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AMERICANS choose their team according to the match. Today, Pakistan needs to sit it out in the pavilion for their captain’s Pacific Ocean contest with China. The new ancillary perspective is conducive.
Never mind the sub-Saharan indices in large swathes of India, its leaders are eager to shell out considerable money, not just for the strangely beached French submarines. India is keen to host American bases too, not for the first time though. In the Afghan mission, the team was differently configured. Then too India had put out tenders but failed to woo Washington to use its territory to steer the Afghan invasion. It was Pakistan that won the contract.
No one knows if John Keats contracted tuberculosis in his unrequited love for Fanny Brawne or whether he had the destructive bacilli in his system anyhow. We are yet to ascertain the damage Pakistan’s unrequited love for America since Ayub Khan’s coup has bequeathed to its people. Actually, the Afghan adventure may have only worsened a lingering malaise. In a cricket match the winning players walk away with the stumps. Pakistan got the Haqqani group as souvenir from a match it may not have won. Now it’s India’s turn to show the paces.
As far as one can fathom, there are many good reasons for Delhi to be cordial with Beijing. For one, they are more deferential to Indians, surprisingly, than they are to the Western counterparts, habitually targeting Americans even if they love American capitalism. The respite for Indians is relative, of course, not absolute, and possibly conditional.
As far as one can fathom, there are many good reasons for Delhi to be cordial with Beijing.
Endowed with Confucian equanimity to mask disapproval with a perfectly genuine smile, the Chinese can be withering in their silence. A truer analogy for Indians, should they unwittingly play music at night beyond the permitted decibels, would be the way Mao Zedong dealt with Nikita Khrushchev. The Soviet leader kept Mao waiting for too long in the anteroom on a Moscow trip. Mao left quietly only to cosy up to the Americans, which saw Nikita Khrushchev rushing to Beijing on bended knees.
Mao ushered Khrushchev to an only meeting — at his swimming pool, and not merely because the host was an expert swimmer. Henry Kissinger has described how the mighty Soviet leader was made to struggle to keep up with the Great Helmsman, with the help of inflated armbands as the host did his standard 20 lengths. The edgy rendezvous presaged a lacerating Sino-Soviet shootout on the Ussuri river.
The fracas over President Obama’s Sunday arrival for the G20 summit in China could be another case in point. “This is our country”, a Chinese official hissed without losing his composure with the visiting media. The Americans wanted to watch their president alight from Air Force One. The Chinese for reasons best known to them got Obama to leave from the belly of the aircraft instead of the usual door. There was no red carpet either. It could have to do with security, but none had the time of the day to explain all this to the restive Americans who got a glare and a hiss instead of a photo-op.
Things could be worse, like the time I found myself at a handshake distance from then premier Li Peng at a Beijing guard of honour for Indian counterpart P.V. Narasimha Rao. The Chinese premier’s sleeve brushed my extended hand holding a recorder, proffered for a possible comment. None came.
Across the carpeted path on the other side of Li and Rao, photographers from around the world were clicking away, with one eye on the line they were not meant to cross. One photographer did just that. The toe of his shoe slipped into the forbidden zone. In a flash he was lifted by a burly security man and flung sideways on the concrete. He was my colleague from a western country whose knee was bloodied and broken and camera shattered.
The Chinese can’t always have their way in a brawl. Vietnam most memorably gave them a bloody nose in a short but vicious conflict. It didn’t need foreign-made submarines that feed on funds from hospital and school budgets, nor a nuclear umbrella. Just a determined fight was enough, and it worked like magic. Vietnam remains the only country to give a licking to three nuclear powers, leaning on raw grit and a wealth of experience from guerrilla warfare.
India has reportedly placed Russian-designed BrahMos cruise missiles on the border with Tibet. They go well with the current leader’s media appeal and probably give a few self-regarding think tanks their moment of importance. A more tested route to regional and therefore global bonhomie, one that Indian businessmen have tried out successfully, would be to engage with Pakistan and China in the promising economic corridor to Gwadar.
Indian hawks habitually would want Delhi to play the dog in the manger on the strategic economic enterprise. In the emerging scenario, we are all on razor’s edge. Instead of frazzling over the purported prescience of Nostradamus that the third world war would begin in October this year, there are more rational ways to anticipate a more cordial future.
The author of the current global turmoil Zbigniew Brzezinski now says something he would not normally say. The man who uncorked the Muslim genie in Afghanistan and announced America as the paramount power confesses how “given complex geopolitical shifts in regional balances, [the US] is no longer the globally imperial power”. It’s time instead for the world, as for America, to bond with Russia and China.
What if the submarines everyone has contracted at a cost become redundant? The Beatles song comes to mind here, as one idiom the world, including young and old Chinese and Indians, heartily shares.
The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.
Published in Dawn September 6th, 2016
