June 30, 2016
Blocking India’s bid for membership to the Nuclear Suppliers’ Group (NSG) is part of China’s long-term strategic impulse.
Beijing sees India as the third pivot in an emerging tri-polar world. The United States and China will contest the first half of the 21st century just as Britain and Germany contested the first half of the 20th century.
India, poorer and weaker than both the US and China, will nevertheless be the balancing force in this triangular geopolitical relationship. It will have the world’s third largest economy and military within the next 20 years.
Bulwark
For America, India is a bulwark against a rising China.
For China, India needs to be kept in check. It does not want to confront two powerful democracies, India and America, at once.
India, therefore, must be shown its place.
Blocking India’s NSG membership is only a small part of Beijing’s India-specific strategy. A larger part is to encourage a renegade nation like Pakistan to unbalance India.
China’s illegal occupation of swathes of Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK), through which the Pakistan-China economic corridor will pass, is a key element of this strategy.
India’s China policy has traditionally been anaemic and poorly thought-through.
India’s first PM, Jawaharlal Nehru, gifted to China the permanent seat in the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) which India was offered, as former foreign secretary MK Rasgotra confirms in his excellent new book, A Life in Diplomacy.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi and U.S. President Barack Obama
Nehru followed it up with a provocative “forward policy” on the Chinese border that drew a strong response from Beijing, leading to India’s humiliating defeat in the 1962 war.
Over the next 50 years, India’s China policy oscillated between strong words and weak action.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi and National Security Adviser Ajit Doval have tried to change the grammar of that policy.
However, after two years, not much has changed. China is a bully. It has alienated almost every East Asian country with its aggressive manoeuvres in the South China Sea.
It has territorial disputes (over the Senkaku islands) with Japan. It fought, and lost, a short war with tiny, plucky Vietnam in 1979.
Few Asian countries have cordial relations with China. Just as Pakistan is distrusted by its neighbours – Afghanistan, Iran, Bangladesh and India – China is distrusted by its East Asian neighbours.
India, though, has a number of important levers. It must use each with calibrated robustness.
First, Tibet. Nehru was right to give refuge in Dharamsala to the Dalai Lama and his followers in 1959. While the Dalai Lama is barred from making political statements as part of this agreement, India is not.
Tibet has international resonance, and India must leverage this. Despite Chinese protests, US President Barack Obama has met the Dalai Lama on three separate occasions during his term in office.
Delhi must host more conferences for free-Tibet activists. Key Uighar dissidents were recently denied visas at a conference in Dharamsala on Tibet and Xinjiang due to Interpol’s red corner notices against them.
However, free-Tibet activism should now receive enthusiastic Indian support. China’s appalling human rights record in Tibet and Xinjiang must be highlighted.
Taiwan
The new government in Taipei is anti-Beijing.
Previous Taiwanese governments were in regular talks with Beijing, largely agreeing on the sensitive “one-China” concept.
The new Taiwanese president, Tsai Ingwen, took office in May 2016 after a landslide win and has suspended rapprochement talks with China.
According to one report: “Beijing is highly suspicious of Tsai, whose Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), which replaced the Beijing-friendly Kuomintang (KMT) party in government, is traditionally pro-independence, and has warned her against any attempt at a breakaway.”
India must deepen its ties with Taiwan despite not having formal diplomatic relations with it.
The US, too, has no diplomatic relations with Taiwan. However, it legislated a Taiwan Relations Act through which it has developed close economic, security, cultural and political ties with Taipei.
With an anti-China government now in place in Taiwan for the first time in two decades, this is the right time to strengthen India’s relationship with Taipei as part of its “Act East” policy.
This must also embrace the littoral states of the South China Sea, especially China’s bête noire Vietnam.
Economy
With China’s economy slowing, Beijing can no longer be a profligate bank-roller of Pakistan’s proxy terrorism.
As Ruchir Sharma writes in his new book, The Rise and Fall of Nations, China is staring a banking and real estate crisis in the face.
The Chinese growth story will be further eroded as the country greys and ages, triggering a ticking demographic time bomb.
Chinese soldiers ride in tanks as they pass in front of Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City during a military parade. Although India is still poorer and weaker than both the US and China, within the next 20 years India will possess the world’s third largest economy and military.
China’s Muslim-dominated province Xinjiang has a population of restive Uighars. They are the principal source of terrorism in China. Uighars recently met in India to press their case for autonomy in Xinjiang. India can offer them moral support just as China provides such support to Pakistan in PoK.
These four elements – Tibet, Taiwan, China’s faltering economy, and Xinjiang – provide enough leverage to India to keep China off-balance in the same way that Beijing does India.
China exploits the weak, but respects the strong. PM Modi must jettison decades of India’s traditional appease-China diplomacy. It hasn’t worked, as events at the NSG plenary in Seoul showed, and it won’t work in the future either.
The time for playing nice with President Xi Jinping is over. It’s time to play a game Beijing understands – hardball.
