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| India's China policy in a shambles | | China-India boundary question is in limbo | |
B L KAK
NEW DELHI, NOV 19
Guiding formula for the setlement of the India-China boundary question is in limbo, with Beijing quibbling over new dates for an 8th round of border negotiations between the two Special Representatives, Chinese Vice Foreign Minister, Dai Bingguo, and Indian National Security Advisor, MK Narayanan. Ahead of the first visit to India by Chinese President, Hu Jintao, this week, some heat has been generated with Beijing and New Delhi engaged in the task of watching each other.
Add that to a steady ratcheting up of rhetoric by the Chinese Ambassador to India, who has publicly laid claim not just to Tawang, but to the entire State of Arunachal Pradesh, and India's much touted China policy is in a shambles. By going public days before Hu's visit, even the quiet building up of public opinion towards a possible Tawang Aksai Chin swap as the next step after India agreed to give up its claims over Tibet in return for recognition of sovereignty over Sikkim, will become politically untenable.
India's antennae should have shot up when Chinese Ambassador, Sun Yuxi, attacked his host country for keeping Chinese firms with links to the People's Liberation Army out of contracts to build ports. Delhi had been lulled into a false sense of security by the "peace and tranquillity" of the Sino-Indian engagement. Even going so far as to smugly preach to Pakistan that Delhi-Islamabad adopt the Indo-Chinese model of tackling issues more easily resolved, building a healthy trade relationship rather than go at intractable issues first.
Indian naivete did not see the diplomat's comments were a signal that China was unhappy over growing US-India rapprochement and Delhi's neo-colonialist break out of its sub-continental straightjacket to compete with the Asian giant for oil and raw materials in resource-rich Africa, Central Asia and South America. It did not pick up the signals when a Chinese consul general in Mumbai talked down to then Defence Minister, and now Minister of External Affairs, Pranab Mukherjee. The undiplomatic harangue culminated when China baldly raised the Dalai Lama issue six days before Hu's visit.
A high ranking official Chinese delegation said the supporters of Tibetan spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, had been using Indian soil for anti-China activities, and pointed to the activities of the Tibetan government-in-exile in Dharamsala in Himachal Pradesh. Is it Beijing's attempt at setting a more contentious agenda during the Hu visit? Yet another question: Will Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh, be able to fashion a new strategy to tackle his suddenly more belligerent neighbour?
Two more important questions: Can India nail the official line that negotiations over the 3,500 kms are progressing? How can two countries who have been negotiating over a Line of Actual Control since 1981 not have exchanged maps on anything except the only thing they agree on the "middle sector"? The west and the east remain deadlocked. Chinese maps made one change over Sikkim, no longer showing the former kingdom that India annexed as disputed but as part of India after Delhi agreed to open up the Nathu La pass on the old Silk Road leading into Tibet.
But there is no change on Arunachal or the 20 per cent of Jammu and Kashmir it lays claim to. New Delhi has shown some pragmatism by limiting Beijing's encirclement of India by engaging with neighbouring Myanmar where it had set up a listening post in the Coco islands; and in Nepal where it used its own Communists to confer legitimacy to the Maoist movement. But these and China's plans to dam the Brahmaputra are only a few of India's concerns. |
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