India is just another BRIC in China's Great Wall

A heart bowed down with the weight of woe will cling to the weakest hope. Ahead of today’s meeting of the leaders of BRICS economies in the southern Chinese island-resort of Sanya, Indian foreign policy mandarins drew comfort from a straw signal that signalled perceived warmth of Chinese manner.

The reason: ahead of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s visit to Sanya, the Chinese embassy in New Delhi had issued regular visas to four journalists from Jammu and Kashmir - not the stapled ones they’ve been provocatively issuing in recent months, which symbolically challenged Indian sovereignty over the troubled State.

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This momentary reversion of sanity has so enthused Indian officials that they’re now playing along with China’s desires to see the restoration of high-level military exchanges between their two countries. Those exchanges were suspended last year when China controversially indicated it would not grant a regular visa to Indian Army’s Northern Command chief, B.S. Jaswal, since he was in charge of the disputed State of Jammu and Kashmir.

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Yet, even the latest visa ‘concession’ does not represent a change of Chinese hearts; China has never formally acknowledged either its ‘stapled visa’ policy or suggested that it had since been rolled back. The most charitable explanation for its recent concession is that Chinese authorities did not want to see the shadow of a bilateral dispute (with India) to fall over a multilateral summit and spoil the party. It would therefore be folly for India to reverse its suspension of military exchanges without a matching commitment from China that it will not resort to similar visa provocations.

In any case, China’s invocation of the ‘multilateral spirit’ at forums such as this is only intended to advance its own strategic and national interests using the cover of multilateralism as a shield. As China enhances its global profile, it finds itself open to international criticism on a number of counts - from its mercantilist undervaluation of its currency to its unwillingness to abide by climate change protocol rules despite being the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases.

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But as the proceedings at the 2009 Copenhagen climate change summit showed, an alliance of momentary convenience with India and other developing economies helps China deflect criticism away from itself. India’s Environment Mininster Jairam Ramesh, ever ready to shake his ‘ Chindia’ pom-poms, even crowed that India had ‘saved’ China from isolation at Copenhagen. (Barely a year later, at Cancun, Jairam Ramesh articulated a climate change policy that amounted to an about-turn on Copenhagen, yet he spun that as being in the ’national interest’.)

Chinia’s own faith in configurations like BASIC and BRICS - which some commentators have likened to a sack of potatoes - is only of recent vintage. But China has figured out that they serve the purpose of insulating itself from isolation on international forums and to deflect well-merited criticism away from itself. India, for now, is only just another BRIC in China’s Great Wall. To misread China’s opportunistic invocation of ‘multilateral spirit’ for a change of heart that might reset bilateral tensions will only skew India’s strategic calculations vis–vis China.