ABSTRACT
If Mullik’s account of Nehru’s view about China is correct, then the Indian government made a fundamental shift: from a policy of peaceful engagement with China including accommodation of its interests in Tibet with a view to build a positive Sino-Indian alignment, to an expectation of a prolonged process of conflictual engagement after 1962. The process of Sino-Indian action reaction set the stage for Wight’s deadlocked duel. Says Wight: ‘where One can make no heading against Two, he may lash out at a third party, or sideways’. ‘Three will not be sorry to see One and Two batter each other to pieces’.3 In my case, China is ‘One’, India is ‘Two’ and the US and Soviet Russia represented ‘Three’ along with Pakistan. Here China lashed out against Russian revisionists, Indian reactionaries and American imperialists but as China’s relations with the US and Russia improved, the lashing out against Indians continued and intensified. (See Chapter 9) Indians lashed out at China’s betrayal and perfidy and its opportunistic use of Pakistan against India. Pakistan and China lashed out against Indian expansionism and hegemonism for a major part of the diplomatic and military history of the Subcontinent. Ashley Tellis, senior researcher at the Carnegie Endowment for Inter-
national Peace and a former government official in various capacities (including assistant to US Ambassador to India Robert Blackwill) confirms Wight’s point that ‘Three’ will not mind if ‘One’ and ‘Two batter each other to pieces’. To quote him: ‘Sino-Indian relations in Asia will be driven, first,
by the growth of Chinese and Indian economic and military capabilities and, second, by the interaction of their interests with those of the United States. … all the Asian states actively participating in the Sino-Indian relationship will seek to play off the two major regional powers against one another. … 4
One further point needs to be made. Just as the US and Soviet Russia represented ‘Three’ in relation to Sino-Indian conflict, China was the ‘Three’ after 1961-62 in relation to the Indo-Pakistani conflict; it did not mind IndoPakistani polarity. In the Sino-Indian-Pakistani relationship Mao’s emphasis on deception,
surprise and protracted conflict made sense up to a point. Surprise and deception worked against the Indians up to 1962. China’s decision to launch a war across the length of the entire border caught India by surprise; it achieved military superiority in the 1962 border conflict. But I argue that the military success was of limited value. China lost its diplomatic initiative with India and the space for diplomatic manoeuvre and action was lost to China and to India after 1962, until diplomatic activity was revived in the late 1980s by the two governments. The use of strategic deception was no longer relevant as a tool in China’s India policy because Indian practitioners and the world community were on guard. In the bilateral context after 1962, the Maoist goal of ‘superiority’ and ‘initiative’ became irrelevant as a strategic stalemate developed; and as a result of Indian actions to develop its military and economic capabilities vis-à-vis China the emphasis was to stabilize the conflict relationship, that is, to ensure conflict formation that produced predictability in the actions of the two and manageable instability rather than harmony or peace. However, Maoism was relevant in the Sino-Indian case after 1962 in two important ways. First, an expectation of a protracted conflict set in on both sides. Second, China expanded its front building activity against India by forming diplomatic and military alignments with Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka to create a Chinese presence in India’s backyard and to curtain India’s capacity for diplomatic and manoeuvrability within the region. After 1962, Chinese diplomatic and military activity in the region intensi-
fied but the score card of gains and losses for China-India-Pakistan was mixed. China gained international prestige as a result of its success in the 1962 war, and following its performance in the Korean War which stalled the advance of American forces, American strategy sought to engage China rather than to isolate it. The evolution of a process of American accommodation of Chinese interests in the world scene included an acknowledgement that it had legitimate interests in the Subcontinent; this was discussed in a previous chapter. This was a gain in international prestige for China and paved the way for the theory that G2 (China and America) could emerge as a foundation of stability in China’s southern zone. Pakistan emerged as a front line state for both China and America – against Soviet Russia for America and against India for China. Kashmir remained a point of pressure and a common front between America and China. America sought
Indian concessions to Pakistan on Kashmir and China sought Kashmiri selfdetermination and justice for Kashmiris against Indian occupation. America acknowledged that China would have a say in the final settlement on Kashmir; hence the China-India-Pakistan triangle came to be applied to the politics of Kashmir. America and China agreed that Tibet was an integral part of China (as did India) but there was a difference. Henry Kissinger ordered the termination of US aid to Khampas as a part of the accommodation with China during the Nixon-Kissinger visit in 1972 and the old policy of CIA involvement in Tibetan affairs was concluded; India however, remained hospitable to the Dalai Lama and his government in exile in Dharamsala even as its policy was not to allow political activity against China from India. In these circumstances China gained diplomatic leverage or manoeuvrability with Americans in the Himalayan sphere as well as the prestige from the fact that Nixon went to China and made his peace; Mao’s strategy of bidding his time to get a good deal with America had worked. But there were losses as well for China, and gains for India in four impor-
tant issue areas. First, China lost international prestige along with America when the two failed to save Pakistan from defeat in the Bangladesh campaign in 1971; the G2 combination failed against the Indo-Soviet combination. China’s and Pakistan’s loss was India’s and Russia’s gain in international prestige and regional authority. Second, from the 1980s Pakistan was emerging as the hub of Islamist terrorism that was organized and financed by Pakistan’s intelligence and military services, and it had moral and material support from the US, China, Saudi Arabia and few other Middle Eastern states. This was a gain for China, Pakistan and America in the 1980s because it was instrumental in defeating Russian forces in Afghanistan but as later events showed it backfired; the Islamist extremists became a problem for China in its frontier area with a Muslim minority population that opposed Chinese communist rule, and it emerged as a problem within Afghanistan and Pakistan as well it was the source of the rise of the Taliban and Al Qaeda. The September 2001 attack revealed the large international and regional dimensions of the problem. Third, China and North Korea had aided Pakistan’s military, nuclear and missile development since the early 1980s and this culminated in the revelations about the A. Q. Khan affair and the international network that he formed. Because China is a permanent member of the Security Council and its cooperation is required by America it could not be sanctioned for its conduct in promoting nuclear weapons and missile proliferation. However, China was implicated in Pakistan’s nuclear development and it could not avoid the blemish that its declarations on nuclear nonproliferation did not match its actions, and that a double standard existed between China’s policy to promote Pakistani nuclear weapons proliferation and its policy to oppose that of India. This selectivity was based on its strategic policies in the region and the rivalry with India rather than a commitment to nonproliferation. Finally, following India’s 1998 nuclear tests and claim that it was a nuclear weapon state with a formal nuclear doctrine and
deployment, the US-India nuclear deal was organized by the US government. Its international acceptance led to a loss of face for China because it was widely believed to oppose the deal which legitimized Indian nuclear arms and lifted sanctions against it. In addition, India’s growing strategic links with America, Russia, the Europeans, Australia, Israel, Japan, Singapore and others triggered a fear among Chinese practitioners about the possibility of strategic encirclement. Nehru expected a hostile post-1962 China, and his policy response was to
prepare for a prolonged encounter with it in the Himalayan, Southeast Asian and Central Asian regions.5 This perspective informs my assessment of post1962 China-India-Pakistan relationships. The period 1962-98 was eventful. India, China and Pakistan fought wars in 1962, 1965 and 1971. India conducted its first nuclear test in 1974, and Nixon and Kissinger recognized China’s growing importance by visiting Beijing and acknowledging it as a strategic partner in 1972. These events were tipping points in the ChinaIndia-Pakistan triangle. Each event produced actions and reactions in the conduct of the powers involved but in every crisis the players blinked so the pattern of activism and policy ambivalence was maintained. They could not follow up on their threats. None of them found the end game, and the result of high activity was a stalemate on a situation of manageable instability. Consider the following. Following Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi’s visit to China in 1988 and the
restoration of ambassadorial-level relations, the tone of the relationship improved and bilateral cooperation in various fields increased but the cooperative elements were shallow and ambiguous regarding strategic questions including the settlement of the border issue. The development of high-level political discourse, the establishment of an inter-governmental framework for border talks, the significant growth of bilateral trade to the $50billion mark by 2008 were marred by China’s opposition to the US-India nuclear deal in 2008, by an intensification of China’s claims to Arunachal Pradesh (NEFA in British India), by its supply of sensitive nuclear weapons and missiles for Pakistan, its support of Maoist Nepal, and provision of military supplies to Burma, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka and by its naval activity in the Indian Ocean. At the same time, India’s naval expansion in the Indian Ocean, its justification that China’s and Pakistan’s nuclear and missile buildup was a threat to Indian security, and the development of its alignments with the US, major European powers, Japan, Australia and Singapore, among others appeared to Chinese practitioners as a form of India’s interest in containment of China. To Indian practitioners, China’s quest for port facilities in Myanmar, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka appeared as a form of China’s interest to contain India. Despite an improved diplomatic discourse and growing economic ties, the incompatibility in strategic views of the two continued to mar the relationship. Although China and India have proclaimed the goal of building a strategic partnership, I argue that at the time of writing (2010) China and India are both trying to build their weight in the international
system, and to conduct manoeuvres against each other. These are obstacles to the formation of a truly cooperative and peaceful relationship. For China at issue are India’s nuclear and military modernization, its strategic links with the US and other major powers in Asia and Europe, the naval competition between China and India in the Indian Ocean, India’s involvement in affairs of Tibet, conflicting Sino-Indian aims in Nepal, Beijing’s position on Arunchal Pradesh (China calls it southern Tibet) and the link up between Tibet and Taiwan in Beijing’s policy as core sovereignty issues. China’s internal foreign policy debates indicate the importance of these linkages in Chinese perceptions. If the settlement of the Sino-Indian border question is conditioned on the settlement of China’s positions in Taiwan, Tibet, Nepal and Arunachal Pradesh, then one can foresee a prolonged period of SinoIndian contention in the diplomatic and the military spheres. In this case, both countries are expected to conduct high maintenance policies in defence of entrenched positions that are based on history, culture and strategic calculations. The Sino-Indian rivalry is not simply a strategic one; it has a cultural
character as well. President Nixon assessed China’s views as follows: ‘the attitude of the Chinese towards their neighbours can be summed up this way. The Russians they hate and fear now. The Japanese they fear later but do not hate. For the Indians they feel contempt but they are there and backed by the USSR’.6 This was an example of Chinese groupthink about the Indians as a race and the poor quality of Indian political leadership. Pakistani and Chinese practitioners shared a common view about ‘Indian aggression and expansionism’,7 as well as being worried about the danger of Indo-Soviet encirclement of China.8
