New turn in Sino-Indian ties

By removing references to Sikkim as an "independent country" from its new official maps and publications, China has sent out a clear message that it now acknowledges Indian sovereignty over the Himalayan state. The merger of Sikkim in India in 1975 had angered China and remained a critical irritant in Sino-Indian relations for almost three decades.

It is amazing that an event of far-reaching implications for the geopolitics of the Himalayas remained almost unnoticed in the Pakistani media. Was it due to our ostrich-like usual approach to developments that do not accord with our wishful thinking or unrealistic expectations?

It may be recalled that, during Mr Vajpayee's official visit to Beijing last June, China gave a cautious assurance to the Indian leader that one of their problematical issues in bilateral relations, the "Sikkim question" would be "resolved gradually". But perhaps even the Indians did not expect that the Chinese promise would be fulfilled in less than a year.

Beijing has addressed the Indian concerns on the Sikkim question in a typically Chinese way. The first hint that China accepted Sikkim's status as an integral part of India came when the two sides, during the Vajpayee visit, signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to expand border trade.

That was a clear signal that China had moved away from its earlier position that Sikkim's merger with India in 1975 was an "illegal annexation." The MoU was tantamount to an implicit Chinese acknowledgement of Sikkim as part of India. But a still clearer indication came a few months later when Sikkim ceased to figure in the list of "independent countries" on the Chinese Foreign Ministry's website. This was actually a goodwill gesture from Beijing ahead of Vajpayee's meeting with his Chinese counterpart in Bali in October last year.

Even more significantly, an offensive reference to the Himalayan state ("China does not recognize India's illegal annexation of Sikkim") was also deleted from the website.

The Chinese acknowledgement of Indian sovereignty over Sikkim had been on the cards for some time. After New Delhi had affirmed its acceptance of Tibet as an integral part of China and reiterated its commitment not to allow the Dalai Lama and other Tibetans on its soil to engage in anti-China political activities, it naturally expected from Beijing a reciprocal recognition of Sikkim's merger with India.

After the latest Chinese signal, the northeastern Indian state has ceased to be a contentious bilateral issue between India and China. The recent development on Sikkim reflects the enormous improvement in Sino-Indian relations after about four decades of mutual hostility.

It also indicates the political will on both sides to normalize relations, despite the unresolved border dispute. There is no question that the Vajpayee's visit last June gave a tremendous thrust to their bilateral relationship.

But the foundation of the prevailing goodwill can be traced back to Rajiv Gandhi's historic visit in 1988 which provided a breakthrough in Sino-Indian ties.

The Chinese move reflects the appreciation in Beijing of the need for adapting its foreign policy to the changed security and strategic scenario in the aftermath of the 9/11 developments. That is why China seems to be more eager than ever before to improve its relations with its two big neighbours - Russia and India.

According to the Indian media, for two years foreign ministers of Russia, China and India have made it an annual practice to meet on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly meeting in New York and discuss matters of mutual interest.

Last October, the trilateral "get-together" in New York discussed Iraq and UN reform. That meeting was followed by another get-together at Chang Mai (Thailand) between the foreign ministers of the three countries. At the suggestion of the Russian foreign minister, the next trilateral meeting will be held in Russia some time this year.

With Russia, China has already settled its border dispute which at one point of time threatened to drag the two giants, who are also powerful nuclear nations, into armed conflict.

After putting the border dispute behind them, Russia and China are now collaborating with each other closely not only in the sphere of trade and economy but even in the sensitive field of security and space technology. There are indications that Beijing may repeat its Russian experiment with New Delhi and put behind the memories of the 1962 armed conflict.

Improvement in Sino-Indian relations, despite the unresolved border dispute, clearly indicates the willingness of both sides not to allow the burden of history and nationalistic sentiments to dictate the course of their relationship.

As India and China have reached a broad mutual understanding on Tibet and Sikkim, they are now moving away from the sterile confrontation of the past 40 years to build bridges of geo-economics.

Is there anything in this approach that Pakistan and India can learn for resolving their bilateral disputes which have kept them at loggerheads for more than half a century?

India and China are now reported to be working to implement last year's agreement on the resumption of cross-border trade, frozen for 40 years. The resumption of trade on the historic Silk route through the Sikkim-Tibet border will economically benefit the entire region, including India's northeast and southern China.

After Sikkim has ceased to be a problem between the two countries, New Delhi is likely to end the deployment of its troops on the Sikkim border and hand over security charge to its para-military forces. This will release a large contingent of Indian forces for deployment in Kashmir or elsewhere.

There will be an additional benefit from withdrawing troops from the Sikkim border. It will once again turn Natu La pass into India's gateway to Tibet for tourists as well as commercial traffic. Natu La pass, hardly 400 kilometres from Lhasa and connected by a an all-weather road, will become an attractive point for the tourists to cross into Tibet.

But more than tourism, it is the commercial traffic that is likely to transform the border between Tibet and Sikkim, thereby further strengthening the interdependent relations between the two Asian giants. According to some Indian analysts, the opening of the Sikkim-Tibet border may provide an impetus for transit trade benefiting the countries of the entire region.

However, even if a political decision is taken by the two governments to promote transit trade, it will necessarily take some time to develop the needed infrastructure. The Chinese plan to connect Lhasa by rail link by the year 2007.

The Indians for their part, have to improve the road from Kolkata to Natu La pass. If the plan goes through, it will benefit India more than China. It will turn Kolkata into the closest sea port to Lhasa. Secondly, it will pave the way for opening up over-land connectivity between India and China's heartland.

There is no question that both India and China are making conscious efforts to remove irritants from their relations. Sino-Indian ties are now at an interesting stage. Real politik and pragmatism have played an important role in bringing about a marked improvement in their bilateral relations.

Whether the two can maintain the current tempo of reconciliation will, to a large extent, depend upon how far they succeed in harmonizing their geo-strategic interests. Trade has already brought the two big neighbours closer, overcoming old barriers of mistrust and fear. A further expansion of economic ties is bound to increase the tempo of improvement in their bilateral ties.

The writer is a former ambassador.

Causes of BJP's defeat

The unexpected defeat of the BJP-led 22-party National Democratic Alliance in India's 14th general elections and the good grace with which the incumbent prime minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee, resigned his office have once again proved that India is a functioning democracy despite its mass illiteracy and poverty.

Earlier, in the late seventies, Indira Gandhi, also an incumbent prime minister, lost the elections and her own Lok Sabha seat. In both cases the transfer of power from the ruling party to the opposition alliance was smooth, orderly and peaceful as if it were a routine matter.

It has lessons for the neighbouring countries which have so far failed to evolve a viable political system.

It may be recalled that the electorate had rejected Indira, the victor of the 1971 India-Pakistan war, on the ground that she had imposed authoritarian rule under the garb of emergency although she had done so to bulldoze her populist agenda aimed at creating a socialistic pattern of society envisaged by the 1955 Avadi Congress session under the leadership of her illustrious father.

By rejecting the Indira Congress at that time, the electorate gave a message to the rulers that they wanted both civil liberties and social-economic justice.

The BJP government, however, relied on economic liberalization that made the five per cent urban rich richer and the rural masses poorer as the graph showed that one-third of the population had been pushed below the poverty line.

The BJP's veteran ally, the chief minister of Andhra Pradesh and leader of Telegu Desam Party, Chandrababu Naidu, pursued his economic reforms with great vigour and succeeded in getting Microsoft to open its branch in Hyderabad to develop software items locally. This gave India the distinction of being the only country that could develop software products in collaboration with the giant US company.

The visits of Bill Clinton and of Bill Gates to Hyderabad in recent years focused worldwide attention on Andhra Pradesh that became the symbol of the BJP's economic success. But that benefited only five per cent - urban rich while 95 per cent of the state's population, especially the farmers, sank deeper and deeper into poverty. They cried in vain for a steady and cheap supply of electricity and farm credits.

Failure to obtain loans in time, would force the farmer to borrow money from the local money lenders who would grab his holding on default, driving him to seek a job in cities as an unskilled worker. As a result, 4,000 farmers committed suicide during the last few years; of these 3,000 were from Andhra Pradesh alone and 200 from the southern state of Karnataka.

While information technology boomed, agricultural production slumped. When Vajpayee bragged about his "shining India" during his election campaign and told the people they never had it so good, his words fell on the deaf ears of the country's 700 million impoverished people.

The NDA government failed to convince the masses that it would usher in the Green Revolution II if returned to power, thus evoking the nostalgic memory of the 1960 Green Revolution led by Indira Gandhi that brought about the modernization of agriculture by providing tractors, chemical fertilizers, high-yielding seeds and irrigation to the farmers.

Since the BJP had failed to meet the grievances of the farmers, they rejected its elitist agenda and turned to the Congress which had a track record of serving the farming community.

From the abolition of the accursed land lordism to consolidation of uneconomic holdings of small farmers in a cooperative system to the establishment of Panchayat Raj and finally, to the Green Revolution, it is indeed a laudable achievement of any government.

This is why in the four rounds of the five-stage elections ranging from April 20 to May 10, the Congress and its allies won 215 of the 539 Lok Sabha seats and the BJP and its allies 187 while others took 137 seats.

Thus, the Congress was able to form a coalition government along with leftist and other like-minded parties. It is not going to be an unprincipled alliance like the one forged by the Hindu fundamentalist BJP and the regional Telegu Desam and George Fernandes' so-called socialist party. Vajpayee, doubtless, deserves credit for his adroitness in holding together such a heterogeneous group.

That 25 of his ministers, including Yashwant Sinha, the foreign minister, have lost the elections is an unequivocal verdict of the nation in rejecting his elitist agenda. In the Andhra Pradesh state assembly the Congress and its partners have captured 229 of the 294 seats while the ruling Telegu Desam and its allies could get only 48 seats.

Another failure was the alienation of Muslim voters - a fact that was admitted by the BJP leader, Rajnath Singh. Not even the orchestrated and stage-managed march of the Muslim caravan led by Imam Bokhari of Delhi's Jama Masjid could swing the Muslim votes in its favour.

Just as Andhra Pradesh was the test case of BJP's claim for economic success, Gujrat proved to be the test case of Vajpayee's claims of reconciliation with the Muslims of that state, in particular, and Indian Muslims, in general. On the other hand, the Congress and the secular parties had taken a forthright and courageous stand in support of the aggrieved Muslims.

The crushing defeat of the ruling BJP in Gujrat by the Congress has established beyond any shadow of doubt that the bulk of the embattled state's Hindu population had no hand in the ethnic cleansing of their Muslim fellow countrymen.

On the contrary, they detested the anti-Muslim carnage in February-March 2002 so much that they overthrew its perpetrators, something that shows that the secular character of the Indian people remains in tact.

It also redounds to the credit of the Indian leadership that it did not succumb to the wave of extremism that had erupted in the region. Vajpayee's approach to Pakistan was seen by many as ambivalent because he vacillated from one extreme to another as manifested by his abrupt severance of air, land and sea communication and transportation between India and Pakistan.

He also deployed troops along Pakistan's border with the ultimatum to Islamabad to hand over 20 Indian offenders allegedly hiding in Pakistan or else Indian troops might go there in hot pursuit. Had Gen. Musharraf not maintained exemplary restraint in the face of such provocations, there would have been war.

But again, it goes to the credit of the outgoing prime minister that he pulled back from the brink - an undoubted act of statesmanship that was lacking in Indira Gandhi who in 1971 illegally intervened in what was then Pakistan's internal matter. As opposed to this, Vajpayee chose the path of peaceful coexistence through negotiations.

This is the BJP's invaluable contribution to regional peace that renounces force in the settlement of bilateral disputes. It is indeed gratifying to note that Congress leader Sonia Gandhi has vowed to further strengthen the peace process now underway in South Asia.

At the same time, political observers point out that the old guard such as Natwar Singh and J.N. Dixit, who happen to be Sonia Gandhi's foreign policy advisers, had pursued a stereotyped policy towards Pakistan that only prolonged the stalemate, exacerbating tension in the region.

It would be difficult for them to soften their stance now that they have returned to power. During the period the Congress has been in the wilderness, there has been a sea change in the public opinion in both countries, thanks to the people-to-people contact, Track II diplomacy and behind-the-scenes mediation by friendly countries.

In addition, the Saarc summit at Islamabad decided to establish a Free Trade Area, in the subcontinent. These developments are irreversible and the new policy-makers in New Delhi under Dr. Manmohan Singh-led Congress coalition government will have to take them into account.