Claude Arpi
Niti Central
June 17, 2014
On Sunday afternoon, Prime Minister Narendra Modi landed at Thimphu. A touching ceremonial welcome by Bhutanese school children awaited him. It was Modi’s first visit abroad.
Fifty six years ago Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Prime Minister of independent India, visited Bhutan too. But it was another era.
In October 1958, in a letter to the Chief Ministers, Nehru recalls: “After I left Gangtok, I was almost entirely cut off from communications till my return to Gangtok two and a half weeks later. I received an occasional message by wireless from Delhi. …There were no newspapers at all and I had a sensation of being in another world.”
At that time, it was no question of landing anywhere in Bhutan. The PM, Indira Gandhi and their entourage had to undertake a long trek via the Chumbi Valley in Tibet. It was the customary and easiest road to reach the Kingdom of the Dragon. India had just built a road till Nathu-la, the border between Sikkim and Tibet.
Nehru remarked: “On the Tibetan side, this road will be a much simpler proposition than the one that we have built on our side. Through road traffic would make a great difference to trade as well as to travellers. There is still a considerable inflow of goods from India to Tibet although this has gone down during the last year or two.”
Why should the trade have gone down? Simply because the Chinese had established themselves on the Tibetan plateau and had decided to drastically reduce the trade exchanges between India and Tibet.
At that time, India still had a Consulate General in Lhasa and 3 Trade Agencies in Gyantse, Yatung and Gartok (Western Tibet).
Nehru, who spent 2 nights in Yatung’s Trade Agency, recalled: “Yatung was a small spread out town. The main market road was full of Indian shops. There were, I believe, over ninety such shops, many of them having started business in the course of the last three years, when this trade was highly profitable. Conditions were more difficult now and so a number of these Indian shops were closing up. The Chinese authorities had put up a number of new buildings-schools, hospital, community centre and residential houses for themselves. Our own Trade Agent’s house had its own little hospital and buildings for the staff.”
Unfortunately, the relations with the Himalayan States, which have for centuries been so important to India, deteriorated a few months later, with the uprising in Lhasa in March 1959 and the consequent flight of the Dalai Lama to India. Thereafter, the Chinese tightened their grip on the Tibetan plateau; this was a tragedy for India and its security.
By paying his first visit to Bhutan, Narendra Modi has probably decided to change the tide.
The Times of India reported that Modi has “stepped up a charm offensive with neighbours to try to check China’s influence in the region.”
Before leaving, the PMO had released a statement putting the visit in perspective: “Bound by common interests and shared prosperity, India and Bhutan enjoy a unique and special relationship, which has been forged by ties of geography, history and culture. Therefore, Bhutan as the destination for my first visit abroad as Prime Minister is a natural choice. Relations with Bhutan will be a key foreign policy priority of my Government.”
Modi’s first visit abroad comes ahead of the 22nd round of bilateral talks between Bhutan and China which are expected to take place in July or August. Since 1986, these talks are officially aimed at resolving the long-pending border dispute between Bhutan and China.
For some time now, Thimphu has been tempted to have a more official relationship with Beijing. It is probably why Modi was accompanied by Foreign Minister Sushma Swaraj, National Security Advisor (NSA) Ajit Doval and Foreign Secretary Sujatha Singh.
On August 9 last year, the then NSA Shivshankar Menon visited Bhutan. There was more in his visit than a routine exchange on the 11th Bhutanese Plan.
It was clear that the NSA’s main purpose was to see with the Bhutanese Government how to handle the border talks with China.
The 21st round of boundary talks between Bhutan’s Foreign Minister Rinzim Dorje and the Chinese vice-Minister in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs were to be held two weeks later.
The New Indian Express then mentioned “a shift in emphasis from the disputed north-western, close to Siliguri corridor, to the central parts of Bhutan,” this made Delhi nervous.
The Sino-Bhutanese border talks have always had serious strategic implications for India’s security.
A particular Chinese claim worries India. It is the Doklam plateau, adjacent to the hyper-strategic Chumbi valley, crossed by Nehru 56 years ago. This is the real nightmare for India.
At the time of Menon’s visit, Liu Zengyi, a research fellow at Shanghai Institutes for International Studies admitted in The Global Times that for India, China’s advances in the Doklam area was a strategic threat to the Siliguri corridor: “As a country located between China and India, Bhutan serves as a buffer and is of critical strategic importance to the Siliguri corridor, a narrow stretch of land (known as chicken’s neck) that connects India’s north-eastern States to the rest of India. …The corridor is considered a vulnerable bottleneck for India’s national security. New Delhi worries that China will send troops to the corridor if a China-Indian military clash breaks out.”
It is indeed a vital issue for New Delhi.
Incidentally, the present Bhutanese PM Tshering Tobgay’s constituency is adjacent to the territory claimed by China.
Interestingly, when Nehru crossed the Chumbi valley in 1958, there was no discrepancy between the Chinese and Bhutanese maps (except for eastern Bhutan where Beijing did not recognise the McMahon Line) and no claim on Doklam.
Since then, the PLA has intruded in several areas and has built important infrastructure, such as the road from Yatung to Phari in the Chumbi Valley. The Doklam area overlooks this highway. The Chinese engineers have also built traversal roads and set up a communication network within the disputed area. By grabbing the Doklam Plateau, Beijing considerably enlarged the Chumbi valley and its access to Sikkim and Siliguri.
How to dislodge the Chinese will not be an easy task.
At the same time, the cordial people-to-people relations between India and Bhutan had to be reaffirmed. A Bhutanese well—known nature photographer wrote in his blog: “In recent times, our relationship has digressed from being trustworthy buddies to that of being an estranged couple – slowly drifting apart with the danger of finally ending in divorce. This would be so unfortunate. …I hope that somewhere tucked away in a small corner of his luggage, Mister Modi brings with him a brand new and re-tinkered foreign policy initiative towards Bhutan that is progressive and based on trust and good intention.”
Let’s hope that Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s first visit would have also achieved this.
