India has engaged in high-profile hand wringing over the Barack Obama administration's renewed focus on developing the United States' relationship with China, as New Delhi perceives a pattern of diplomatic, economic and military encirclement by Beijing.
A Chinese threat is seen in the "string of pearls" - China's access to maritime facilities in Myanmar, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Pakistan and the Maldives - and in the military buildup on India's eastern border that threatens to sever the "chicken's neck", the narrow Siliguri Corridor between Nepal and Bangladesh that connects India's landlocked eastern boondock to the national heartland.
In July 2009, one pundit predicted war with China "by 2012", in the article "'Nervous China may attack India by 2012'" [1], published by the Times of India: "China will launch an attack on
India before 2012. There are multiple reasons for a desperate Beijing to teach India the final lesson, thereby ensuring Chinese supremacy in Asia in this century," Bharat Verma, editor of
the Indian Defense Review, wrote in the article.
But a look at prevailing trends in South Asia indicates that China's adventurism will be moderated by its own vulnerabilities. The fate of Tibet could emerge as Asia's defining security issue - to Beijing's detriment - if China and India can't manage their differences.
An adjustment of the special Indo-American
relationship consummated under
president George W Bush was inevitable once the Obama
administration entered office in January 2009.
One of the most erratic and destabilizing initiatives of Bush's erratic and destabilizing presidency was his opening to India. Bush and his
national security advisor, Condoleezza Rice, entered office determined to upgrade relations with Delhi. To do so, a key diplomatic and legal impediment to intimate security cooperation had to be swept aside: India's development of its civilian and military nuclear programs outside of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) structure. This initiative was not popular, even inside the Bush administration.
Robert Blackwill, the abrasive, arm-twisting (literally - he left government in 2004, shortly after he allegedly yanked the arm of a female embassy functionary in a rage over a missing airline reservation) US ambassador to India was a mentor to Rice and one of the most aggressive advocates of the new relationship.
He described his struggles with non-proliferation types and the pro-Pakistan former
secretary of state, Colin Powell, and his deputy, Richard Armitage, in colorful terms in the article: "What are the origins of the transformation of US-Indian relations?" [2]
... [T]he non-proliferation "ayatollahs", as the Indians call them, who despite the fact that the White House was intent on redefining the relationship, sought to maintain without essential change all of the non-proliferation approaches toward India that had been pursued in the [Bill] Clinton administration. It was as if they had not digested the fact that George W Bush was now president. During the first year of the Bush presidency, I vividly recall receiving routine instructions in New Delhi from the State Department that contained all the counterproductive language from the Clinton administration's approach to India's nuclear weapons program. These nagging nannies were alive and well in that State Department labyrinth. I, of course, did not implement those instructions. It took me months and many calls to the White House to finally cut off the head of this snake back home.
Assisted by Blackwill's persistent insubordination and the determination of India's foreign secretary at the time, Shyam Saran, Bush cut the Gordian knot in a manner that suited his world view of the US and its allies unconstrained by the international system and its network of treaties and instead dispensing instruction to it.
The US unilaterally concluded a nuclear deal with India that made a mockery of the NPT and logic by exempting eight Indian reactors capable of generating fissile weapons material from inspection. Then the United States orchestrated acceptance of the deal by the International Atomic Energy Agency and, after considerable arm twisting, the Nuclear Suppliers' Group. The deal was ratified and signed by the US and Indian governments in late 2008, in one of the last acts of the Bush presidency.
The deal, enshrined in US law as the United States-India Nuclear Cooperation Approval and Non-proliferation Enhancement Act, was sold as a reward for India's good record as a democracy and as a non-proliferator as it developed its nuclear program outside the NPT. India's less-than-stellar record as contributor to nuclear tensions in South Asia - it had danced to the brink of a nuclear exchange with Pakistan as recently as 2002 over Kashmir - was pointedly ignored.
India was overjoyed at its good fortune, having gained an undeserved pass for its nuclear program and recognition of a privileged role as an American security partner at the expense of its detested rival, Pakistan.
Bush remains a popular figure to the Indian establishment. Tellingly, after he emerged from the traditional one-year hiatus of presidents who have left office, one of his first stops was the hospitable venue of the Hindustan Times-sponsored Leadership Initiative Conference in
New Delhi.
The Hindustan Times concluded its interview with Bush, "India's voice on the global stage very important: Bush" [3] with the following question/statement: There are some who believe you have been the best US president for India.
In his reply to the newspaper, Bush - while modestly stating that he would await history's verdict - did not presume to disagree.
When asked what the United States got out of the nuclear deal, Bush jocularly cited reduced import barriers for India's luscious mangoes in the US market as justification.
A more realistic case was made that US suppliers of nuclear gear would benefit from India's entry into the global market for plants and equipment, though Russian and French suppliers, with their proven export records, would be expected to fare better selling to India than America's civilian nuclear plant builders.
Beyond its shortage of unambiguous benefits, the deal brought a number of negatives with it.
The Indian transaction - and the inescapable conclusion that the United States had institutionalized a double standard of forgiveness for its allies and selective enforcement against its enemies - has created inevitable problems for the United States in its attempts to create a united front against Iran.
When the Bush administration declined to extend similar nuclear privileges to the (admittedly, undemocratic, serial-proliferating) government of Pakistan, it contributed to the sense of anxiety and suspicion of the US within the Pakistani military that dogs American efforts to gain Islamabad's wholehearted participation in its bloody AfPak strategy to this day.
It also brought the security tensions implicit in the Sino-Indian relationship to the surface. China vigorously if fruitlessly opposed the Nuclear Suppliers' Group waiver to India, earning considerable resentment from India in the process.
The primary significance of the Sino-American relationship was, apparently, geostrategic. In its official statements, the Bush administration never alluded to a significant rationale for the Indo-American alliance: China.
After he left government, Blackwill was considerably less circumspect. While he acknowledged that there was no sense of immediate existential threat underlying from Beijing underpinning the relationship between Washington and New Delhi, he went on to say:
Like some in Washington, India is enormously attentive to the rise of Chinese power ... as the Indian military thinks strategically, its contingency planning concentrates on China. It is partially in this context (as well as energy security) that India plans a blue-water navy with as many as four aircraft carriers. India will also eventually have longer-range combat aircraft and is working on extending the range of its missile forces. What other US ally, except Japan, thinks about China in this prudent way? On the contrary, witness the current widespread eagerness within the European Union to lift its arms embargo against China. As a Chinese general said to me a few years ago, European policy toward China can be summed up in a six-letter word: Airbus.
The American conservative's platonic ideal of confrontational Sino-Indian relations driven by border disputes (and a unique interpretation of the phrase "honest broker") was supplied in a
Wall Street Journal op-ed: "The China-India Border Brawl" [4] by Jeff Smith of the right-wing
American Foreign Policy Council in June 2009:
What is Washington's role in this Asian rivalry? ... Washington should leverage its friendly relations with both capitals to promote bilateral dialogue and act as an honest broker where invited. But it should also continue to build upon the strategic partnership with India initiated by former president George W Bush, and support its ally, as it did at the Nuclear Suppliers' group and the ADB [Asian Development Bank], where necessary. Washington must also make clear that it considers the established, decades-old border between the two to be permanent.
Most importantly, though, the Sino-Indian border dispute should be viewed as a test for proponents of China's "peaceful rise" theory. If China becomes adventurous enough to challenge India's sovereignty or cross well-defined red lines, Washington must be willing to recognize the signal and respond appropriately.
Alas for India, its privileged position near the heart of American security calculations did not survive the global financial crisis, the deterioration of the situation in Afghanistan, and the Obama administration.
Obama, who won his Nobel Peace Prize in part for his efforts towards world nuclear disarmament, not the granting of deals to ostensibly right-minded and responsible nuclear democracies, pledged during his presidential campaign to obtain ratification of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.
Indian experts promptly announced that India's first hydrogen bomb test had been a dud, implying that enmeshing India in international nuclear agreements would be an unacceptable compromise of India's ability to perfect its weapons and ensure its security. (See
India reels under explosive nuclear charge, Asia Times Online)
More significantly, the Obama administration has embarked on a policy of "strategic reassurance" towards China, intended to obtain China's active assistance in resuscitating the global economy and to ensure it will not dump its massive holdings of US public debt.
The US-India relationship remains, but for the time being it is stripped of the China-pushback elements that imbued the Bush administration's initiative with its appeal, sense of urgency, and bilateral recklessness.
In South Asia, the US no longer has the Bush administration's luxury of cultivating relations with India while a medium-intensity conflict festers in Afghanistan. Instead, the US has found itself desperate for effective cooperation from Pakistan as it attempts to forestall a political and military collapse in Afghanistan that, aside from its strategic implications, would be a considerable embarrassment for the current US president.
The Obama administration made an effort in good faith to square the US/Afghanistan/Pakistan/India circle by promoting a grand bargain involving the disputed region of Kashmir. In an attempt to win the support and gratitude of the Pakistan military - and enable the shift of resources to the Afghanistan border - the US tried to put negotiation of Kashmir on the regional agenda and revealed the first conspicuous fissures in the Sino-American relationship.
The Indian government is resolutely opposed to internationalization of the Kashmir issue, since the demographics are against it. The area is overwhelmingly Muslim - even more so now that a terror campaign has uprooted almost 300,000 Hindu residents and turned them into internally displaced persons - and the inevitable destination of a good faith negotiation would appear to be the alienation of a large part of India's current holding of Jammu and Kashmir.
At New Delhi's vociferous insistence, Kashmir was deleted from US special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan (AfPak), Richard Holbrooke's portfolio, and the US State Department sent him off to try to solve the AfPak mess without explicit reference to the central preoccupation of Pakistan's army.
Beyond assuring that the desperately distracted Pakistan government would be deprived of the good offices of any third party to overcome the entrenched Indian position on Kashmir, the decoupling of Pakistan from India's geopolitical concerns also confirmed a more subtle shift: the near-total marginalization of Pakistan as a Chinese asset in South Asian affairs.
Although the Pakistan security establishment retains its loyalty and appreciation of China as a genuine ally, it is enmeshed in a bloody, distracting struggle with the Taliban while its civilian leadership finds itself desperately reliant on US arms, aid, and diplomatic good offices.
The Obama administration has also provided signal assistance to India in dealing with another nettlesome ally of Beijing on its border: Myanmar.
Myanmar has been courted by India for years, even as persistent US advocacy of democracy in Myanmar and the cause of Aung San Suu Kyi pushed the junta deeper into Beijing's embrace. Now, the United States has adopted a policy of engagement
marked this week by the visit of US Undersecretary of State Kurt Campbell - whose primary objective appears to be to help India wean Myanmar away from China.
It is perhaps not a coincidence that India now finds - with its western and eastern headaches reduced if not eliminated - that it has the leisure to involve itself in a
border spat with China on the matter of Beijing's claim on a remote ethnic-Tibetan enclave in
the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh and, specifically, the little town of Tawang, the town that
the Dalai Lama - to considerable
Chinese tooth-gnashing and with the full-throated support of the Indian government - arrived in on Sunday for a five-day visit.
Although Western observers tend to dismiss the Sino-Indian border dispute as a matter of juvenile posturing by two aspiring superpowers who ought to know better, there is a deadly serious element to the dispute over these remote areas - the destabilizing and, to Beijing, profoundly threatening problem of the hostile Tibetan diaspora on the People's Republic of China's (PRC) borders with India, Nepal and Bhutan.
Beijing's top Indian affairs boffin, Ma Jiali, has identified the border dispute, not economic competition or maritime security, as the central problem of Sino-Indian relations.
As demonstrated by the unrest in 2008 throughout the vast ethnic-Tibetan areas of China and South Asia, the PRC has been unable to get a grip on its Tibetan problem, despite 60 years of assiduously working
the military, security, political, economic and diplomatic levers at its disposal.
Over the past four decades, China has profited in its clumsy grappling with
the Tibetan issue from forbearance by the international community, especially its neighbor to the south, India.
Despite hosting the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, since his flight from Lhasa in 1959, the Indian government has refused to allow the Tibetan diaspora to engage in activities that directly attack PRC rule in the Tibetan Autonomous Region and the Tibetan areas of Qinghai, Gansu and Sichuan.
China has exploited the Dalai Lama's commitment to a "Middle Way" of negotiated autonomy, to entangle the Tibetan government-in-exile in endless, fruitless and seemingly insincere negotiations.
However, it appears that generational changes within the Tibetan movement, the evolving geopolitical and economic stature of India, and Washington's willingness to partner with
New Delhi are converging to introduce elements of instability and dangerous unpredictability into China's relationship with India.
To forestall Chinese interference in the selection process, the Dalai Lama has indicated that his successor may be found outside of China, and may even be selected before his death.
Whoever succeeds the Dalai Lama, and however he is chosen, increased militancy by proponents of Tibetan independence within the diaspora is virtually assured. Explicit independence activists like the Tibetan Youth Congress (TYC) have historically respected the desires of the Dalai Lama and moderated their activities. They are unlikely to show the same deference to the young man who is rumored to be the Dalai Lama's preferred successor, Ugyen Thinley Dorjee, the 17th Karmapa.
The Karmapa, a charismatic 22-year-old who escaped Tibet dramatically in 1999, may serve his people well as as telegenic, intelligent and pious face of Tibetan Buddhism to the West, but he is unlikely to command authority within the movement. He comes from the competing Black Hat sect and has been locked into an embarrassing struggle with a powerful leader within his own sect who has recognized a competing Karmapa. He has been locked out of the sect's monastery and denied access to his customary regalia. Instead, he resides at Dharamsala in India with the Dalai Lama and is seen as little more than his protege.
In the context of the South Asian status quo, in which all nations subscribe to the "One China" policy, as well as discourage Tibetan political activity and monitor and suppress Tibetan militancy with various degrees of enthusiasm, the loss of the Dalai Lama's moderating influence and an uptick in rhetoric and violence by angry Tibetan emigres would not concern Beijing overmuch.
What concerns the PRC is the possibility that India, flush with economic development and US backing, would be willing to confront China and roll back its influence in South Asia by choosing to play "the Tibet card" with the help of Tibetan militants operating from havens located in the cross-border territories of India and its allies.
The
Christian Science Monitor in "Rivals China, India in escalating war of words" [5], sought out Chinese and Indian pundits in the context of the Dalai Lama's visit this week to Tawang:
The fierce People's Daily editorial was "a message showing Beijing's intention", says Han. "They don't want the Indian side to do anything to play the Tibet card."
New Delhi, however, "has no bargaining leverage with China except the Dalai Lama", says Dr Pant. "He is the last thing they can use against China ..."
The Times of India, in the article "India and the Tibet card" [6] provided some additional background information by recounting the result of China's continual fishing in the troubled waters of India's increasingly disgruntled and independent-minded satellite state on the Tibet border, Nepal:
India has also played the Tibet card, at least twice in recent times. Kondapalli [of Jawaharlal Nehru University] points out that "in 1987 and 2003, when China began supplying arms to the Royal Nepalese Army, India did play the Tibet card. In 2003, foreign secretary Shyam Sharan went to Dharamsala to meet the Dalai Lama. It was a message to China: Don't interfere in our backyard."
The desire to display and deter on their contested border in the area of Tibet has led both China and India to develop and militarize the remote communities there even beyond the expected investments of two burgeoning regional powers that wish to secure and integrate their most remote territories.
The Sino-Indian border has never been fixed by mutual agreement between the two nations. In the 1950s, China proposed a swap in which China would keep a desolate stretch in western India called the Aksai Chin, claimed by India, over which the Chinese had constructed a strategic road linking Xinjiang and Tibet. In return, China would recognize Indian control of a piece of land in what was then known as India's North East Frontier Agency (NEFA) nestled against the Myanmar border and China.
Indian prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru, miscalculating China's willingness to go to war, refused the deal and instead sent troops into Aksai Chin to expel the Chinese.
Disagreement escalated into a full-scale war in 1962. China's People's Liberation Army (PLA) administered a thorough drubbing to the unprepared Indian army, expelling Indian units from Aksai Chin, and occupying contested areas in the NEFA.
The Chinese leadership, wary of becoming embroiled in a prolonged war with India on top of problems with the Soviet Union, the US and Kuomintang leader Chiang Kai-shek, fatefully decided to withdraw unilaterally from the territory it had taken in NEFA, instead of continuing
military operations and occupation to bargain the border dispute towards a final conclusion.
Today, the swap - actually, the acknowledgement of de facto control of territories each side already occupies - is still on the table. The PRC has the (virtually) uninhabited Aksai Chin tightly in its grasp, while India has reorganized the NEFA and created the state of Arunachal Pradesh on the land China claimed.
There's one wrinkle. For several years, China has indicated that it would surrender its claims over all of Arunachal Pradesh except Tawang - the same Tawang that the Dalai Lama visited on November 8. That is the same Tawang that the Dalai Lama - in 2008, in a statement that possibly reflected frustration at serving as a
punching bag for duplicitous Chinese negotiators and aggrieved Tibetan militants in the aftermath of the bloody unrest inside China - stepped into the political arena and identified not as "Tibetan" (as he had done previously in an acknowledgment of its cultural character while sidestepping the political issue of whose territory it should belong to) but as "part of India".
To be fair to the Chinese, Tawang is indisputably Tibetan.
In a twist that probably accounts for Tawang's existence as a Chinese negotiating point, in 1947, the Tibetan government asked for only one modification to the border arrangements that the British had made (and China has consistently refused to recognize): it explicitly asked that India acknowledge Tibetan authority in Tawang. That is a persuasive indication that the district - which protrudes into the president-day Tibetan Autonomous Region like an inconveniently extended thumb - falls outside what India might construe as its natural Himalayan boundary.
Nevertheless, it is difficult to believe that the Chinese are serious about recovering Tawang. Tawang is the site of the Tawang Monastery, known as Galden Namgyal Lhatse, founded in the 17th century. It calls itself the "second-oldest Buddhist monastery in the world after Lhasa", hosted the Dalai Lama when he fled the Chinese occupation in 1959, and the Tibetan spiritual leader has visited it four times since then. The Dalai Lama has chosen at least one of Tawang's abbots and provides financial support to the monastery, which provides political as well as religious leadership for a community of 20,000 Monpa tribespeople of Tibetan extraction.
Turning Tawang over to the tender mercies of the PRC in the face of the horror, outrage and resistance of a large, powerful Buddhist monastery, an aggrieved population, the global Tibetan community, and a large swath of Indian and world opinion would appear to be a political impossibility for New Delhi and utter folly for Beijing.
Given Beijing's current anxieties over the future direction of the Tibetan independence movement and India's increased assertiveness, it will probably persist in its claim to Tawang simply to have a convenient
casus belli at hand if and when it wants to escalate tensions in a relatively controlled manner and lay claim to the Indian government's attention.
In an indication to Chinese, Tibetan and world opinion that the contested border is not a place where China can provoke India at little diplomatic and military cost, the Indian government announced in June the stationing of a squadron of nuclear-capable Sukhoi 30 MKI fighters within striking distance of Arunachal Pradesh, and has mooted raising another two divisions of mountain troops to serve there.
To emphasize the state's status as an integrated and inalienable part of India, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh made a campaign visit to Arunachal Pradesh in October 2008 during the run-up to the parliamentary elections. The Chinese retaliated with an unsuccessful attempt to block an Asian Development Bank loan to India that included flood control in the state.
The Tawang situation benefits from the fact that each side has occupied and fortified its positions for decades and not too much can happen there that can surprise and threaten. More importantly, as India's ability to project power into its border areas improves, the situation has benefited from the discrete restraint of the Congress Party's Manmohan and Foreign Secretary Nirupama Rao.
Manmohan characterized the Dalai Lama's trip as a response to a local invitation extended to the Dalai Lama that he wasn't involved in, an absurdity considering the close attention New Delhi pays to every issue surrounding the Tibetans.
In an apparent attempt to diffuse or redirect tensions as the date of the trip approached, the Chinese government cannily noted Manmohan's bland statement, and decided to construe and condemn the trip as the Dalai Lama's affront to Sino-Indian ties instead of an insult to Beijing by New Delhi.
For India's part, in order to lower the temperature for the Dalai Lama's visit to Tawang - which had already received in-depth coverage in the New York Times, Time magazine, the Christian Science Monitor and a host of other media outlets, its Foreign Ministry canceled visas for foreign journalists looking to cover the trip.
China has agreed to sell Pakistan at least 36 advanced fighter jets in a landmark deal worth as much as $1.4bn, Pakistani and western officials said on Tuesday.
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