A new world of collisions is shaping up and New Delhi must read it right
For long China had been in
the best kind of fight, the kind where only one side saw a fight going
on while America presided benignly over China’s rise. India was the
loser from the dramatic Nixon-Mao rapprochement of 1972, facilitated by
Islamabad’s good offices as a go-between. It was taken as axiomatic
within the American establishment that the highway to winning the Cold
War passed through Beijing: Consequently New Delhi, for a long time,
came to be cast as the spoiler in this equation (and as a disrupter of
international agreements, in general).
That changed with the
US-India nuclear deal of 2005, piloted by President George Bush and
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh despite distrust and political opposition
in both countries. And it changed definitively with US secretary of
state Mike Pompeo’s speech last month, describing Communist China as an
existential threat to democracies. If one of President Ronald Reagan’s
seminal slogans during the erstwhile Cold War with the Soviet Union had
been “trust but verify”, Pompeo went one up on that in summing up the
current US administration’s approach to China: “distrust and verify”.
In
the view of some heightened geopolitical tensions between the US and
China are only a temporary phase, stemming from administration rhetoric
designed to win upcoming presidential elections. And it’s arguable that
Pompeo’s speech went too far in terms of hardline Cold War-like
rhetoric. After all, the US and Chinese economies are too closely
entangled, and they will need to engage in tackling global challenges.
However,
as I’ve argued at greater length earlier (‘The China Syndrome’, June
19), there’s a fundamental problem when a mercantilist power like China
is admitted into a global order premised on open markets and free trade,
setting up an anomaly that grows ever larger and becomes unsustainable
as China’s economy grows in size. As is already evident in the battles
over Chinese 5G tech some degree of economic decoupling, even if
partial, is inevitable between China and Western economies. There’s
little doubt an era is ending, and post-Covid geopolitics will be
different from pre-Covid.
The China-India relationship, too, is
defined by a fundamental anomaly, or disequilibrium. While Beijing used
the rules based, liberal international order to rapidly climb the global
ladder, it has also held to a starkly ‘realist’ view of international
relations as a zero sum game, where lesser powers owe deference to more
powerful states, and India’s rise is to its detriment. India, on the
other hand, approaches China as a fellow legatee of a great classical
civilisation, both of which dominated the world order till about the
16th-17th centuries, and therefore expects to be treated as an equal.
To
be sure, New Delhi already makes many concessions to Chinese
expectations without reciprocity. For example, China backs Pakistan
whenever the latter raises Kashmir at the UN, and provides diplomatic
cover for Pakistan’s practitioners of asymmetric warfare seeking to
attack India in Kashmir and elsewhere. But New Delhi never raises issues
such as China’s suppression of human rights in Xinjiang or Tibet –
occurring on a far greater scale than in Kashmir and in the absence of
any armed insurgency – or its violation of the core “one country, two
systems” agreement with Hong Kong. New Delhi might have met China’s
moves in Pakistan by undertaking matching moves with Taiwan, but never
goes there.
All this, clearly, isn’t enough to placate Beijing,
as it expects more overwhelming deference – which can hardly be
forthcoming as New Delhi has to look to its own interests too. Thus,
China’s current belligerence and the grave situation along the LAC where
China continues to hold the ground in Pangong Tso, Gogra-Hot Springs
and Depsang Bulge it recently occupied. New Delhi’s efforts to persuade
Beijing to “restore status quo ante” have proved fruitless so far.
This,
indeed, could be the new status quo ante that the Modi government will
have to deal with. The PLA, by deploying troops, tanks and artillery
along the border for the long haul, could force New Delhi to expend
resources to remain on guard along the LAC – as well as along the LoC
since in the event of a Chinese attack, Islamabad would likely open a
second front. Joining forces, the China-Pakistan axis could essentially
do to India what the West did to the Soviet Union.
To break out
of this encirclement New Delhi’s only viable option is to join – and
indeed play a role in organising – the global pushback against Chinese
belligerence led by the West, which will be a feature of the post-Covid
world. New Delhi must throw its weight behind a rules based, liberal
international order which is plurilateral if not multilateral. What
should facilitate such an engagement is that China’s, as well as
Pakistan’s, star is beginning to fade in the West – and India is no
longer seen as a spoiler.
Above all, New Delhi must avoid the
trap of Huntingtonian views about a clash of civilisations adopted by
Hindutva’s proponents (or by the Pakistani elite, for that matter).
Remember, if one wants to adopt a Huntingtonian framework then Sinic and
Islamic civilisations, acting jointly, possess far more resources than
and are likely to overwhelm the Indic one.
Thus New Delhi needs
to ensure that Hindutva doesn’t become the new non-alignment, which
allowed Pakistan to diplomatically outmanoeuvre it earlier. For it to
geopolitically leverage the common interest of democracies, and for the
rest of the world to take an interest in India’s fate, New Delhi must
keep at bay the forces of radical-populist anti-globalism busily
chipping away at its own polity.
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