Column

It’s easy to tell that India’s relations with China appear, for the moment at least, to be on an even keel: we haven’t seen Chinese border patrol drop in uninvited for tea or to spray-paint graffiti on our Himalayan rocks. Our television anchors aren’t discussing war strategies in their customary shrill, denunciatory tones on their prime-time shows.

Hell, we haven’t come across even a single invocation of that overused ‘crouching tiger, pouncing dragon’ metaphor in our newspapers in the past month. For now, all appears quiet on our eastern front, and it’s a fair bet that the collective sighs of relief from our foreign policy mandarins in South Block can be heard all the way in Arunachal Pradesh — which, by the way, China claims as its own.

This Sino-Indian détente was, of course, fashioned at the Copenhagen climate change conference last month, where both countries teamed up to ensure a stalemate that would protect their cynical right to pollute as much as the developed world. But although this momentary coming together of the two Asian giants may give the appearance of having changed the overall climate of relations between them, the diplomatic détente rests on decidedly infirm foundations.

On other matters of strategic significance to both of them, China and India have very little congruence of interests; and unless the current state of play, characterised by an absence of hostilities and hectoring, can be cemented with some tangible forward movement on the many areas on which they have deep-rooted discords, the mood of the moment may prove fleeting.

The year ahead, during which China will likely seek continued Indian support at the climate change negotiations, opens one window of opportunity for continued cooperation, perhaps even generation of bilateral goodwill. But at other platforms — for instance, at the NPT review conference in New York in May — that same solidarity will be hard to summon up, particularly if under the influence of an actively non-proliferationist Obama, and as the sub-plot of the West’s nuclear standoff with Iran, India comes under renewed pressure to sign the NPT and the CTBT.

On other counts too, there is the risk that mere reliance on bilateral bhai-bhai bonhomie may be an inadequate buffer against the tide of contemporaneous events that acquire a momentum of their own — for instance, an unrest in Tibet. 2010 also promises to be a year in which the lingering effects of the global economic crisis will play out, raising the prospects of trade frictions between countries. In that event, China, as the country with perhaps the most to lose from a slowdown in global trade, will likely respond with more of the same political muscle-flexing that we’ve seen in recent weeks.

One particular border incident last week is illustrative: it involved Chinese law enforcement officials in Shenzhen in southern China and human rights activists in Hong Kong, which is notionally Chinese territory, but which enjoys special status under the ‘one country, two systems’ formulation. The activists were rallying in defence of human rights in China, but although they were on the Hong Kong side of the immigration control point (where their rights were protected), plain-clothes Chinese police from across the border darted in and dragged activists and journalists back into China. It was as egregious a ‘border incursion’ as any that
India experienced last year.

Additionally, the mere absence of open Sino-Indian hostilities is no reason for India to lower its guard. China still controversially issues stapled visas to Kashmiris, but since they’re routed through Hong Kong, they remain off the radar of Indian immigration officials.

All this is not to say that India shouldn’t be smoking the peace pipe with China, only that it should be alert that the heat that it generates doesn’t melt away the layer of thin ice on which the diplomatic détente of the moment rests.