The talks on restoring status quo ante in eastern Ladakh have yet to yield significant results. There has reportedly been disengagement in the Galwan area, but the more serious Pangong Tso and Depsang incursions have yet to be terminated.
Meanwhile, India must grapple with the consequences of the collapse of the regime that largely maintained peace and tranquility along the Line of Actual Control (LAC) and possibly its larger relationship with its huge northern neighbour, China.
Given the asymmetry of the terrain and logistics, we need to ensure that there are no repetitions of the Chinese moves that have taken place in the recent months. Stopping them from intruding into Indian territory is infinitely more preferable, and doable, than trying to uproot them from the positions they have occupied. This has been the long lesson the country has learnt since 1951. Meanwhile, the bigger challenge is to figure out the new trajectory of our relations with China.
First, we should try to figure out why the Chinese have done what they did. It could simply be a bit of Covid-19 opportunism — after all, China, the first country to be infected, has also successfully pulled out of it and has got its economy going again. As in the case of the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) of 2008, its power relative to that of the others could grow in the coming period.
It could also be a consequence of the astounding abandonment of global leadership by the US generally, and more specifically during the Covid crisis. The chaos and confusion in the US is a perfect opportunity to be exploited. More so because the country is up for elections this year and the incumbent President is hitting out blindly as he senses he may lose to his Democratic challenger.
This could explain their simultaneous moves across their periphery — in the South China Sea, with Japan in the East Sea, raising the eastern Bhutan claim, the crackdown in Hong Kong and the actions in eastern Ladakh. This is a perfect moment for staking out their primacy in Asia. Kurt Campbell and Mira Rapp-Hooper argue that the foreign policy of restraint introduced by Deng Xiaoping is at an end. ‘China is done biding its time’ is the suggestive title to their recent article in Foreign Affairs.
The Chinese are driven by a sense of history, and they see their dominance as the natural order of things. Their view of the world is that harmony is a consequence of every country accepting its place in a system, which is hierarchical. This was perhaps best put in their White Paper on Asia Pacific Security Cooperation in 2017, which observed that ‘Major countries should treat the strategic intentions of others in an objective and rational manner… (while) small and medium-sized countries need not, and should not, take sides among big countries.’ In the document, China listed four ‘major’ countries in a hierarchical manner — the US, Russia, India and Japan. Indonesia, Vietnam, Pakistan, or Australia did not figure on the list.
The first thing that Xi Jinping did when he came to power was to talk of a ‘New Model of Great Power Relations’, a kind of code to get the US to accept a sort of a condominium or a ‘group of two’ (G2) arrangement. This proposal began to do the rounds in the US following the GFC, with people like Zbigniew Brzezinski and C Fred Bergsten advocating it.
But the Chinese misread the American mood and Obama was cold to the proposal when Xi brought it up at the Sunnylands summit in 2013. The New Model was all about getting the US to accept China as an equal which, in turn, would signal an acceptance of Chinese dominance in the western Pacific. Instead the US began to talk about the ‘pivot’, which later became the Indo-Pacific policy.
Though it spoke of a new model of major power relations, the Chinese were only thinking of the US, and most certainly not India. As a large and populous country, we are a bit of a conundrum for China. Where could we figure in the hierarchy? Besides, we have the economic and military potential to match up to, or even beat China.
So, Chinese policy has been concentrated on containing India’s rise however it can. Formally, Beijing professes friendship and cooperation with India, but in practical terms, all it has needed is a Pakistan to keep us off balance. Our own policy of relentless hostility towards Islamabad, of course, aids this mission. And our incompetence with neighbours like Nepal and Sri Lanka compounds our problem.
As of now, we are only a potential equal. China’s economy is nearly five times the size of India’s, and its military much more powerful. They could yet overreach and crash, but let’s not depend on that and work at some self-help.
The challenge for Indian policy is to be able to reduce these asymmetries. This is not something a friendly Uncle will help us do — we need to relentlessly grow our economy, enhance our diplomatic performance and be far more focused. This cannot happen overnight, or even in one prime ministerial term. It requires systematic short to medium-term planning and effort, beginning now. As our trendlines start arching upwards, we will get the payoffs in the form of better Chinese behaviour on our borders.