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India's Interests at Stake in Relationship with China
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As India embarks on redefining its foreign policy priorities to match its growing weight in the international system, it has become imperative for Indian policymakers to learn from the country's past in order to frame appropriate policies for the future. The Central Intelligence Agency recently declassified its decades-old documents, referred to as the "family jewels," which included the CIA's own assessment of the reasons behind India's debacle in the 1962 Sino-Indian war. While the documents do not reveal any major new insight into the events, it reinforces some of the issues that India should not ignore.
When Chinese President Liu Shao-chi said that "China was a great power and had to punish India once," it is clear that India was being viewed as a threat to China in the long-term and the 1962 war was as much about China's demonstration of its might as it was about the boundary dispute that apparently was the proximate cause behind the conflict. China's military superiority in the 1950s -- bolstered by India's own woolly eyed approach to security issues -- provided China a window of opportunity that it exploited to its advantage. While Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru continued to see war as unnecessary, his tendency to project his own beliefs about statecraft onto his adversaries paved the way for a conflict, the consequences of which India continues to come to terms with even after more than 40 years.
The coverage of the recently declassified CIA documents in the Indian media seems to underline the apparent "cunningness" of the Chinese and how they were able to deceive Nehru and India. The so-called Chinese "betrayal" of Nehru is a lesson that the Indian media and many others seem to have taken to heart. The argument is being made that the Chinese cannot be trusted because of their behavior in the 1950s and the 1960s.
Yet, reading the documents and examining China's behavior reveals that it was no different than the behavior of major powers across millennia. China was not betraying Nehru; it was simply looking after what it perceived to be its national interests and seeking aggrandizement of power and influence at the cost of India, its weaker neighbor and a possible challenger in the future. Nehru allowed India to be taken for a ride as he started believing in his own rhetoric of "Hindi-China bhai-bhai." His foreign policy became divorced from the realities of power politics and the consequences for India were catastrophic.
Today, as China and India emerge as major powers in the global hierarchy, it is imperative that Indian policymakers take note of their history. The reality is that, even today, Indian foreign policy vis-à-vis China remains mired in confusion, contradictions, and clichés. Leaving aside the question of the ability of Indian elites to think strategically on national security, in the case of India's China policy it is not clear if the Indian political and foreign policy establishment understands the basic forces that shape and configure global politics.
Pursuit of friendly relations with China seems to have become an end in itself when it should be a means toward achieving India's larger strategic objective of emerging as a major regional and global player. Diplomacy without an overarching conceptual and intellectual framework of foreign policy often becomes a technical exercise in splitting differences, thus shading into what many might consider appeasement.
There is nothing really sinister about China's attempts to expand its own influence and curtail India's. China is a rising power in Asia and the world and as such will do its utmost to prevent the rise of other power centers around its periphery like India that might in the future prevent it from taking its place as a global player. It did so in the 1960s and it is doing so today.
China's all-weather friendship with Pakistan, its attempts to increase its influence in Nepal, Bangladesh, and Burma, its persistent refusal to recognize parts of India such as Arunachal Pradesh, its lack of support for India's membership to the United Nations Security Council and other regional and global organizations, all point toward China's attempts at preventing the rise of India as a regional and global player of major importance. It is this strategy that China has consistently and successfully pursued without any apologies.
This is not much different than the stated U.S. policy of preventing the rise of other powers that might threaten its position as a global power. Just as the United States is working toward achieving its strategic objective, China is pursuing its own strategic agenda.
There is also nothing extraordinarily benign in China's attempts to improve its bilateral relations with India in recent times. After cutting India down to size in various ways, China does not want India to move closer to the United States in order to contain China. On this geopolitical chessboard, while both Washington and Beijing are using India toward their own strategic ends, India has ended up primarily reacting to the actions of other.
A rising China will not tolerate a rising India as its peer competitor. Even if a rising India does not have any intention of becoming a regional hegemon, China will try its best to contain India as it has already done to a large extent. It is this containment that India has to guard against. China's intentions vis-à-vis India may seem entirely peaceful at the moment, but that is largely irrelevant in the strategic scheme of politics. India should recognize that the future of Sino-Indian relations remain highly uncertain in large part due to the opacity in Chinese intentions.
Yet, contrary to what many in India might think, China is not a malevolent, sinister international entity out there to demolish India, but a state which is simply pursuing its own strategic interests in a hard-headed fashion on its way to great power status. It is time for India to realize that India's great power aspirations cannot be realized without a similar cold-blooded realistic assessment of its own strategic interests in an anarchic international system where there are no permanent friends or enemies, only permanent interests.
Report Drafted By:
Dr. Harsh V. Pant
