India and China: Who’s Carrot, Who’s Stick?

Our experts are comfortable with the idea that India is an emerging power centre, using that notion to largely explain its multi-pronged approach to foreign policy.

We think mutual back-slapping with Obama and Abe is a strong counter to China reaching out to Pakistan and Sri Lanka. Signing a cost-ineffective deal for an old naval carrier with Russia is sending another signal to China, we assume. We send our President to Vietnam and host their Prime Minister in New Delhi to indicate we know all about the South China Sea dispute.

We cloak these acts of steel with a fabric of geniality. Our Prime Minister receives the President of China in his home state of Gujarat and teaches him how to work the charkha in Sabarmati Ashram. Our Prime Minister goes to China with full information on Chinese monk Xuanzang trip to Gujarat 1400 years ago. We also ask BJP chief Amit Shah to defer meeting the Dalai Lama before our Prime Minister’s visit to China.

The hot-and-cold – or carrot-and-stick, if you wish – policy has its returns, the experts tell us. The Chinese President received our Prime Minister in his home province of Xi’an. We signed not one, not two, but 24 agreements worth 10 billion dollars in various sectors. There’s also this proposed tie-up between Doordarshan and its Chinese counterpart, CCTV. But the icing on the cake is we Indians now have access to a motorable route to Mansarovar and Mount Kailash, the mythical abode of Shiva.

If you look at it this way, our Prime Minister’s visit to China will be deemed a success. That’s how these experts will keep projecting it in the coming days.

I cannot say if they are right or wrong because I am not an expert. I get a different sense of what happened.

Like many other nations we also went to China to attract investments. We got them. As a bonus, we can reach Shiva’s abode faster. And we are now convinced that more and more Chinese can speak in Hindi do Yoga. We will soon have Chennai familiarizing itself with Chongqing, Hyderabad with Gingdao. The Chinese will also help us set up a skill centre in the Ahmedabad of Gandhi.

As to our Prime Minister, he was received with so much warmth by Xi Jinping. They took care to offer an all-bean spread in deference to Modi’s personal gastronomy – assorted vegetables with pancake and red bean rice, bean curd with mushroom, water chestnut in bean sauce, braised asparagus and bamboo fungus and lotus root.

Those were their carrots. And here were their sticks. Even before CCTV broadcast a controversial map of India that showed Arunachal Pradesh as 'South Tibet' and excluded large parts of Jammu and Kashmir, their mouth piece Global Times had written about Modi’s visit:

1."Modi has been busy strengthening India's ties with neighbouring countries to compete with China, while trying to take advantage of the tremendous opportunities for economic development created by China.

2."Modi has also been playing little tricks over border disputes and security issues”, hoping to boost his domestic prestige while increasing his leverage in negotiations with China.

3.”Modi should no longer visit the disputed border region (Arunachal Pradesh) in pursuit of his own political interests, nor should he deliver any remarks that infringe on the consensus on bilateral ties.”

4.”The Indian government should completely stop supporting the Dalai Lama, and stop making the Tibetan issue a stumbling block to the Sino-Indian relationship.”

The message was clear. Know your place. Is that what the Chinese are telling India?

Our Prime Minister has talked of “nation first” as a preamble to all his policies. It is not fair to put it down only to nationalist ideology. The phrase has found an echo in programmes like Swachch Bharat. But where the phrase matters most, when we deal with neighbours like China to resolve disputes, specially of the border-and-boundary kind, has it yielded us any ground?

What does China want? For a country which concealed its capabilities for years, it’s splurges into infrastructure development is an open book today. The revival of the Silk Route, the proposed maritime Silk Route, the industrial banks, the speed rails, energy pipeline networks, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, etc, make transparent it’s need to expand its economic tentacles, at least initially, all over Asia, and ever progressing westward.

In other words, China would be happy to see the American influence over Asia weaken. Things have not come to that as yet, so it is still easy for us and countries like ours to play both sides. But what happens when the time of reckoning comes? What choice we, unlike other countries who have no border disputes with China, will then make?

In his joint press statement with Chinese Prime Minister Li Keqiang, our Prime Minister said this about the border dispute:

”On the boundary question, we agreed that we continue to explore a fair, reasonable and mutually acceptable resolution. We both reiterated our strong commitment to make all efforts to maintain peace and tranquility in the border region. I found sensitivity to our concerns on this issue; and, interest in further intensifying confidence building measures. I also reiterated the importance of clarification of Line of Actual Control in this regard.”

Eight months ago, when the President of China was in India, our Prime Minister had said:

“I raised our serious concern over repeated incidents along the border. We agreed that peace and tranquility in the border region constitutes an essential foundation for mutual trust and confidence and for realizing the full potential of our relationship. This is an important understanding, which should be observed diligently. While our border related agreements and confidence building measures have worked well, I also suggested that clarification of Line of Actual Control would greatly contribute to our efforts to maintain peace and tranquility and requested President Xi to resume the stalled process of clarifying the LAC. We should also seek an early settlement of the boundary question.”

Save the contrasts in writing styles, the crux of our statements over the years has not changed much.

Our geographic position and demographic disposition give us no option but to play the global political game. The lack of an option is true for all countries, though the compulsions vary. The only difference is that those who play the game and simultaneously continue to grow economically often stay on course longer.

We may have expanded our world-view in the last 12 months thanks to our Prime Minister’s visits to 19 countries – nine more in the pipe line – but the message is getting clearer day by day: Look inward to expand outward. We need to focus more on getting things right with all our internal wrongs which currently, literally, stink. At the same time, let us learn the basics of becoming a geo-political player by first getting things right with our immediate neighbours. Moving men and material to Nepal in the time it takes to blink is by all means a great humanitarian effort but cannot be an indicator of our regional influence. There is still Sri Lanka and Bangladesh and then there is Pakistan. Then only, China.