Posted on 11/14/2009 6:58:16 AM PST by libh8er
NEW DELHI — The India-China relationship has entered choppy waters due to a perceptible hardening in the Chinese stance. Anti-India rhetoric in the state-run Chinese media has intensified, even as China has stepped up military pressure along the disputed Himalayan frontier through cross-border incursions. Beijing also has resurrected its long-dormant claim to the northeastern Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh, nearly three times as large as Taiwan.
The more muscular Chinese stance clearly is tied to the new U.S.-India strategic partnership, symbolized by the nuclear deal and deepening military cooperation. As President George W. Bush declared in his valedictory speech, "We opened a new historic and strategic partnership with India."
The Obama administration, although committed to promoting that strategic partnership, has been reluctant to take New Delhi's side in any of its disputes with Beijing. This has emboldened China to up the ante against India, with the Chinese Foreign Ministry employing language like "we demand" in a recent statement that labeled the Indian prime minister's visit to Arunachal Pradesh a "disturbance."
New Delhi has hit back by permitting the Dalai Lama to tour Arunachal Pradesh and announcing an end to the practice of letting Chinese companies bring thousands of workers from China to work on projects in India. And in a public riposte to Beijing's raising of objections to multilateral funding of any project in Arunachal, India has asked China to cease its infrastructure and military projects in another disputed region — Pakistan-held Kashmir.
The present pattern of border provocations, new force deployments and mutual recriminations is redolent of the situation that prevailed 47 years ago when China routed the unprepared Indian military in a surprise two-front aggression. Today, amid rising tensions, the danger of border skirmishes, if not a limited war, looks real.
Such tensions have been rising since 2006. Until 2005, China actually was eschewing anti-India rhetoric and pursuing a policy of active engagement with India, even as it continued to expand its strategic space in southern Asia, to New Delhi's detriment. In fact, when Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao visited India in April 2005, the two countries unveiled six broad principles to help settle their festering border dispute. But after the Indo-U.S. defense-framework accord and nuclear deal were unveiled in quick succession in subsequent months, the mood in Beijing perceptibly changed.
That gave rise to a pattern that now has become commonplace: Chinese newspapers, individual bloggers, security think tanks and even officially blessed Web sites ratcheting up an "India threat" scenario. A U.S.-India military alliance has always been a strategic nightmare for the Chinese, and the ballyhooed Indo-U.S. global strategic partnership triggered alarm bells in Beijing.
The partnership, though, falls short of a formal military alliance. Still, the high-pitched Indian and American rhetoric that the new partnership represented a tectonic shift in geopolitical alignments apparently made Chinese policymakers believe that India was being groomed as a new Japan or Australia to America — a perception reinforced by subsequent arrangements and Indian orders for U.S. arms worth $3.5 billion in just the past year.
Clearly, New Delhi failed to foresee that its rush to forge close strategic bonds with Washington could provoke greater Chinese pressure and that, in such a situation, the U.S. actually would offer little comfort. Consequently, India finds itself in a spot today.
For one, Beijing calculatedly has sought to pressure India on multiple fronts — military, diplomatic and multilateral. For another, the U.S. — far from coming to India's support — has shied away from even cautioning Beijing against any attempt to forcibly change the territorial status quo. Indeed, on a host of issues — from the Dalai Lama to the Arunachal dispute — Washington has chosen not to antagonize Beijing. That, in effect, has left India on its own.
The spectacle of the president of the most powerful country in the world seeking to curry favor with a rights-abusing China by shunning the Dalai Lama during the Tibetan leader's Washington visit cannot but embolden the Chinese leadership to step up pressure on India, the seat of the Tibetan government in exile.
U.S. President Barack Obama also has signaled that America's strategic relationship with India will not be at the expense of the fast-growing U.S. ties with Beijing. The Obama team, after reviewing the Bush-era arrangements, now intends to abjure elements in its ties with New Delhi that could rile China, including any joint military drill in Arunachal or a 2007-style naval exercise involving the U.S., India, Australia, Japan and Singapore. Even trilateral U.S. naval maneuvers with India and Japan are being abandoned so as not to raise China's hackles.
As his secretary of state did in February, Obama is undertaking an Asia tour that begins in Japan and ends in China — the high spot — while skipping India. In fact, Washington is quietly charting a course of tacit neutrality on the Arunachal dispute. Yet Beijing remains suspicious of the likely trajectory of U.S.-India strategic ties, including pre-1962-style CIA meddling in Tibet.
This distrust found expression in the latest People's Daily editorial that accused New Delhi of pursuing a foreign policy of "befriending the far and attacking the near." Left to fend for itself, New Delhi has decided to steer clear of any confrontation with Beijing.
Still, even as it seeks to tamp down tensions with Beijing, New Delhi cannot rule out the use of force by China at a time when hardliners there seem to believe that a swift, 1962-style military victory can help fashion a Beijing-oriented Asia.
Having declared that America's "most important bilateral relationship in the world" is with Beijing, the Obama team must caution it against crossing well-defined red lines or going against its gospel of China's "peaceful rise."
Brahma Chellaney is professor of strategic studies at the independent, privately funded Center for Policy Research in New Delhi and the author of "Asian Juggernaut: The Rise of China, India and Japan," published by HarperCollins, with a new U.S. edition scheduled for release in January.
Good grief. Are you aware that India is a democracy? And how strategically placed that democracy is? Yet you think the U.S. should abandon them..... well, I hope you’re not employed in the State Dept.
FYI ... in case you haven’t seen.
This is a long running dispute.
Andhra Pradesh is basically the outer ring of mongolia although India lays claim to it.
The people there are asiatic I doubt that they subscribe to Hu Jin Toa or BJ Singh. They are Nomadic
It figures that Obama is pissing away our position on this matter.
While the area has long been disputed it is china and the Maoist rebels that are creating disruption.
They have even cut supply roads into Bhutan
Obama is quietly enabling our enemy’s.
He is giving them the signal. “All Clear”
You are keeping up with this, I see.
I did not even know there are “maoist rebels.”
Silly me, what are they rebelling against?:)
Here is a quote from Victor Davis Hanson:
“The fact that in the Bush years we were increasingly disliked by Ahmadinejad, Assad, Castro, Chávez, Kim Jong Il, Morales, Ortega, and Putin, may in retrospect seem logical, just as their current warming to the U.S. may prove to be cause for alarm, given the repugnant nature of these strongmen.”
Obama blew off the Dahli Lama. Thats all we need to know about his intentions
You know the answer.
They are rebelling against freedom/autonomy
Like I said... silly me. What a hopeless task they have.
And re Dalai Lama: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2374941/posts
Thank you for the ping La Enchiladita
Can you imagine if GWB had done this? The Libs would go crazy. It would be frontpage news
Obama the passive aggressive enabler
I wonder of the DL now realizes what hypocrites they are.
Free Tibet! LoL
They love Mao now
Whatever Dear Reader dictates.
China, keep him... please.
GTH, swarthyguy. But leave the jobs here.
That is all.
It is a socialist nation.
Do your homework.
The Indians that are still trying to take our jobs, are still pretending to be our allies, our ideological cousins, etc.
They are not.
As soon as they get the upper hand economically, they will dump us just as China will. They believe the the pundits who say that Asia is the next super-economy of history. They have allied themselves with the BRIC nations to prepare for their seat at the throne.
Just like “Genghis Khan,” who used to post here and who I called out as a communist sympathizer two years before he was banned from FR for calling America “a middle finger up its own ***,” all of the false friends of America will eventually show the face behind the facade.
With unemployment (the U3) now at 10.2 and the U6 now at over 17%, will the offshore/free-traitors still try to claim that offshoring CREATES jobs in America? We have seen the proof that it is a drain of jobs and energy and capital and that the money allegedly saved by US companies is not enough to maintain employment here. The argument of economists like Hazlitt (whom I admire immensely) that if manufacturing moves to a cheaper location the money saved will create a new industry only applies in the long-term and only when isolated industries are affected. You simply can’t offshore so much manufacturing and now white-collar jobs that your unemployment hits 17% and honestly believe that somehow those companies are going to start hiring again.
Time to hamstring all immigration until we stabilize American culture and get our economy sound again. And it is time to end offshoring of our jobs.
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