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.
One of the most significant master strokes of the Bush Presidency and as usual ignored by almost everyone on the right and the left.
India is a massive strategic counter weight to China and yet the the Right’s critics of Chinese hegemony fail to take any account of this incredible coup in international affairs.
Thanks for the post.
India should not have allowed itself to become a part of the BRIC cartel.
Three of the member nations are communist.
One is socialist.
All 4 are actively seeking to dump and destroy the dollar. We largely made China and India what they are today.
Once again, no good deed goes unpunished.
I say let all the BRIC nations turn against each other.
...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."See, there it is.
Bush’s work on India was excellent in intent but poor in execution due to the reception it received at home. Whilst balancing China, it also had the negative effect of undermining US credibility on nuclear compliance issues worldwide.
International norms like the ones you are referencing are ridiculous.
That is an added benefit of the US India nuclear deal.
The international nuclear consensus is that Israel and the US should be disarmed and the every radicalized state should have nuclear weapons.
Obama certainly likes that standard.
We need to establish norms contrary to the international norms. The US india deal emphasizes the good principal that democracies get nukes and anti-democracies don’t.
The Stronger stance between US and India has ticked off the Chinese and infuriated the Russians.
we'd go after India and China, and pursue Pebble Bed Fission and Polywell Fusion reactors here.
Let India and China sabotage each other now, they've been usurping the US in its rightful place as the leader of the world for too long...
Cheers!
India is niether Socialist nor Communist! The leftist left the coalition! Do your homework!
>.Obama is undertaking an Asia tour that begins in Japan and ends in China — the high spot — while skipping India
Well, of course, current PC GroupThink mores in the US see only Orientals as Asians, and the Pacific Islanders.
From the viewpoint of the Obamawallahs, WTF are the Injuns wee-weed about...they aren’t ASIAN Asian.
But, objectively is it that big a snub when PM Singh is coming here soon, dunno if that’s accurate. If not, then it kinda is.
But to visit India and not Pakistan, especially now would have raised a conundrum, especially IMO there’s no way the Secret Service wanted a stop in Islamabad and a midnight stop a la Clinton wouldn’t have looked good.
Well, Obamawallahs won’t like it, but this certainly a tilt to China and Pakistan that has Nixonian overtones. Heh.
You know, from a country that has for individuals
-unemployment insurance
-food stamps
-Section8 housing
-Flood insurance
-Medicare
-Medicaid
-Social Security
-Farm Subsidies
-Mortgage subsidies (aka tax deductions)
on the kind of scale that barely exist in the BRIC countries, and then combined with the fact that we have essentially large chunks of the following industries NATIONALISED in all but name -
-Insurance
-Automobiles-
-Finance (Welfare St. not Wall St., in other words
-Federal Mortgage Guarantors (freddie, fannie etc.
It is funny to hear Americans call other countries ideological epithets.
That is all.
I remember being taught in my Foreign Relations class in college that back at the start of the Cold War the US missed out a huge opportunity by not aligning itself with India at the start.
I, like my putative POTUS, who gave up British Citizenship to become my leader, feel that India must be closed down immediately.
Not only are the Bengal Tiger, Indian Elephant, the Gharial, and many small mammal species in danger of immediate if not sooner extinction, but there is another, even greater danger!
India's carbon footprint is growing ever larger! Men, we must think of the children, whom India's wanton agricultural and industrial growth place in danger. I, and my putative POTUS say,
Absolutely. Yet, the "true conservatives" here can only bash President Bush now that he is out of office. They don't comprehend the world "out there."
Oh yeah? Howz that?
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