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The overhang of history and its ressentiments combined with a chest-thumping exercise to establish India’s stature as a major geopolitical player is shaping and colouring Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s foreign policy as much as it is driving his domestic politics.
Over the two years since the BJP came to power, perhaps no aspect of his diplomacy, or the lack of it, has occasioned as much curiosity and comment as his handling of China even if Delhi-Islamabad relations with their predictable pyrotechnics have hogged media headlines. Modi’s somewhat overwrought overtures towards China have careened wildly from the enthusiastic reception he gave President Xi Jinping in September 2014, just four months after he took office, to the deliberately provocative measures that have marked his foreign policy initiatives since then.
When Modi received Xi on his home turf of Ahmedabad and images of the two leaders sitting cosily on a swing near the Sabarmati river were transmitted to the world, it appeared to signal a dramatic change in relations between India and its largest neighbour. But it turned out to be a false spring to a long summer of aggravations marked by heightened border tensions and deepening fissures over geopolitics. Relations, in short, have been unusually fraught.
Read: India raises CPEC with Chinese minister
To some observers it appears that India is going out of its way to poke China in the eye. There are several instances of this, the most provocative being the decision to grant a visa to Uighur dissident Dolkun Isa who China lists as a terrorist — although withdrawn before he could use it — to attend a conclave in Dharamshala to discuss the liberation of Xinjiang from the Chinese authority. Dharamshala, incidentally, is the seat of the Tibetan government-in-exile where the Dalai Lama lives. Then there was the quick off-the-trigger statement by the Ministry of External Affairs to hail the verdict of an international tribunal against China in the South China Sea dispute even before the ink had dried on the ruling so to speak.
The BJP’s policy on China appears to be coloured by India’s defeat in the 1962 war that the RSS refuses to forget.
More frequently than before, India has been despatching to the South China Sea as part of a naval operation with the US to affirm what the two countries emphasise as the importance of safeguarding maritime security and ensuring freedom of navigation throughout the region, “especially in the South China Sea”. To make his meaning clear, Modi said in a lecture in Singapore last year that “India will lend its strength to keep the seas safe, secure and free for the benefit of all”.
For the ruling dispensation, this is retaliation for what it sees as China’s starring role in blocking India’s entry into the Nuclear Suppliers Group although this is not borne out by the facts. More than China, a clutch of countries who want India to sign the NPT has been blackballing India’s membership of NSG. There have been other irritants on the part of China that have incensed the ruling party and its ideological fountainhead, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). One is China’s repeated blocking of India’s attempts to have three Pakistan-based militant groups and the Jaish-e- Mohammad chief Masood Azhar listed by the Al Qaeda Sanctions Committee of the UN.
Underlying the Modi government’s penchant to ‘take on China’, is the regime’s marked discomfort with the sharp asymmetries between the two countries on the economic front and the geopolitical sphere. Going by the reactions of some of the BJP ministers to issues related to China, they are clearly chafing over this. A recent discussion to understand what was termed India’s China Conundrum highlighted the significant asymmetries in the Delhi-Beijing equation. Hosted by the India branch of Brookings Institution, the Washington-based US think tank, the conference found a significant asymmetry between the two on all fronts — economic, political and strategic. A note by Brookings India said one reason for India’s asymmetry with China on strategic issues “has been the Indian over-fixation on Pakistan and the immediate threat posed by Pakistan to India”.
What has not gone down well with the government is the reminder that economically, China is in a major league with an economy about four times larger than India’s. This is a discomfiting fact for BJP supporters who regularly call for a boycott of Chinese goods every time diplomatic relations hit a block, forgetting the fact that we have a $57 billion deficit in trade with China.
Shiv Shankar Menon, former national security adviser and a seasoned China observer, points out wryly that the “Chinese drive to power and status is very different from the inferiority complex that elements of the Indian middle class display”. The example he cited was “the neuralgic glee with which the Chinese stock market crash in September 2015 occasioned a much-publicised meeting by Modi and Finance Minister Arun Jaitley with Indian business ‘to see how to take China’s place’ and the Indian media’s reaction to anything to do with the India-China border”.
The ultranationalist RSS — its members who occupy important ministerial positions include Modi — is still smarting over India’s humiliating defeat in the 1962 war with China, an event that it describes as “one of the most embarrassing episodes of our history”. It wants the war to be part of the school syllabus. The Hindu supremacist RSS blames India’s first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru whom they attack bitterly for the traumatic war which has left a lingering distrust of the Chinese with a section of the population.
Nehru’s passionate advocacy “Hindi-Chini bhai-bhai” the RSS-BJP believes was foolish since the Chinese betrayed him and the country. It’s not surprising that Beijing’s political commentators who have been extremely astute in sizing up the Indian psyche said India is “still stuck in the 1962 war mindset”. That seems unlikely to change soon.
The writer is a journalist based in New Delhi.
Published in Dawn, August 22nd, 2016
