Pax Indica: India and the World of the Twenty-first Century

by Shashi Tharoor

  Energy is an obvious area for cooperation. The US Department of Energy estimates that China’s oil consumption will rise 156 per cent and India’s oil consumption will rise 152 per cent by 2025. While both countries are seeking to expand their domestic production, opportunities for growth are limited, and both countries will become more dependent on imported oil, making them more vulnerable to irregularities of supply and price volatility. This makes the quest for reliable sources of supply and secure sea lanes of communication a shared interest. After all, both China and India are relatively new entrants into the global oil system. They are facing fierce competition from much larger, more experienced and arguably more resourceful Western oil companies. Cooperation between Indian and Chinese oil firms is essential.

  Prior to 2002, India and China competed aggressively with each other to acquire oil and gas fields abroad. Wisdom dawned, however, with improved energy cooperation starting that year, when India’s Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC) purchased a 25 per cent share of Sudan’s Greater Nile Oil Project, operated by the China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC). The experience has been positive and continued cooperation in the global energy sector, including some examples of joint bids and at least one successful joint acquisition, has occurred. The prospects for further collaboration, to jointly explore and develop oil and natural gas resources in third countries, are high.

  To take another example: our demand for food will inevitably rise as well, perhaps by 50 per cent in the next two decades, as a result of our growing population, their rising affluence and the improved dietary possibilities available to a larger middle class. We will need to multiply our sources of food, including acquiring agricultural land abroad, in Africa and even Latin America. Lack of access to stable supplies of water is reaching critical proportions, particularly for agricultural purposes, and the problem will worsen because of rapid urbanization over the next twenty years. We will need skilful and creative diplomacy to ensure that interruptions in the flow of water across our borders do not bedevil relations with our neighbours.

  The only question is whether the two countries can prolong the elephant–dragon dance, or whether political tensions could bring the music to a screeching halt. Critics argue that the good news is in fact good only for China. The trade surplus is undoubtedly in favour of Beijing: of the $73 billion in 2011, $50 billion consisted of Chinese exports to India and only less than half of that, $23 billion, of Indian exports to China. China conserves it own domestic resources of iron ore by importing this commodity from India and selling finished steel to it. Indeed, some critics have argued that India is largely exporting its primary commodities to China and importing finished products from that country, a pattern of trade relations reminiscent of the exploitation of India’s raw materials in the colonial era. A large proportion of Chinese exports involves items that are so much cheaper than Indian alternatives that they are making Indian manufacturing unviable. And the focus on trade, critics suggest, underscores an issue of interest to Beijing, while taking attention away from the broader strategic contest between the two countries, which China’s economic interests prompt it to gloss over.

  The critics may be right in suggesting that good trade relations do little to help resolve the perennial political problems between countries. But there are two counter-arguments worth making. First, trade contributes to a positive atmosphere between two countries, which at least makes political hostility less likely. More important, in this instance, it ensures that China has far too high a stake in the Indian economy to contemplate engaging in any military adventurism against India. There are some strategic advantages to offering a potential adversary a large market: it is more likely that the Chinese establishment will learn to see Indians as consumers rather than as enemies.

  This raises the issue of the risk of conflict between the two countries. As all Indians painfully remember, we went to war in 1962—a decisive triumph for China, which wrested 23,200 square kilometres of Indian territory. At the same time, Beijing has taken pains in recent years to remind India that it still claims a further 92,000 square kilometres, mainly in the north-eastern Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh. It doesn’t help that the two countries share the longest disputed frontier in the world, since the Line of Actual Control (LAC) has never been formally delineated in a manner accepted by both sides. India’s borders were defined by British imperial administrators in the 1913 MacMahon Line, which China rejects (though it accepts that line as its frontier with Myanmar, which was in those days part of British India). With the LAC coming into being in the wake of China’s military success in 1962, the situation is even more unclear. Whenever troops from either side build roads, construct or repair their bunkers and other routine fortifications, or conduct patrols close to the LAC, tensions can and repeatedly do flare up. When the two sides are anxious to avoid provoking each other, such activities are kept to a minimum, but it seemed that since 2008 Beijing has taken a conscious decision to keep the Indians on their toes.

  Why do I say that? The last three years have witnessed a proliferation of incidents along the 3488-kilometre frontier between the two Asian giants. Nearly 200 have been recorded, including no fewer than ninety-five incursions by the People’s Liberation Army in just one sector alone—the evocatively named Finger Area, a 2.1-square-kilometre salient in the Indian state of Sikkim, which shares a 206-kilometre border with Tibet. Intensified Chinese patrolling has been observed both in Ladakh and in the border areas of Arunachal Pradesh. Reports of intrusions into Indian territory included one in which Chinese soldiers entered 15 kilometres into Indian territory in Ladakh and actually burned the Indian patrolling base. While Indian spokespersons are anxious to downplay such reports, and fewer incidents were made public in 2011, they serve to remind us that the border dispute remains unresolved. In a reply to a question in Parliament, Defence Minister A.K. Antony informed MPs in December 2011 that Chinese troops had, in July 2011, damaged a 200-foot (approx. 60-metre) stone wall which was built 250 metres inside Indian territory in the Tawang area of Arunachal Pradesh. Antony said that an attempt by the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) to raze the wall was prevented by the Indian Army. The stone wall was partially damaged by the PLA patrol, but it has been reconstructed, he added.

  Arunachal Pradesh has become a rhetorical flashpoint. Chinese notables, including their ambassadors in New Delhi, have publicly laid claim to the state in recent years, describing it as ‘Southern Tibet’ and publicly objecting whenever an Indian leader (or the Dalai Lama) travelled there. (To India’s credit, this has not deterred Prime Minister Manmohan Singh from visiting and campaigning in Arunachal’s elections, nor did India prevent the Dalai Lama from ministering to his flock in that state.) China also reacted sharply to the participation by India’s Defence Minister Antony in the silver jubilee celebrations of the state of Arunachal Pradesh held on 20 February 2012, with a Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson asking India publicly to refrain from any action that will complicate the border issue. Earlier China had denied a visa to an Indian Air Force official born in Pasighat, Arunachal Pradesh, who was supposed to visit China as part of an Indian tri-services delegation, on the grounds that as an Arunachali he was not entitled to an Indian passport or a Chinese visa! But the quantum of belligerence in the official Chinese media’s reporting about India has risen alarmingly; there have been reminders of 1962 and the People’s Daily has gone so far as to write of India’s ‘recklessness and arrogance’ and urging it to consider ‘the consequences of a potential confrontation with China’.

  It was also revealed in 2010 that the Chinese authorities had begun a practice of issuing visas to Indian citizens from Jammu and Kashmir on a separate piece of paper to be stapled to their passports rather than on their Indian passports directly, in order to signal that China does not consider residents of that state to be legitimate citizens of India. (This policy has also led to the anomaly that India and China cite different figures for the length of their disputed
border, since China refuses to count the 1600 kilometres between Kashmir and Tibet as part of its dispute with India!) The matter was only resolved after Prime Minister Singh took it up with the Chinese premier during his visit to India in December 2010 and after India had suspended defence ties with China upon China’s refusal to grant a visa to India’s northern army commander on the grounds that he was operating in a disputed state.

  Related developments are no less disquieting. With China having established four new airbases in Tibet and three in its southern provinces bordering India, the Indian Air Force is reportedly augmenting its own presence near the Chinese border by deploying two squadrons of Sukhoi-30MKI fighters. Are the two countries bracing for war? What on earth is going on?

  Fears of imminent major hostilities are clearly overblown. China, flush from the huge public relations success of the Olympics, and rejoicing in a huge trade imbalance in its favour with India, is hardly likely to initiate a clash, and India has no desire whatsoever to provoke its northern neighbour. But it’s clear that China’s troubles over Tibet, which first erupted in 2008 and have again arisen in 2011–12 with a seemingly interminable chain of self-immolations, have brought with them unwelcome reminders to Beijing of India’s hospitality to the Dalai Lama and his government-in-exile.

  Ironically, during the mass protests in Tibet in 2008, one country that was conspicuous both by its centrality to the drama and by its reticence over it was India. On the question of Tibet, India, the land of asylum for the Dalai Lama and the angry young hotheads of the Tibetan Youth Congress, finds itself on the horns of a dilemma. On the one hand, it is a democracy, one that has a long tradition of allowing peaceful protests, including against foreign countries when their leaders come visiting. It provided refuge to the Dalai Lama when he fled the Chinese occupation of his homeland in 1959, granted asylum (and eventually Indian citizenship) to over 110,000 Tibetan refugees, and permitted them to set up a government-in-exile (albeit one that New Delhi does not recognize) in the picturesque Himalayan hill town of Dharamsala.

  On the other hand, it has assiduously been cultivating better relations with China. Though their bitter border dispute remains unresolved, and China has been a vital ally and military supplier to India’s enemies across the border in Pakistan, the two countries have been warming to each other in recent years. So New Delhi has attempted to draw a distinction between its humanitarian obligations as a country of asylum and its political responsibilities as a friend of China. The Dalai Lama and his followers are given a respected place but told not to conduct ‘political activities’ on Indian soil. When young Tibetan radicals undertook a march to Lhasa from Indian soil, the Indian police stopped them well before they got to the Tibetan border, and detained a hundred Tibetans. When some Tibetan demonstrators outside the Chinese embassy in New Delhi attacked the premises, the Indian government stepped up its level of protection for the Chinese diplomats. The former Indian foreign minister Pranab Mukherjee—who was noticeably less forthcoming on Tibet than his American counterpart during a press conference in the middle of the Tibet crisis with then secretary of state Condoleezza Rice in Washington—publicly warned the Dalai Lama against doing anything that could have a ‘negative impact on Indo-Sino relations’.

  The Dalai Lama’s curious position has complicated India’s dance on the diplomatic tightrope with China. He is simultaneously the most visible spiritual leader of a worldwide community of believers, a role that India honours, and till 2011 the political head of a government-in-exile, a role that India permits but has rejected in its own dealings with him. As a Buddhist he preaches non-attachment, self-realization, inner actualization and non-violence; as a Tibetan he is looked up to by a people fiercely attached to their homeland, most seeking its independence from China, many determined to fight for it. He has been a refugee for nearly five decades, but is the most recognized worldwide symbol of a country he has not seen in half a century. His message of peace, love and reconciliation has found adherents among Hollywood movie stars and ponytailed hippies, Irish rock musicians and Indian politicians; but he has made no headway at all with the regime that rules his homeland, and has been unable to prevent Tibet’s inexorable transformation into one more Chinese province. His sermons fill football stadiums and he has won a Nobel Prize, but political leaders around the world shrink from meeting him openly, for fear of causing costly offence to the Chinese.

  Indian officials are acutely conscious that, on this subject, the Chinese are easily offended. An interesting instance came when India facilitated the highly publicized visit by Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the US House of Representatives, to the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala in 2009, but almost simultaneously cancelled a scheduled meeting between him and the vice-president of India, Mohammed Hamid Ansari. When China summoned the Indian ambassador in Beijing to the foreign ministry at 2 a.m. for a dressing-down over the Tibetan protests in New Delhi, India meekly acquiesced in the insult. Though Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has publicly declared the Dalai Lama to be the ‘personification of non-violence’, India has let it be known that it does not support his political objectives. Tibet, New Delhi says, is an integral part of China, and India lends no support to those who would challenge that status.

  The position is not without its detractors within the country. The Opposition BJP (which led the previous government in New Delhi) has criticized the current government for not ‘expressing concern over the use of force by the Chinese government’ and instead ‘adopting a policy of appeasement towards China with scant regard to the country’s national honour and foreign policy independence’. Privately, however, few observers believe the BJP would have conducted itself differently had it been in office.

  For the stark truth is that India has no choice in the matter. It cannot undermine its own democratic principles and abridge the freedom of speech of Tibetans on its soil. Nor can it afford to alienate its largest trading partner, a neighbour well on the way to global superpower status, which is known to be extremely prickly over any presumed slights to its sovereignty over Tibet. India will continue to dance delicately on its Tibetan tightrope.

  But the dangers are real. The fact that Tawang, the birthplace of the sixth Dalai Lama and a major monastery of Tibetan Buddhism, lies in Arunachal Pradesh deprives Beijing of a vital asset in its attempts to assert total control over Tibet. Beijing must hope that the passing of the current Dalai Lama will permit it to identify and indoctrinate a young successor, rather as it has done with the Panchen Lama. But the Dalai Lama has announced that the next Dalai Lama may not be born in Chinese-controlled Tibetan lands; the suggestion is that he could easily emanate either from the Tibetan diaspora or from traditional areas of Tibetan residence now in India, notably the Tawang tract. Reminding New Delhi of China’s claims is therefore all the more urgent for Beijing: China would like to take control of Tawang before it is too late.

  India, of course, has no intention of obliging Beijing. Tibet has also exposed the limitations of China’s claims to constituting an alternative global pole of attraction to that of the United States. China is not the natural leader of the South; its development experience and economic clout are so exceptional that it is difficult for other developing countries to see themselves in the same mirror. More important on Tibet, China’s position, while ostensibly anchored in a principle that other southern governments tend to uphold (that of sovereignty and non-interference), is also infused with a strong dash of national chauvinism that leaves even its allies cold. It is perfectly understandable for Chinese to be proud of China and to demonstrate that pride by jingoistic behaviour in the streets of Beijing, but why should such passions inspire anyone who is not Chinese? By contrast, the spiritual teaching and Gandhian pacifism of the Dalai Lama finds a far more universal appeal, especially in democracies like India and Buddhist nations like Sri Lanka and Thailand. Their governments may be reluctant to offend China, but their hearts are, in many cases, with the Tibetans rather than their sovereign overlords in Beijing.
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  The recent announcement by the Dalai Lama that he had renounced his political role as head of the Tibetan government-in-exile, and would henceforth seek to confine himself to a purely spiritual and ecclesiastical role, has further confounded the Chinese, who have made it clear that they see it as yet another example of his Machiavellian design. By organizing free and fair elections among the Tibetan diaspora—which elected Lobsang Sangay, a forty-two-year-old Harvard academic, as the new political head of the exiled government—the Dalai Lama has effectively insulated the political leadership of the Tibetan diaspora from the question of his own succession. Even if the Chinese were to identify and indoctrinate a new ‘Dalai Lama’, that child would only be regarded by Tibetans at large as having succeeded to a religious role, while political authority would continue to inhere in the elected leader, Sangay, or his successors. Sangay, an impressive young man I have met and spoken with at length, is a plausible twenty-first-century political leader, unlike the other-worldly spiritual Dalai Lama. China has unleashed an unrelenting tirade against this development, denouncing the so-called Dalai clique and categorizing the new arrangements, in its idiosyncratic lexicon, as ‘splittist’. That India has acquiesced in the new dispensation and allows Sangay to live in, and operate from, its territory remains a sore point for Beijing.

  The limitations of China’s diplomatic appeal to the world have become apparent in a number of recent diplomatic disasters. Beijing’s pronouncement that the South China Sea was an area of core concern for China did not go down well with its neighbours. Several countries spoke against the declaration at the meeting of the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF) in Hanoi in 2010, leaving the Chinese foreign minister fuming in the meeting at the perceived ‘ganging up’ against his country. There followed a diplomatic spat with Japan over the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands, and Beijing’s overreaction to the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Liu Xiaobo, which backfired in worldwide revulsion at China’s behaviour. Meanwhile, China’s relations with North Korea have increased tensions with both South Korea and Japan at the same time. China’s refusal to condemn Pyongyang’s outrageous behaviour, such as its sinking of a South Korean naval vessel and the persistent shelling of Yeonpyeong Island, has damaged its relations with Seoul. All these actions have pushed China’s East Asian and Southeast Asian neighbours towards American arms purchases and increasingly towards improving their relations with India. The Chinese push in Southeast Asia has resulted in a push back from these countries. Vietnam, for instance, has sought to offset the presence of its Chinese neighbour by developing remarkably good relations with the United States, a former adversary, going so far as to sign a nuclear cooperation agreement with Washington. Malaysia and Indonesia have sought to develop better relations with India.