ABSTRACT
The focus of this book has been to highlight the enduring and emerging complexities in India-China relations. They are multi-layered and polygonal in nature, which are both a result and reflection of a multipolar world order. The book has tested the argument that India-China relations have crossed the conventional prism of ‘competition-cooperation’ premise, and have moved to new acmes of power dynamics that covers a complex web of ‘competition, cooperation, conflict, collaboration, and coexistence’. This web of complexities is a significant segment of the relationship that they have established progressively at the bilateral, sub-regional, regional, cross-continental and global levels. These structural edifices explain the enduring vitality and layers of politics that India-China relations today are embedded in, which makes their relationship the most complicated, composite and compound one in the current global politics. This book has also displayed how the spectrum of India-China relations in various structural edifices – bilateral, sub-regional, regional, cross-continental and global – reveals a multifaceted and multipronged dynamics of the relationships that is closely linked with the current multipolar world order. India-China relations in the BASIC climate grouping, the BRICS forum and in other multilateral forums have demonstrated that they are part and parcel of the evolving world structure. Relatively, Sino-US relations may be confined mostly to the space and scope of Chinese and American primacy in the current and future world politics (Wang Jisi 2015); but India-China relations are distinctive and have arrived at a stage where they shape and resolve the nature of world politics. As discussed at the beginning of this book, India-China relations are coupled heavily with the multipolar world order, which is both a reflection and result of multiple power centres and overwhelmingly shapes and influences the nature of current and future world politics. That prompts us to ask: What will be the future trajectory of India-China relations? Given the transitional nature of these relations, it would be difficult to foresee and compute their exact nature in a definite context. Most of the analysis in this book has been far from any overt presumption. Given that India is still not entrenched fully in the global financial system and structure, there is a balancing politics emerging between the two. Five correlated scenarios, congenital in nature, may be consequential here.
