 "How will Modi 3.0 tackle the China threat? Early signs indicate a tense battle of nerves ahead")
A strange paradox plagues the status of India-China ties. For such a consequential relationship that may make or mar India’s rise, the debates around it are largely myopic, set across the political and ideological faultlines. India certainly cannot afford not to constantly evaluate and debate threadbare the terms of the relationship, more so as a new government in New Delhi begins another innings with a fresh mandate.
Will the third iteration of Narendra Modi government prefer continuity, or a new approach? Given that bilateral ties have hit a deadlock in the backdrop of an ominous military buildup across the ill-defined Himalayan borders, creating a dangerous flashpoint between two of the world’s most powerful armies, the urgent question is the current state of the bilateral framework.
It is clear that the terms of the framework that were drawn up in the 1990s have collapsed. Owing chiefly to the power imbalance, an inordinately more powerful China now wants to redraw the provisos of the relationship in its own terms, and that involves creating new realities along the 3,440km-long LAC. So far, all of India’s efforts at persuading China not to use force to unilaterally change the status quo at the LAC have failed, and New Delhi has also been unsuccessful in coaxing China to revert to pre-2020 status quo, even at the cost of considerable bloodshed.
Even more worringly, both militaries – armed to the teeth – are locked in a confrontationist posture at the LAC. Failure to achieve a détente could lead to an eventual catastrophic conflict, led by miscalculation even, if not intent. The question of a new bilateral framework that may prevent such an eventuality gains added significance but with China adopting a maximalist position, leaving India with an onerous choice between acceptance or aggression, the roadmap to a new framework isn’t clear.
To get a shot at a new framework, therefore, the deadlock needs to be broken. There must be sufficient incentives for both sides to engage with an earnest intention of breaking the deadlock. So far, 21 rounds of military-level talks have achieved some progress. But it has not been enough. The onus lies on India, unlike China that wants the “boundary issue” to be boxed in “ an appropriate place” for resumption of normalcy because “China-India ties should not be defined by any single issue or area”. In other words, China is not interested in resolving the crisis.
Impact Shorts
More ShortsNew Delhi, in response, is creating deterrence to discourage China from further deployment of grey-zone tactics. The Modi government is furiously building and upgrading critical infrastructure at the border to improve its logistics capabilities. It is also exploring the option of external balancing by gravitating closer to the US and its regional allies.
None of it, however, has given India the requisite leverage to force China to climb down from the cliff, ‘manage’ the crisis and reduce the risk of violent escalation. Some voices are urging a resumption of political-level dialogue.
Writing in The Times of India, author and former Indian foreign secretary Vijay Gokhale observes, “What objectives might a resumption of the political dialogue serve? To begin with, it might allow for an in-depth understanding at a political level of each other’s positions. Such dialogue might, hopefully, permit both sides to find some common ground to start building a new framework. It might benefit risk management, not simply in terms of minimising unintended conflict, but also in terms of modernising the 1993 and 1996 agreements in order to make them relevant to contemporary needs.”
While the restarting of dialogue process at the highest political level may help in breaking the deadlock, it is worth noting that Chinese incursions have occurred even when two leaders have met. Xi Jinping’s visit to India from 17-10 September, 2014, was marked by a standoff between Indian soldiers and the PLA in the Chumar and Demchok region of Ladakh.
While political dialogue has its usefulness, it isn’t clear how dialogue will help when China is using power disparity between two nations to redraw the modus vivendi. In March 2023, when India’s external affairs minister S Jaishankar had met then Chinese foreign minister Qin Gang on the sidelines of the G20 FMs’ summit, the Chinese interpretation of the meeting indicated the widening gulf between the two sides.
Scholar Antara Ghosal Singh of ORF, who pores over Chinese media commentary and analyses for reaction, writes of the Chinese perspective that “the mainstream Chinese discourse post the meeting was that ‘China needs to prepare for the worst at the LAC’. From a Chinese perspective, India did not show a positive attitude during the meeting and did not reciprocate China’s so-called ‘goodwill gestures’ such as it seeking to explore common grounds between the two countries beyond the border dispute or participating in defence exchanges and cooperation with India under the framework of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, etc. It was argued that the meeting only lasted for 45 minutes, in which Jaishankar made ‘a big fuss’ about the border issue.”
While India holds that ties may improve only if there’s disengagement at the border and that overall relations cannot be separated from the military standoff, China insists that India cannot bring any conditionality to the table during talks. In this game of one-upmanship, Chinese and Indian leverages for peaceful resolution have cancelled each other out for an enduring stalemate, leaving China, the superior military and economic power, in a state of advantage.
China has used the situation deftly, indulging in a series of cartographic and nomenclature aggression to buttress its overarching territorial aggrandizement, and is doing everything from building dual-use facilities and villages along the LAC, expanding infrastructure and is even beefing up offensive air force capabilities by deploying advanced stealth fighters along the border.
What could be India’s response? Modi 3.0 has given a few indications. Some notable developments show an attempt by New Delhi to create more leverage.
The Diplomat has reported that India plans to ‘rename’ 30-plus places in Tibet, “reclaiming from historical records their ancient names in Indian languages.” The magazine claims to have witnessed a list of the places to be “renamed”, and quotes Indian army officers involved in the exercise, as saying that media trips are being organized to disputed border areas “to speak to locals who fiercely oppose Chinese claims and say they were always part of India” with an aim to “push through the Indian counter-narrative on the disputed border through regional and global media.”
If renaming of places, a move that is yet to materialise, is ‘playing the Tibet card’, the message got louder with India hosting a bipartisan US Congressional delegation that had just passed a bill, Resolve Tibet Act, that empowers the US “to actively and directly counter disinformation about Tibet from the Chinese government, rejecting false claims that Tibet has been part of China since ‘ancient times,’ pushing for negotiations without preconditions between the Chinese government and the Dalai Lama or his representatives or the democratically elected leaders of the Tibetan community, and affirming the State Department’s responsibility to coordinate with other governments in multilateral efforts toward the goal of a negotiated agreement on Tibet.”
The American lawmakers (both Republicans and Democrats) who passed the bill that pushes for ‘free Tibet’, landed in New Delhi, met the Dalai Lama, and issued a scathing attack on Xi. Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who was part of the delegation, stated that while “His Holiness Dalai Lama, with his message of knowledge, tradition, compassion, purity of soul and love, will live a long time and his legacy will live forever. But you, the President of China, you’ll be gone and nobody will give you credit for anything.”
And then the delegation met Prime Minister Modi the next day, having been hosted by Jaishankar the previous night. Interestingly, the Tibetan spiritual leader has left for the US for medical treatment, so the meeting could well have been held on American soil. The fact that India played host to the American lawmakers who had an explicit agenda on Tibet, and the prime minister granted them an audience the next day says all that is to be said about India’s messaging.
Modi’s move came right after the newly elected prime minister, in his third consecutive stint, had responded warmly to a congratulatory message from Taiwanese leader William Lai Ching-te and vowed to build “closer ties as we work towards mutually beneficial economic and technological partnership”. The deliberate nature of the public response that triggered an acerbic reaction from China, left little space for doubt that this is part of a calibrated pushback, aimed at leveraging the partnerships. That Modi is using the US and its allies in sending across messages won’t be lost on Beijing.
New Delhi is also refusing to resume direct civilian flight service between India and China, that has remained suspended for the last four years since the outbreak of the pandemic, despite several requests from Beijing – tying it with restoration of normalcy at the border.
Modi has also decided not to visit the upcoming SCO summit at Astana, Kazakhstan. The official excuse is ongoing Parliament session that ends on July 3, but it is hard to ignore the impression that avoiding running into Xi has been an equally strong motivation. Any Russian displeasure at Modi’s absence will be taken care of by the prime minister’s quick dash to Moscow for a standalone visit for the India-Russia summit on July 8.
Faced with a fait accompli at the border, Modi’s attempts are focused on creating leverage by expanding the horizons. The overarching goal remains stability in relationship while breaking the deadlock and forcing Xi into a meaningful engagement. India has been forced into this balancing act because China is unwilling to reverse the new ‘facts on the ground’ or make any more concessions.
To China, India has no real clout or ability to alter the new reality and no option but to accept it. From this vantage point, China calls India’s earnest efforts to tie normalisation of relations with the resolution of border crisis “arrogance” and “ sky-high price”.
Chinese scholar and strategist Hu Shisheng – the director of Institute for South Asian Studies at CICIR, an influential Chinese think tank on foreign policy and security affairs that comes under the direct supervision of CCP’s Ministry of State Security (MSS) and whose research influences and represents the mainstream voice of the Chinese party-state system, in a recent piece on Indian foreign policy, calls the diplomacy of Modi government “dynamic” and “tension-filled”.
Hu’s essay, reproduced in Sinification (machine translation), observes that though Indian diplomacy has “flourished” under Modi due to “indulgence from the West”, and even though India-US ties despite “latent mistrust” are “set to deepen”, “in recent years, the Biden administration has focused much of its efforts on the Western Pacific region, promoting minilateral security cooperation mechanisms with its allies. This indicates that the US has lowered its expectations of India in its strategy to contain and blockade China.”
Hu also observes that “considering the significant disparity in power between China and India, New Delhi will neither want to break relations with China completely nor will it be willing to serve as ‘cannon fodder’ for the West’s containment of China. In future, Sino-Indian relations may continue to be characterised by “cold hostility” [冷暴力] or “non-violent, non-cooperative” coexistence.”
To the extent that Hu’s views represent the prevalent Chinese thinking, it appears that Beijing has come to a conclusion that India’s options in getting China to do its bid are becoming increasingly more constricted. China remains aware of the significant power discrepancy between the two nations, and this awareness is making China more adventurous, imbuing it with a greater appetite for risk-taking including implementation of force to achieve its objectives – secure in the belief that India, as a lesser power, will ultimately be forced to back down.
This is not to suggest that Beijing is spoiling for a violent escalation, but it seeks to use force, or threat of force as a leverage to demand obeisance from India, and it wants New Delhi to accept Beijing’s primacy and admit its secondary status in Asia.
In this context, Modi’s recent moves assume greater significance. A battle of nerves lies ahead. External balancing and a fast-growing economy are India’s best options, but in the short term, a lot may depend on the outcome of US presidential polls.
The author is Deputy Executive Editor, Firstpost. He tweets @sreemoytalukdar. The views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.
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