End of Make-Believe

Context: India is unable to learn from past mistakes and is consistently misreading China. It needs to craft a new China policy to check the rise of China.

Failure of India in understanding China:

• Rabindranath Tagore’s attempt to developing a shared Asian spiritual civilisation: Radical groups in China accused him of conspiring to divert Chinese attention away from the imperatives of modernization and westernization. 
• The rhetoric of anti-imperialism: 

• Nehru approached China as a modernist and nationalist and aspired Chinese support against Western Imperialism. But didn’t support China in defeating Japanese Imperialism.

• So much for Asian Solidarity: Neither normalized the relationship nor resolved the boundary dispute.

• At Conference in Bandung, Indonesia in 1955 campaigned against the western attempt to isolate them, J. Nehru serenaded Zhou Enlai. But war broke out in 1962.
• Atal Bihari Vajpayee in 1979 tried to re-engage Beijing which was followed by the Chinese war against fellow communist Vietnam.
• Rajiv Gandhi in 1988 sought to normalize relations while continuing to negotiate on the boundary dispute.

• Economic cooperation not leading to mutual trust: 

• Trade deficits as a rude shock to India: making it hard for India to disentangle the deep economic dependence on China.

• Failed bet on political cooperation: 

• After the cold war, India was busy promoting the “multipolar world” joined by China and Russia, embarking on a strategy to blunt the US’s “unipolar moment”. 
• Now Delhi is coping with Beijing emerging at the center of “unipolar Asia ” and a ‘bipolar world’ dominated by Washington and Beijing.

• Perennial Illusion of Anti-western Solidarity with China: China never bought India’s ideas of building coalitions against the West.

• The false assumption that the US is seeking to divide India and China; our respective territorial nationalism and irreconcilable conflict of interest being responsible for it.
• British imperialists wanted Indian and Chinese nationalists to unite against Japanese imperialists; Gandhi met Chiang but refused to cooperate
• China developed sustained engagement with the US, while India never stopped arguing with the West; thus China has leveraged deep relationships with the West.

• Mao joined forces with the US in the early 1970s.
• Deng Xiaoping promoted massive economic cooperation with the US to transform China.

• Different lenses to see the world: China sees through the lens of power, India resisting realist prism.

WAY FORWARD:

• Crafting a new China policy: India in dealing with China first needs to recognise that China wants to redeem its territorial claims, reshape the global order to suit its interests.
• Expanding India’s national power: India needs to restore internal political coherence, accelerate economic modernisation to deal with rising China.