We bring here excerpts of Kanti Bajpai’s views from a session at the Khushwant Singh Literary Festival 2024 on India’s China Challenge. This was a part of a session at the recently concluded Khushwant Singh Literary Festival 2024.
The subject was India’s China Challenge, the speaker Kanti Bajpai, who was Interviewed by Suhasini Haider, senior diplomatic correspondent, The Hindu.
They can be friends, but with difficulty, this book was commissioned to present the pessimistic view in a sense. So, I’m a bit more optimistic than the book title indicates, but my charter was to write a book in 2020, a month after Galwan one, and I had to write in three months on why, in a sense they couldn’t be friends or why it was so difficult and why things had gone wrong spectacularly in the summer of 2020. I was going talk about these four Ps very quickly. They are related, but in the book, because I was a lazy kind of person, I couldn’t trace through the exact ways in which the four Ps are interrelated, but I think you can work it out for yourself.
It’s a little algorithm, just an easy way to try and think about the India China relationship beyond just the border issue, which I wanted to get away from. So, what are the four P’s.
The First P – Perception
The first ‘P’ is perceptions or images of each other historically. And what you see there, tracing it through from the time Buddhism went to China is that for about five or six or 700 years, China looked up to India because it was the land of Buddha. And there’s even some evidence that their ‘Zhongguo’ which refers to the Middle Kingdom, was used to refer to parts of India that were spiritually central. But by the 15th or 16th century, as Buddhism had kind of gone into remission in India, but was vigorous in China, in any case, by the 15th or 16th century, China’s a great maritime power and a great imperial power was drawing tribute from various Indian kingdoms in Bengal, in southern India. So, China looked up to India for several hundred years, and then for a couple of hundred years, at least, if not longer, they were tribute sending Indians who looked up to China.
And then the Europeans came along. And in a way, the relationship was broken with China until about really the 19th century, when a lot of negative things happened from the Chinese perspective related to India, which is that British Indian troops and policemen were in India. Of course, the famous you know drug trade as it were from India into China which devastated Chinese society occurred. They were sort of images of unscrupulous Indian businessmen working in China and so on. So, quite a negative opinions arose, but I think it climaxed in about the late 19th century when young Chinese intellectuals facing the possibility of China becoming an India, being subordinated by the Europeans, asked themselves what happened to this great civilization in Southern Asia to their west.
And young intellectuals, they said, oh my god, you know, India a chaotic place, became a slave nation, and they lamented it. But there was also a kind of a tinge of contempt there for India. And I think as we project forward, some of that attitude has remained although it’s inflected differently in contemporary times, there’s still a sort of a feeling that India, some kind of rather dirty, messy, unfathomable, not very interesting or exciting place to go to. And there’s tinge with racism and ignorance. And of course, in large part, or in quite substantial part, there are Indians who repay, the mutual contempt. Racist or ignorance or otherwise. And then if you look at some of the behaviour during Covid and so on, it wasn’t pretty in India associating the virus with the Chinese virus and so on.
So, treatment of Chinese Indians during the ‘62 war also was quite a bad moment in terms of the way we reacted to people of Chinese origins. The first problem is there’s quite a big perception or image problem on both sides. These are very slow to change. So, if we want to be friends, that’s going to be a bit of a long haul.
The Second P – Perimeters
The second P is perimeters, that’s borders. And I think that’s a very long story, but it seems to me that at the heart of the problem there is Tibet, because it’s Tibet that borders India, and it’s Tibet that’s such a difficult point for the Chinese vulnerability even now. And indeed, we may be coming to a time when things will sharpen even further because sadly, obviously the present Dalai Lama will pass from the stage. A new Dalai Lama will be chosen, and there will be a moment when Chinese will put forward inevitably, I think, Dalai Lama and there may be another Dalai Lama nominated by Tibetans elsewhere and others and India will have to, in a sense, will be under pressure to make a choice. But whenever I think of the problem around the border, I think of the domestic problem of China around Tibet, and I can only see it sharpening. That’s one very serious problem. My short point about the border is I think that both sides know what the solution is, more or less, but because of Tibet, and because today there’s no leader of the size of Deng Xiaoping or Mao or Nehru or whatever, in India who can sell that potential agreement, it’s going be very difficult come back to say something about what a deal could look like. But it’s not just a border deal. It would have to be a much larger political adjustment and even a security adjustment.
The Third P – Partnerships
The third P is partnerships. So, Russia, the Soviet Union in the Cold War, the United States, India and China have always been part of a kind of geopolitical quadrilateral. But the most striking thing about those four powers together is that in this entire period from 1949, they’re the only two, give or take a period of xxxxx between them, particularly against the Americans in the fifties and sixties. And then after the Cold War. These are the only two that have never been strategic partners against either Russia or the United States, which means at the sort of grand strategic level of decision making, high political, high military, and so on, they’ve never had that kind of lips to teeth engagement that perhaps the Chinese and the Americans had in the second half of the Cold War, or the Soviets and the Chinese had in the first half of the Cold War, and perhaps they have today.
So, these are the only two that have always been on opposite sides of this kind of set of strategic partnerships. They have no military geopolitical capital, as it were, to draw on, to get them over bad times because they’ve never been partners.
The Fourth P – Power
The last P is the one that, we talk about the most and it’s the most evident. And so, I won’t say a lot about it, but just to sketch it in for a moment, and that is the power asymmetry. So, in 1980, I think it’s pretty clear, at least at the economic level, perhaps even at the military level, except in respect of nuclear weapons India and China were more or less balanced even. But since then, we know that the Chinese economy in nominal terms today in GDP terms is five times India’s size per capita income, roughly also about five times India’s. And the absolute difference in their economies is about $17 trillion today, even if China slows down on a base of $21 trillion and India grows 8 or 9% on a base of 3 trillion, means that the gap with China, in an absolute sense will grow. It won’t reduce.
In hard par terms, that is military terms. I think what the good news here, ironically, is that as the economies are pulled away, geography helps us on the military front, at least for, I would say the next decade or so. It’s just so hard to fight up there in the Himalayas. You can’t do a lot, you can’t win much, and you can’t lose much. And that’s I think a great solace to us here in India and in the maritime space, geography helps us again because it’s a long way from Hainan base with the Chinese Navy egress from into the Bay of Bengal in the Indian Ocean. They have long supply lines and the Indians are quite well placed.
Again at least for the next decade or so. It seems to me on soft par, it’s interesting that on some measures of soft par that are out there, that people have done, India scores rather poorly. And one of the reasons it does, it seems to me, is that the very thing that some extol India for, which is open, pluralistic, democratic and relatively liberal – many countries around the world and societies actually look to China for the opposite reason. Very well ordered and more centralised than India. And so, for countries that want to fast track development, they look at China and they say, hey, that’s what we want to be. And we look after the democracy problem later.
And when they look at India, on the other hand, it’s like somewhat stumbling along, and they think democracy gets in the way. They may be right, and they may be wrong on that, but that’s their perception. In a sense, because the Chinese are so far ahead, they have a bit of a sense of why should we make a compromise when we are so much more powerful than India, let the Indians come to us. And on the Indian side, precisely because we are so relatively weak, there’s a sense that any concession we might want to make reasonably, would be portrayed as a surrender and might be a slippery slope to more compromises or concessions. So, the Chinese won’t concede because they’re superior in par, and we won’t concede or compromise because we’re afraid it’ll amount to a surrender. So that’s a real structural problem. So, I think the most dynamic issue is a border settlement, which is most in our hands.
Likely Deal Outlines and a Solution Ahead
First, I will address is the possibility of some kind of a deal. And I won’t take on the Nehru issue. I think it’s pretty well recorded that it was a complex time. He made mistakes, he got some things right and he got some things wrong. So did the Chinese. Neither side was quite sure of their maps and by the time they were, positions had hardened over various things. And mistakes were made on both sides, including by Nehru. But I think more importantly at this point, let’s look at the possibility of a deal. I think both sides, and probably everyone here can name the broad outlines of the deal, which is the swap in some fashion or the other, with some adjustments here and there.
That is the western sector where the Chinese, more or less, get to keep their claims. India gets to keep more or less all its claims in the eastern sector, which is Arunachal Pradesh. And there’s a relatively simple problem in the middle sector in Himachal / Uttarakhand. And then you know I think I guess I’m assuming Sikkim is more or less settled, but perhaps not, but there might be some adjustments somewhere in and around there.
But what would be the deal? I mean it can’t be simply the territorial swap. The Chinese have always said and I think India has come round to the view that there’s a much bigger issue that has to be settled. And I think it really relates to Tibet in the end.
And as I said earlier, we’re coming to a difficult time. And I think it’ll have to be that and, and this is hard and possibly controversial, but India will have to kind of sign off as it were on Tibet, which is to say more or less, accept you know, the Chinese, I would say nominee for, for the Dalai lama. I think if that doesn’t happen, then Tibet is still alive between the two. Of course, that’s a difficult decision internally in India. And it’ll be difficult for the Tibetan diaspora perhaps and other countries who have people of Tibetan / Buddhist leanings and faith. But I think that will be one very hard call. And if it can’t be made, then a deal will be very difficult.
The Chinese on their side, I think you know, what is the crucial thing about this is you know, as some Chinese interlocutors have said, what is it that India can give us that they can’t take back? So that’s one thing. The Tibet deal. We could ask the same thing of the Chinese, which is what is the one thing they can give us that they can’t really take back that would make the deal attractive deal? And I think that is they have to come out once and for all openly and support us to get the UN Security Council permanent veto membership and they can’t take it back. And I think that symbolically, politically, diplomatically would be the kind of solution. The last point relates to Tawang, which is a real problem and perhaps some internationalisation of Tawang that is given an international personality of some kind. So perhaps the Chinese get real access to and perhaps some sort of control over the monastery. But the governance of the district of Tawang still remains under India, and that’s some kind of a secondary swap that allows the deal to go through.
