Guest Column | Bold, But Half Moves

Kanwal Sibal

During his China visit, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s unusual candour in speaking about the problems that hold back the India-China relationship is a refreshing change from the past discourse of emphasising only improved border management and acceptance that the border issue will take a long time to resolve and should not impede the rest of the relationship from moving forward.

Whether the airing of our concerns about the prevarication on the boundary settlement and other aspects of Chinese policies in our region will produce the results we expect is too early to say because it all depends on the value China attaches to genuinely improved ties with India on an equitable basis and how much of the Chinese ‘dream’ and the vision of an ‘Asian Century’ it judges will be contingent on this.

Many statements made by the Chinese leadership on territorial issues in general, their uncompromising tenor, the reality of their policies in the western Pacific where they are confronted with stronger US power, the aggressive posture on Arunachal Pradesh even when Modi’s visit was in the offing, suggest that China believes it can pursue its destiny on the strength of its phenomenal economic rise, its developing military strength and the political cards now in its hands at the global level that it can play to its advantage. In this scenario, stable relations with India on China’s terms can be helpful in consolidating China’s regional and eventually global leadership, but the lack of it may not be viewed as a crucial element in realising China’s ambitions.

As it is, China has entrenched itself solidly in our own region. Its latest plans for Pakistan will outflank India to our west and bring the Pakistan-Afghanistan region within China’s political, economic and military orbit as never before. China is already the most powerful economic player in Central Asia and has made deep inroads into Iran. It has established connectivity across Eurasia to serve its needs. The only exposed area for China is Southeast and East Asia where its hegemony can be effectively challenged by Japan and, of course, the US, with countries like Australia and Vietnam acting as additional bulwarks.

China’s interest would be to deflect India from aligning itself with this grouping, and to that extent, keeping India engaged would be in its interest. In fact, high level engagement and affirming commonalities of interest even in areas where they do not exist help China to discourage India from making a clear choice so long as the China door seems open, besides presenting a moderate and conciliatory face of its diplomacy. More importantly, all the talk of a strategic partnership with China inhibits us from forcefully questioning its policies towards us and in our neighbourhood.

Whatever the ultimate result of this new posture of boldly and publicly confronting China with India’s expectations, China will find it increasingly difficult to keep prevaricating on our border differences and undermining our interests in our periphery while pretending that it is not. It will have to take a policy decision on how to move forward with us, taking into account attractive economic opportunities in India and the concerns that Modi has expressed. Modi, in turn, having brought these issues out in the open, will find it difficult to boost the bilateral relationship economically if the Chinese remain unresponsive to the concerns he has laid out.

Modi has possibly changed the dynamics of India’s engagement with China. Even while claiming in the joint statement that outstanding differences, including on the boundary question, should not be allowed to come in the way of continued development of bilateral relations — which has been the approach so far — Modi stressed in his joint press conference with Chinese Premier Li Keqiang that China needed to ‘reconsider its approach on some of the issues that hold us back from realising the full potential of our partnership’ and ‘take a strategic and long term view of our relations’.

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He has ostensibly criticised China for taking a narrow and circumscribed view of India and missing the big picture. This is quite a stricture on Chinese policy and a debunking of the widely accepted myth that China thinks decades ahead in policymaking. He stressed the ‘importance of clarification of the Line of Actual Control (LAC)’ while standing alongside Li Keqiang, repeating what he had said in Xi’s presence during the latter’s September 2014 visit to India. He sought ‘tangible progress on issues relating to visa policy’, which could only have meant the stapled visa issue. He also mentioned trans-border rivers, which apart from data sharing could have also implied more transparency about Chinese plans for constructing dams on the Brahmaputra. He also alluded to ‘some of our regional concerns’, which could only mean China’s policies in our neighbourhood and especially in Pakistan.

One can safely assume that he had raised all these issues in his official conversations with Xi and Li Keqiang, though it would have surprised the latter that he aired them publicly as candidly as he did in his presence. Maybe Modi calculated that having made his desire for closer ties with China clear in official conversations, his public candour would be understood as a sincere effort to remove roadblocks in the relationship and generate more trust in each other. The Chinese reaction to Modi’s remonstrations during the official talks is not known; Li Keqiang did not respond in public to Modi’s public statements either. The consequence of publicly expressing his political expectations from China in the years ahead is that he has, wittingly or unwittingly, set up benchmarks against which China’s policies towards India would be appraised in the period ahead. The merits of his own policy of reaching out to China will be judged by the Indian public too on the basis of how adequate the Chinese response is to concerns laid out by the Indian Prime Minister.

Modi hammered his points further in his address at the Tsinghua University. In doing this, he conveyed to the Chinese leadership the seriousness of his purpose. Modi would know that his remarks to university students would hardly have any real impact on policy making at the leadership level. Even in a democracy such public discourses by foreign leaders have little effect on policy. In an authoritarian set up like China’s where the media, in addition, will not amplify a foreign leader’s message and where independent political thinking is not encouraged, the kind of address Modi made is essentially for the public record. Even Obama has been speaking directly to the