India-China reset will have to pass the test of strategic trust

Shorn of the optics and the speeches made, especially by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and President Xi Jinping, at the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation Summit, their revived interest in improving/normalising bilateral relations holds promise, if and only if they are acted upon with the same spirit and tempo.

Despite the positives, the post-Galwan suspicions of India and Indians will remain for a long time to come. Diplomatically, New Delhi can be expected to follow on the clichéd ‘cautious optimism’ path.

China is also not without doubts about India’s revived interest in bilateral relations, even when both have taken up an unhurried step-by-step approach to reviving ties. In particular, Beijing would doubt if the pronounced Indian intentions are real and a stand-alone affair or only a way to send out a new message to the US in the aftermath of the ‘tariff war’ unleashed by President Donald Trump on an unsuspecting Prime Minister Modi, his government and people.

More from Opinion

GST reforms: A demand-side push to sail India’s ship amid global headwinds How India stands up against bullying, but with reforms and patience

Negated positives

Remember the way Prime Minister Modi hosted Xi and later Trump in his native Gujarat State. Xi was the first foreign visitor to India under the Modi regime, circa 2014. Likewise, the twin showpieces in ‘Namaste Trump!’ and ‘Howdy Modi!’ in each other’s country were a media spectacle. If something actually had come out of it all, Galwan and the tariff war have since negated the positives from those visits.

A lot of speculation surrounded Xi’s Doklam and Galwan attacks. A lot more speculative theories are now doing the rounds over the tariff war. Some of them are personal and personalised—and they have to be discounted. Nations and governments do not act on instincts and certainly not on the moods and methods of individual leaders forever. Global diplomacy has come a long, long way from an era of kings and their whims.

Impact Shorts

More Shorts

How PM Shinawatra’s ouster has deepened political crisis in Thailand

Beyond Tianjin: Can India and China find common ground?

Today, the institutional memory of governments directs it all, including the kind of about-turn that India and the US injected into bilateral relations post-Cold War. Even their preparation time was long and took shape only with the bilateral defence treaty in 2005, under then Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.

A decade earlier, the US had imposed what had become ritualistic or customary sanctions on India following Pokhran-II. If Pakistan too faced sanctions at the time for the Chagai-I nuclear tests, it could not have been otherwise. But then, the US had known about Pakistan’s nuclear capability all along and ignored India’s warnings that it was happening.

Ticklish issues

Regardless of Trump’s re-hyphenating the US’ India-Pakistan relations, for India and China to revive their bilateral ties, at least to pre-Galwan levels, they need to take up ticklish issues going beyond the border dispute early on. Of particular concern for India is the neighbourhood, where China’s strategic outreach in the name of developmental initiatives has been more than irritating. It’s plain and simple, alarming.

If Beijing honestly desired resumption and restoration of bilateral ties with India, China would have to convince not just the Delhi rulers but the Indian nation as a whole of the reasons for the brutal Galwan massacre five years back. It has enraged Indian street opinion as none other in recent years. As an autocratic state, China is unaware of the silent pressure that the Indian democracy entails for its people to influence their rulers.

But that’s only the beginning. For nearly two decades and more, China has created what an American academic first described as a ‘String of Pearls’. Though Indians did not want to believe in such constructs in the early years, the more China tightened the string’s noose, the greater India began feeling the geostrategic and immediate security implications for the country.

In a way, it began with Hambantota Port in the immediate Sri Lankan neighbourhood. Slowly but surely, China began adding new Pearls to the String in the Indian Ocean Region (IOR) closer to the Indian shores. Seychelles, Maldives, and also Nepal, Bangladesh, and Afghanistan along the land border. Throughout, China did not give up on Sri Lanka, either.

The latest on this score is China despatching three ‘spy ships’ to the Indian Ocean waters, for berthing either in Sri Lanka or the Maldives. If a fourth vessel did not come this side, that was only because both Sri Lanka and the Maldives declined to accommodate China’s request, thanks to India’s diplomatic efforts and their own perceptions that linked Indian economic aid to ‘good neighbourly relations’.

That China is with and behind Pakistan, despite supposedly not subscribing to Islamabad’s strategy of cross-border terrorism against India, is well known. After Operation Sindoor this year, more and more Indians have come to know that much of Pakistan’s arsenal, munitions, missiles, fighter jets, et al, came from China.

China’s doubts

Apart from other aspects of bilateral relations, starting with border talks, Beijing has two specific concerns vis-à-vis India’s China policy. Of the two, India has never ever recognised Taiwan, which New Delhi reiterated even this time round. Yet, China has deep-seated suspicions if India would change tack. Beijing has to recognise that New Delhi would adopt such a course, if at all, only if pushed to the wall.

The same cannot be said about India’s new approaches to Vietnam and the Philippines, where joint military exercises and BrahMos sales (to the latter) have become a part of New Delhi’s outreach on the military diplomatic front. Both Vietnam and the Philippines can do with more friends from the extended neighbourhood in fending off unresolved territorial claims from China.

The logical question is if and how India would wriggle out of current commitments and relationships with China’s adversaries in Southeast Asia if that is what Beijing expected out of New Delhi. Or, a Taiwan-like position and posturing, which may be too much and too early to expect from India just now.

But New Delhi cannot put off considering the future course, if and when it comes to that. Having some advanced strategy in mind to tackle an emerging situation would help avoid the kind of confusion and embarrassment that flowed out of la affaire tariff war by American President Trump.

Conspicuous when missed

In this background, for India and China to begin normalisation talks with the restoration of border trade, direct flights and all, is at best symbolic, to begin with. They run their own course, and they would be conspicuous when missed, and to a targeted population, and not necessarily when in operation.

The border talks are at best unending. The two nations share nearly 4,500 km of land border, and the ruggedness of the terrain and the Himalayan peaks dictate how their respective militaries would view a give-and-take—where not to give and where to take. This can still happen as and when the two leaders give appropriate directions and deadlines to their respective negotiation teams, setting normalisation as a collective goal. Yet, mutual doubts, suspicions and fears will remain and take time to erase. But erase they can, erase they should.

Embedded into the border talks is China-occupied Aksai Chin, which Islamabad wished away from Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK) years ago. Lately, Beijing was known to project the ‘Kashmir issue’ as a trilateral affair for a negotiated settlement, owing to the Aksai Chin factor. However, New Delhi firmly maintains that Kashmir is an integral part of India, and the only remaining issue is when Pakistan will vacate PoK. India asserts that neither China, the US, the UN, nor any other external party has any role in the matter.

Changing the perception

Yet, China could begin by encouraging Pakistan to first end cross-border terrorism in India, which triggered Operation Sindoor and other military initiatives of the kind. It can then tell Pakistan to behave and settle the Kashmir issue with India—where only one way is available for a permanent solution. It’s about Pakistan ending the decades-long occupation.

In return, yes, India will have to help Pakistan remain a united state. For this to happen, Islamabad and Rawalpindi together have to convince themselves to change their perception that ‘externalising’ their internal troubles centred on India, since the Partition, alone would keep their nation together. New Delhi cannot do anything about it, but Beijing can help change that perception.

All of it will mean that Beijing has to begin by going slow and ultimately wind up the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) that passes through PoK and is also aimed at disturbing, though not destabilising, India. Every one of China’s developmental inroads in India’s neighbourhood has a similar aim and goal.

Toothless tiger

In contemporary perspective, New Delhi especially should be clear on how to approach the US-China dichotomy, into which it has walked back all over again. There are already free-wheeling suggestions from within the country that India should walk out of Quad. In a way, there is no Quad left after New Delhi declared that it was not interested in a military alliance of the kind as intended by the US from the very beginning. For the rest of the four-nation multilateral relations, the Quad members already have the ‘Indo-Pacific’ scheme alive, if not kicking.

Through all this, India has to seriously evaluate where it stands in geostrategic and geopolitical terms, whatever the claims and achievements on the geo-economic front. It is becoming increasingly clear that both the US and China do want India on their side, but only as an understudy, not an equal ally, whatever the areas of cooperation.

India cannot just agree to such a proposition. Going by the trilateral in China, also involving Russia’s Vladimir Putin, the three nations can work towards reigniting a multipolar global order, where Europe and European nations missed the bus long ago. If India succeeds in the process, then New Delhi can decide on where it stands on issues without having to be a permanent ally or adversary of any nation.

That is saying a lot, yes, especially in terms of convincing other key players, namely, the US and China, Russia and Europe. However, that alone would help India retain its ‘strategic autonomy’ from the post-Independence era and still play a key role in global and regional affairs.

In between, India has to decide what exactly it intends to do with and for the ‘Global South’.

N Sathiya Moorthy, veteran journalist and author, is a Chennai-based policy analyst & political commentator. The views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.