Why India should be wary of China

Nitin A Gokhale

Monday, September 08, 2008, (New Delhi)

The humdinger in Vienna over the last weekend has served to bring home two new aspects to India's future diplomatic efforts. First, New Delhi is now firmly in the US camp in international diplomacy. All pretenses that India may have had about non-alignment have now been abandoned. But this development should not really surprise anyone given the way the Indo-US ties have developed over the past half a decade.

It is actually the second fallout of the Vienna session that should really worry India. China's openly antagonistic stand against giving India a clean waiver at NSG should serve as a wake up call to those in India who have been talking about growing bonhomie between New Delhi and Beijing in glowing terms.

China tried to prevent the effort to end India's nuclear isolation till the very end in Vienna. That top officials in New Delhi were disappointed with China's stand at the NSG surely betrays India's diplomatic naivety in dealing with Beijing.

The reality is, despite all its recent pronouncements about how it values friendship and peace with India, deep down Beijing clearly feels threatened by India's rising international status. That is why Beijing will do all that it can to undermine India at every stage. China has always been clear in its aim to keep India shackled in sub-regional conflicts and disputes. Beijing brooks no opposition to its status as the sole rising power in Asia. Beijing has consistently followed this policy. The signs have all been there but a section of influential policy-makers in India have been shying away from facing the truth.

Just three incidents in the past two years show why India should never treat Beijing lightly. In November 2006, its Ambassador to India made a belligerent reassertion of China's claim on Arunachal Pradesh on the eve of President Hu Jintao's visit to India, hardly a gesture one expects from a responsible and so-called new-found friend. In 2007, China felt threatened enough to issue a statement against a new naval compact between India, Australia, Japan and Singapore. But the most glaring example of China's hostility towards India came in the form of several blatant violations along the line of control in the past three years.

There are other reasons that should keep India on its toes when it deals with China.

China, it must be remembered has set up a massive road and rail network in the Tibetan plateau, a listening post in occupied Aksai Chin, and is repositioning likely nuclear missiles against India, in moves not only aimed at overwhelming India militarily, but to enable Chinese coercive diplomacy in respect of the border dispute.

The Quinghai-Tibet Railway (QTR) has brought Tibet under China's iron grip as demonstrated in the rapid and hard response Beijing unleashed against the Tibetan monks' protests in Lhasa this March. Its handling of the riots was very similar to the way it dealt with the 1989 demonstrations in Tiananmen Square. In the early phase, a large number of regular troops from the People's Liberation Army were sent to the scene to deter the protesters.

Within 48 hours of the start of the riots in Lhasa, T-90/89 armored personnel carriers and T-92 wheeled infantry fighting vehicles appeared on the streets. This rapid troop deployment indicates that with the completion of the Qinghai-Tibet railroad in 2006, the rapid reaction capability of the Chinese armed forces in the Tibet region, particularly the ability to quickly manoueuver heavy equipment, has been greatly enhanced.

The QTR has also simultaneously tripled the People's Liberation Army's offensive power against India, with reinforcements reaching Tibet in less than 20 hours against the earlier response time of nearly three and a half days. Besides, military analysts now say the PLA's Rapid Response Group could be deployed in less than twelve hours to carry out surprise raids on Indian territory from Gansu and Shannxi provinces.

Since March this year, there have been many tell-tale signs that China continues to look at India as a potential rival in Asia and would everything to keep it off-balance. As strategic analyst Gurmeet Kanwal has pointed out elsewhere, Zhan Liu, a Communist Party member, warned India in an article on the website of an influential Chinese think-tank not to "walk today along the old road of resisting China" as the People's Liberation Army is now well-entrenched in Tibet and will not repeat its mistake of withdrawing after a border war as it did in 1962. Zhan extols the virtues of the PLA's newly developed capabilities and goes on to advise India "not to requite kindness with ingratitude".

Admittedly, political and economic relations between India and China are much better now. Bilateral trade is expected to cross US $40 billion very soon, much before the target year of 2010. However, New Delhi should never forget that despite prolonged negotiations at the political level to resolve the outstanding territorial and boundary dispute between the two countries, there has been little progress on this sensitive issue. China continues to occupy large swathes of Indian territory.

As is well-known, in Ladakh, China is in physical possession of approximately 38,000 square kilometres of Indian territory since the mid-1950s. It is through this area that China built the Karakoram highway that now provides a strategic land link between Sinkiang, Tibet and Pakistan. In the northeast, China continues to stake its claim to about 96,000 sq km of Indian territory in Arunachal Pradesh.

As I mentioned earlier, repeated Chinese intrusions along the un-delineated LAC is a major destabilising factor as patrol face-offs are common and could result in an armed clash. It must be remembered that it has been more than three years since India and China had agreed to identify "guiding principles and parameters" for a political solution to the five-decade old dispute. Since then there has been very little progress in talks.

Yet, there are apologists in this country who advocate a soft line towards Beijing little realizing that China will never ever like a strong India to sit at the international high table. Beijing will therefore continue to go all out in keeping India off balance through several methods. The sooner policy-makers in New Delhi accept this reality, the better it is for India's future diplomatic moves. That's the biggest lesson from Vienna.