India and China on collision course?

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By Ramesh Thakur

For Pakistan’s ruling elite, the arch-rival is India. But India’s arch-rival is China. The simple distinction is critical for engagement with India.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper visited China in December in part because, wanting to exploit the economic opportunities of both rising Asian giants and not offend either, he couldn’t not go to China after spending three days in India in November. But he did not visit Pakistan. This is a welcome development from India’s point of view. Analysts too need to switch their analytical frame from India-Pakistan-U.S. to the new and more consequential India-China-U.S. strategic triangle.

Part of the reason for outsiders confusing the two observations is that, while Pakistan makes no secret of its attitude, the broad train of interests guiding India’s foreign policy requires it to co-operate with China on many international issues and mute public expressions of the bilateral rivalry. The identification of China as the main object of the nuclear tests in 1998 was a rare slip.
Like others, Indians are divided on whether China’s recent muscular assertiveness is rooted in insecurity or hubris. A clash between overgoverned China and undergoverned India is less unimaginable than one between China and the U.S. Both have tried to keep the unresolved border dispute frozen while attempting to build and improve relations on other fronts.

The merits of the conflict aside, the 1962 border war was caused by a flawed sequence of statements and actions by India. For many years founding prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru, his ego frequently massaged by the Chinese who were bemused at his efforts to tutor the consummate Zhou Enlai in the art of diplomacy, ignored the strategic legacies inherited from the British on how best to defend the Raj against actual and potential enemies. When Nehru did awaken to the threat to India’s territorial security by the positioning of Chinese troops on the Himalayas, his ill-advised public sabre rattling provoked Beijing into calling India’s military bluff and inflicting a humiliating defeat. A broken Nehru died within two years.

The risk now is China may overplay its hand by under-estimating how much India has changed.
The 3,500-kilometre border is volatile on both sides, running from India’s insurgency-plagued northeast along Nepal and Tibet and on the edges of Xinjiang, home of the Uighurs. Curiously insensitive to the fact that Pakistan was created by splitting India, China is hyper-sensitive to “splittism” in relation to Taiwan, Tibet and Xinjiang. It is exasperated with the safe haven given by India to the Dalai Lama and the increasingly militant thousands of Tibetan exiles.

China was the willing source of Pakistan’s nuclearization. Thomas Reed, a former nuclear weapons designer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and a senior official in the Ford, Carter and Reagan administrations, has claimed that Pakistan’s first nuclear weapon test was carried out for it by China. “We believe that during (Benazir) Bhutto’s term in office, China tested Pakistan’s first bomb for her in 1990. That’s why the Pakistanis were so quick to respond to the Indian nuclear tests in 1998. It only took them two weeks and three days.”

A report in the Washington Post last November concluded that the “deliberate act of proliferation” by China began in earnest in 1982 with the transfer of weapons-grade uranium and a blueprint for making a bomb that China had already tested. Thus began the chain of proliferation that extended later to Iran and Libya.

China’s (and Pakistan’s) unease at India’s rising global clout intensified with the India-U.S. civil nuclear co-operation deal and India’s growing military ties with the U.S. and Israel. China tried to block a $2.9-billion loan from the Asian Development Bank to India because some of the money was for a flood control project in the state of Arunachal Pradesh, parts of which China claims. Beijing has protested also about the Indian prime minister and president and the Dalai Lama visiting those regions.
India worries that China is trying to choke it strategically by a string of pearls strategy, including access to and development of ports in Myanmar, Sri Lanka and Pakistan, the construction of a highway from China into central Nepal and the extension of China’s controversial rail link to Tibet to the border with Nepal. The two countries are also manoeuvring for position in Afghanistan for the inevitable time when westerners pull up and out. There have also been tit-for-tat protestations about actions in relation to Indian and Pakistani administered Kashmir.

The latest U.S. Quadrennial Defence Review states that lack of transparency in military development and decision-making processes raises questions about China’s future conduct and intentions. It notes India’s rapidly improving military capabilities through increased defence acquisitions, including long-range maritime surveillance, maritime interdiction and patrolling, air interdiction and strategic airlift.
It acknowledges shared democratic values, an open political system, and commitment to global stability as demonstrated through peacekeeping, counter-piracy, humanitarian assistance and disaster relief efforts. It welcomes India’s rising profile “as a net provider of security in the Indian Ocean and beyond.”

The Indian Navy keeps a watchful eye to the east of India’s coastline from the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. It is preparing to open a base at the southern tip of the Maldives chain to the west. The surveillance aircraft, helicopters and, possibly, ships based there will be supplemented by radar installed across the Maldives and linked to India’s coastal command.
Meanwhile, bilateral trade has climbed from $3 billion in 2000 to $51 billion. Astonishingly, the annual growth in trade with China is more than India’s total trade with Japan. The two teamed up effectively in the Doha trade talks and in the Copenhagen climate change conference. They share a major interest in eradicating extremist Islamism in Central Asia, Afghanistan and Pakistan. There are low-intensity combined military exercises, a pale shadow of the land, air and sea exercises that Indian forces engage with U.S., Australian, Singaporean and Japanese militaries. (The Ottawa Citizen)

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