Indeed, as long as NATO’s Afghan war rages, US policy will stay hostage to Islamabad, even though it is Pakistan’s duplicitous policy of aiding militants while pretending to be on America’s side that has resulted in the Taliban gaining the momentum. Only a military exit can help free US policy. After all, with US supply lines to Afghanistan running through Pakistan, waging the Afghan war has entailed supporting Pakistan through multibillion-dollar US aid, to the extent that Islamabad this year has emerged as the largest recipient of American assistance in the world.

In that light, is it any surprise that top Pakistanis have lined up to plead against a US withdrawal? Munificent aid to Pakistan traditionally has flown only when the US has been involved in war – hot or cold. Absence of war usually has fostered US neglect of Pakistan. If the US decides to draw down forces in Afghanistan, it will not only stop raining dollars in Islamabad, but also Pakistani sanctuaries for the top Afghan Taliban leaders and other terrorist figures are likely to become US targets.

An Obama decision not to get deeper involved in Afghanistan won’t be an admission of defeat but a course correction on a war that presently is just not winnable. Obama has limited the US goal narrowly "to disrupt, dismantle and defeat al-Qaeda". But the US military’s real foe in Afghanistan is not the badly fragmented and enfeebled al-Qaeda, but a resurgent Taliban. Instead of seeking to rout the Taliban, Washington has encouraged the Pakistani, Afghan and Saudi intelligence services to hold proxy negotiations with the Taliban shura members, holed up in Quetta, Pakistan.

In fact, the US is fighting the wrong war. How can the Afghan war be won when America has limited its ground military campaign to just one side of the Af-Pak border even though the Taliban and other militants openly use the Pakistani side as a haven and staging ground for attacks? Not allowed to pursue the militants across the border, US troops in Nuristan, Kunar and other Afghan border regions find themselves as sitting ducks for surprise attacks orchestrated from Pakistani territory.

Had Washington sought to defeat the Taliban, a further military surge may have made sense, because an ascendant Taliban can be defeated only through major ground operations, not by airstrikes and covert action alone. But to rout an already-weakened al-Qaeda, the US doesn’t need to scale up the war. While acknowledging that al-Qaeda’s capability has been degraded to the extent that it is in no position to openly challenge US interests, American proponents of a bigger war contend that the real danger is of al-Qaeda reconstituting itself if a US pullback leads to the Taliban’s return to power.

Firstly, without large ground forces in Afghanistan or even major ground operations, the US can hold al-Qaeda remnants at bay in their havens in the mountainous tribal regions of Pakistan through covert operations, Predator drones and cruise-missile attacks, as it already is doing. Secondly, US air power and special-force operations, in combination with the support of ground forces of ethnic minorities and non-Taliban Pashtun warlords, can prevent the Taliban from grabbing power in Kabul again. That was the same combination that helped oust the Taliban from power. Even if the US pulls out most of its troops, it will have such punitive-denial capability as it intends to maintain military bases in Afghanistan in the long run.

American and international interests will be better served by gradually drawing down US troop levels. What unites the disparate insurgent elements is a common opposition to foreign military presence. A measured US pullback, far from bolstering the forces of global jihad, will eliminate the common unifying factor and unleash developments with largely internal or sub-regional significance. The most likely outcome of an Afghan power struggle triggered by a US decision to scale back the war would be the formalisation of the present de facto partition of Afghanistan along ethnic lines.

The possible emergence of smaller, more-governable states in the world’s "Terroristan" belt cannot be bad news. In such a scenario, the Tajiks, Uzbeks, Hazaras and other ethnic minorities would be able to ensure self-governance in the Afghan areas they dominate, leaving the Pashtun lands on both sides of the British-drawn but now-disappearing Durand Line in ferment. Pakistan ultimately is bound to pay a price for creating and nurturing the Taliban monster. And that price is likely to directly impinge on its territorial unity.

The writer is professor, Centre for Policy Research.

Tackling an assertive China: India’s options

Posted on October 30, 2009 by Chellaney

Insatiable dragon

As China continues with its provocations, India cannot pretend that all is well.

Brahma Chellaney

DNA newspaper, October 30, 2009

Although China invaded India in 1962, provoked a bloody clash at Nathu La in 1967 and triggered border skirmishes in 1986-87 by crossing the line of control in Samdurong Chu, this is the first time it has opened pressure points against India all along the Himalayan frontier in peacetime.

This pressure long predates the Dalai Lama’s plans to visit Arunachal Pradesh. Indeed, the pressure gradually has been building up since 2006, largely in reaction to the Indo-US strategic partnership, which was set in motion by the separate unveiling in 2005 of the nuclear deal and defence-framework accord.

By muscling up to India, is China aiming to browbeat India or actually fashion an option to wage war?

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and other Indian officials have publicly sought to tamp down military tensions. But in contrast, the Chinese leadership has been mum on the Himalayan border situation even as the bellicose rhetoric in China’s state-run media has affected public opinion, with 90 per cent of respondents in a Global Times online poll citing India as the No. 1 threat to China’s security. The Communist Party’s official newspaper, the People’s Daily, after asking India to consider the costs of "a potential confrontation with China," ran another denunciatory editorial recently on New Delhi’s "recklessness and arrogance."

The current situation, in some aspects, parallels the one that prevailed in the run-up to the 1962 attack, which then Chinese premier Zhou En Lai declared was designed "to teach India a lesson."

Whether Beijing actually sets out to teach India "the final lesson" will, of course, depend on several calculations, including India’s defence preparedness, domestic factors within China and the availability of a propitious international timing of the type that the Cuban missile crisis provided in 1962. But why should New Delhi repeatedly and gratuitously offer explanations or justifications for the continuing Chinese cross-frontier incursions? If such intrusions are due to differing perceptions about the line of control, let the Chinese say that. But note: Beijing hasn’t proffered that excuse.

The issue up to 1962 was Aksai Chin. But having gobbled up Aksai China, an area almost as big as Switzerland, China now claims Arunachal, nearly three times as large as Taiwan, to help widen its annexation of resource-rich Tibet. Since ancient times, the Himalayas have been regarded as India’s northern frontiers. But China is laying claim to territories south of the Himalayan watershed. Having lost its outer buffer — Tibet — India cannot lose its inner buffer — the Himalayas — or else the enemy will arrive in its plains.

Yet, instead of putting the focus on the source of China’s claim — Tibet — and on Beijing’s attempt to territorially enlarge its Tibet annexation to what it calls "southern Tibet" since 2006, India fights shy of gently shining a spotlight on Tibet as the lingering core issue.

Both on strategy and capability, India is found wanting. Unable to define its own game-plan, it plays into China’s containment-behind-the-façade-of-engagement strategy by staying put in an unending, barren process of border talks going on since 1981, even though it realizes Beijing has no intent to reach a political settlement. Worse still, it agreed in August to let the border talks go off on a tangent and turn into an all-encompassing strategic dialogue, thereby arming Beijing with new leverage to condition a border settlement to the achievement of greater strategic congruence.

Now consider capability: More than 11 years after it gate-crashed the nuclear-weapons club, India conspicuously lacks even a barely minimal deterrent capability against China. Instead of giving topmost priority to building a credible deterrent against China — possible only through a major augmentation of indigenous nuclear and missile capabilities — India is focused on the spendthrift import of conventional weapons.

Let’s be clear: No amount of conventional arms can effectively deter a nuclear foe, that too an adversary that enjoys an inherent military advantage against India by being positioned on the commanding upper reaches of the Himalayas.

Although China is playing provoker, New Delhi helped create the context to embolden Beijing to up the ante. Can it be forgotten that New Delhi for long has indulged in ritualized happy talk about its relations with Beijing, brushing problems under the rug and hyping the outcome of every bilateral summit?

Even today, as New Delhi stares at the harvest of a mismanagement of relations with China by successive Indian governments that chose propitiation to leverage building, attempts are being made to pull the wool over public eyes by calling the Himalayan border "peaceful." Speaking honestly about a relationship fraught with major problems and lurking dangers is an essential first step to protect India’s interests.

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U.S. factor in Sino-Indian relations

Posted on October 28, 2009 by Chellaney

U.S. spurs China-India tensions

A need to dissuade Beijing from any resort to force

By Brahma Chellaney
Washington Times, October 28, 2009

The India-China relationship has entered choppy waters because of a perceptible hardening in the Chinese stance. Anti-India rhetoric in the state-run Chinese media has intensified, even as China has stepped up military pressure along the disputed Himalayan frontier through frequent cross-border incursions. Beijing also has resurrected its long-dormant claim to the northeastern Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh, nearly three times as large as Taiwan.

The more-muscular Chinese stance clearly is tied to the new U.S.-India strategic partnership, symbolized by the nuclear deal and deepening military cooperation. As President George W. Bush declared in his valedictory speech, "We opened a new historic and strategic partnership with India."

The Obama administration, although committed to promoting that strategic partnership, has been reluctant to take New Delhi’s side in any of its disputes with Beijing. This has emboldened China to up the ante against India, with the Chinese Foreign Ministry employing language like "we demand" in a recent statement that labeled the Indian prime minister’s visit to Arunachal Pradesh a "disturbance." The Communist Party’s official newspaper, the People’s Daily, after asking India to consider the costs of "a potential confrontation with China," ran another denunciatory editorial recently on New Delhi’s "recklessness and arrogance."

New Delhi has hit back by permitting the Dalai Lama to tour Arunachal Pradesh and announcing an end to the practice of Chinese companies bringing thousands of workers from China to work on projects in India. And in a public riposte to Beijing’s raising of objections to multilateral funding of any project in Arunachal, India has asked China to cease its infrastructure and military projects in another disputed region – Pakistan-held Kashmir.

The present pattern of border provocations, new force deployments and mutual recriminations is redolent of the situation that prevailed 47 years ago, when China – taking advantage of the advent of the Cuban missile crisis, which brought the world to the brink of a nuclear Armageddon – routed the unprepared Indian military in a surprise two-front aggression. Today, amid rising tensions, the danger of border skirmishes, if not a limited war, looks real.

Such tensions have been rising since 2006. Until 2005, China was eschewing anti-India rhetoric and pursuing a policy of active engagement with India even as it continued to expand its strategic space in southern Asia, to New Delhi’s detriment. In fact, when Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao visited India in April 2005, the two countries unveiled six broad principles to help settle their festering border dispute. But after the Indo-U.S. defense-framework accord and nuclear deal were unveiled in quick succession in subsequent months, the mood in Beijing changed perceptibly. That gave rise to a pattern that now has become commonplace: Chinese newspapers, individual bloggers, security think tanks and even officially blessed Web sites ratcheted up an "India threat" scenario.

A U.S.-India military alliance has always been a strategic nightmare for the Chinese, and the ballyhooed Indo-U.S. global strategic partnership triggered alarm bells in Beijing. The partnership, though, falls short of a formal military alliance. Still, the high-pitched Indian and American rhetoric that the new partnership represented a tectonic shift in geopolitical alignments apparently made Chinese policymakers believe India was being groomed as a new Japan or Australia to America – a perception reinforced by subsequent arrangements and Indian orders for U.S. arms worth $3.5 billion in just the past year.

Clearly, New Delhi failed to foresee that its rush to forge close strategic bonds with Washington could provoke greater Chinese pressure and that in such a situation, the United States actually would offer little comfort. Consequently, India finds itself in a spot.

For one thing, Beijing calculatedly has sought to pressure India on multiple fronts – military, diplomatic and multilateral. For another, the United States – far from coming to India’s support – has shied away from even cautioning Beijing against any attempt to forcibly change the territorial status quo. Indeed, on a host of issues – from the Dalai Lama to the Arunachal dispute – Washington has chosen not to antagonize Beijing. That, in effect, has left India on its own.

The spectacle of the president of the most powerful country in the world seeking to curry favor with a rights-abusing China by shunning the Dalai Lama during the Tibetan leader’s Washington visit cannot but embolden the Chinese leadership to step up pressure on India, the seat of the Tibetan government in exile. Mr. Obama also has signaled that America’s strategic relationship with India will not be at the expense of the fast-growing U.S. ties with Beijing.

The Obama team, after reviewing the Bush-era arrangements, intends to abjure elements in its ties with New Delhi that could rile China, including any joint military drill in Arunachal or a 2007-style naval exercise involving the United States, India, Australia, Japan and Singapore. Even trilateral U.S. naval maneuvers with India and Japan are being abandoned so as not to raise China’s hackles. As his secretary of state did in February, Mr. Obama is undertaking an Asia tour that begins in Japan and ends in China – the high spot – while skipping India. In fact, Washington is quietly charting a course of tacit neutrality on the Arunachal dispute.

Yet Beijing remains suspicious of the likely trajectory of U.S.-India strategic ties, including pre-1962-style CIA meddling in Tibet. This distrust found expression in the People’s Daily editorial that accused New Delhi of pursuing a foreign policy of "befriending the far and attacking the near."

Left to fend for itself, New Delhi has decided to steer clear of any confrontation with Beijing. As the prime minister of the Tibetan government in exile, Samdhong Rinpoche, has put it: "For the past few months, China has adopted an aggressive attitude and is indulging in many provocative activities, which are being tolerated by Indian government in a very passive manner."

Still, even as it seeks to tamp down tensions with Beijing, New Delhi cannot rule out the use of force by China at a time when hard-liners there seem to believe that a swift, 1962-style military victory can help fashion a Beijing-oriented Asia.

Having declared that America’s "most important bilateral relationship in the world" is with Beijing, the Obama team must caution China against crossing well-defined red lines or going against its self-touted gospel of China’s "peaceful rise."

Brahma Chellaney is professor of strategic studies at the independent, privately funded Center for Policy Research in New Delhi and the author of "Asian Juggernaut: The Rise of China, India and Japan" (HarperCollins 2006, with a new U.S. edition scheduled for release in January 2010).

Tensions in the China-India-U.S. triangle

Posted on October 26, 2009 by Chellaney

Wrong move in Sino-Indian chess

The Indo-US strategic tie-up has served as the key instigation in China’s hardening stance towards India

Brahma Chellaney Mint October 26, 2009

The India-China relationship has entered choppy waters due to a perceptible hardening in the Chinese stance. Anti-India rhetoric in the state-run Chinese media has intensified, even as China has stepped up military pressure along the disputed Himalayan frontier through frequent cross-border incursions. Beijing also has resurrected its long dormant claim to Arunachal Pradesh.

The more muscular Chinese stance clearly is tied to the new US-India strategic partnership, symbolized by the nuclear deal and deepening military cooperation. As former US president George W. Bush declared in his valedictory speech, “We opened a new historic and strategic partnership with India.”

The Barack Obama administration, although committed to promoting that strategic partnership, has been reluctant to take New Delhi’s side in any of its disputes with Beijing. This has emboldened China to up the ante against India.

Indeed, the present pattern of border provocations, new force deployments and mutual recriminations is redolent of the situation that prevailed 47 years ago when China—taking advantage of the advent of the Cuban missile crisis, which brought the world to the brink of a nuclear Armageddon—routed the unprepared Indian military in a surprise two-front aggression.

The new tensions are of recent origin. Until mid-2005, China was eschewing anti-India rhetoric and pursuing a policy of active engagement with India, even as it continued to expand its strategic space in southern Asia, to New Delhi’s detriment. In fact, when Premier Wen Jiabao visited India in April 2005, the two countries unveiled an important agreement identifying six broad principles to govern a border settlement.

But after the separate unveiling of the Indo-US defence framework accord and nuclear deal in 2005, the mood in Beijing perceptibly changed. That gave rise to a pattern that has become commonplace since: Chinese newspapers, individual bloggers, security think tanks and even officially blessed websites ratcheting up an “India threat” scenario.

A US-India military alliance has always been a strategic nightmare for the Chinese, and the ballyhooed Indo-US global strategic partnership, although it falls short of a formal military alliance, triggered alarm bells in Beijing. That raises the question whether New Delhi helped create the context, however inadvertently, for the new Chinese assertiveness by agreeing to participate in US-led “multinational operations”, share intelligence and build military-to-military interoperability (key elements of the defence framework accord) and to become the US’ partner on a new “global democracy initiative”—a commitment found in the nuclear agreement-in-principle.

While Beijing cannot hold a veto over New Delhi’s diplomatic or strategic initiatives, couldn’t India have avoided creating an impression that it was potentially being primed as a new junior partner (or spoke) in the US’ hub-and-spoke global alliance system?

India—with its hallowed traditions of policy independence—is an unlikely candidate to be a US ally in a patron-client framework. But the high-pitched Indian and American rhetoric that the new partnership represented a tectonic shift in geopolitical alignments apparently made Chinese policymakers believe that India was being groomed as a new Japan or Australia to the US—a perception reinforced by subsequent arrangements and defence transactions.

New Delhi failed to foresee that its rush to forge close strategic bonds with Washington could provoke greater Chinese pressure and that, in such a situation, the US actually would offer little comfort to India. Consequently, India finds itself in a spot.

For one, Beijing calculatedly has sought to badger India on multiple fronts: military—Chinese cross-border incursions nearly doubled in one year, from 140 in 2007 to 270 in 2008, according to Indian defence officials, with “no significant increase”, to quote the foreign secretary, in the 2009 level; diplomatic—for instance, strongly protesting a prime ministerial visit to Arunachal Pradesh and issuing visas on a separate sheet to Jammu and Kashmir residents; and multilateral—launching a diplomatic offensive to undercut Indian sovereignty over Arunachal Pradesh, as at the Asian Development Bank. For another, the US—far from coming to India’s support—has shied away from even cautioning Beijing against any attempt to forcibly change the existing territorial status quo. Indeed, on a host of issues—from the Dalai Lama to the Arunachal Pradesh issue—Washington has chosen not to antagonize Beijing.

That, in effect, has left India on its own. The Obama administration isn’t unfriendly to India. It just doesn’t see India as able to make an important difference to US geopolitical interests. As his secretary of state Hillary Clinton did in February, US President Obama is undertaking an Asia tour that begins in Japan and ends in China—the high spot—while skipping India.

But playing to India’s weakness for flattery, Obama is to massage its ego by honouring it with his presidency’s first state dinner. Such a glitzy affair jibes with Washington’s current business focus on India: Promoting big-ticket export items such as nuclear power reactors and conventional weapons, while prodding New Delhi to be helpful on the Af-Pak (Afghanistan-Pakistan) front.

To be sure, Obama wants to advance the Indo-US partnership, as part of which New Delhi has placed arms purchase orders, according to the Indian ambassador to the US, worth a staggering $3.5 billion just last year. But he also has signalled that such a relationship with India will not be at the expense of Washington’s fast-growing ties with Beijing. The US needs Chinese capital inflows as much as China needs US consumers—an economic interdependence of such import that snapping it would amount to mutually assured destruction (MAD). Even politically, China, with its international leverage, counts for more in US policy than New Delhi or Tokyo. Indeed, as the US-China relationship acquires a wider and deeper base in the coming years, the strains in some of the US’ existing military or strategic tie-ups in Asia will become pronounced.

Against that background, it is no surprise that Washington now intends to abjure elements in its ties with New Delhi that could rile China, including any joint military drill in Arunachal Pradesh or trilateral naval manoeuvres with India and Japan. In fact, Washington is quietly charting a course of tacit neutrality on the Arunachal Pradesh issue, just as its ally Australia has done rather publicly.

Left to fend for itself both on the China and Af-Pak fronts, New Delhi has decided to steer clear of any potential aggravation or confrontation with Beijing. Discretion, after all, is the better part of valour. India, however, cannot afford to be out on a limb. The Indo-US partnership has turned into a great opportunity for Washington to win multi-billion dollar Indian contracts and co-opt India in strategic arrangements, without a concomitant obligation to be on India’s side or to extend political help on regional and international issues.

Joint military exercises indeed have become a basis to make India buy increasing quantities of US arms so as to build compatibility and interoperability between the two militaries. Even counterterrorism is emerging as a major area of defence sales to India, despite the US doing little to help dismantle Pakistan’s state-run terror complex against India or bring the real masterminds of the Mumbai attacks to justice.

With Obama pursuing a Sino-centric Asia policy, and with China-friendly heads of government ensconced in Australia, Japan and Taiwan, it is apparent that New Delhi’s diplomatic calculations have gone terribly wrong. In its exuberance, the government had convinced itself that the way for India to carve out a larger international role was to bandwagon with the US, instead of following China’s example and rapidly developing comprehensive national power.

Yet the present muscular Chinese approach, paradoxically, reinforces the very line of Indian thinking that engendered greater Chinese assertiveness—that India has little option other than to align with the US. Such thinking blithely ignores the limitations of the Indo-US partnership arising from the vicissitudes and compulsions of US policy. Washington indeed is showing through its growing strategic cooperation with China and Pakistan that it does not believe in exclusive strategic partnership in any region.

India can wield international power only through the accretion of its own economic and military strength. In fact, the only way China can be deterred from making a land grab across the line of control or nibbling further at Indian territories is for India to have sufficient nuclear and missile capability. So, augmenting India’s deterrent capabilities to credible but minimal levels has to be priority No. 1. A stable, mutually beneficial equation with China is more likely to be realized if there is no trans-Himalayan military imbalance or Indian security dependency on a third party.

Brahma Chellaney, professor of strategic studies at the Centre for Policy Research, is the author, most recently, of Asian Juggernaut: The Rise of China, India and Japan (2006). Comment at theirview@livemint.com