The Chinese have added to their list of recent provocations against India, this time by questioning the status of Kashmir, ahead of a likely meeting between PM Manmohan Singh and Chinese premier Wen Jiabao in Thailand later this week.
The Chinese have added to their list of recent provocations against India, this
time by questioning the status of Kashmir, ahead of a likely meeting between prime minister Manmohan Singh and Chinese premier Wen Jiabao in Thailand later this week.
In media kits provided by the Chinese authorities to journalists on a visit to Lhasa, Tibet, it was mentioned that Tibet “borders India, Nepal, Myanmar and the Kashmir area”, thereby not recognising the status of Kashmir as part of the Indian union.
The latest salvo comes on the back of the controversy over the issuance of Chinese visas to Kashmiri students on separate slips of paper, to symbolise China’s perception of Kashmir as “disputed territory”.
Even as the ministry of external affairs said it was not aware of this transgression, it asserted that Kashmir was an integral part of India.
Analyst Sujit Datta, a long-time China watcher, was not surprised.
“For the last five years, Beijing has been once again concentrating on the status of Kashmir and many of its official publications have shown the region outside of India.’’ Datta says that three years back, the Beijing Review, a magazine published from the Chinese capital, had a map of India showing Kashmir as a separate region, a kind of “status unknown” territory.
The evolution of China’s position on the Kashmir dispute since the 1950s reflects its changing relations with India, its views on regional stability and its global posture, notes Zaid Haider, Zuckerman Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School. In the heydays of Sino-Indian friendship in 1950s, China condemned the “imperial powers” responsible for the Kashmir dispute, but with the deterioration of relations with India in the 1960s and 1970s, it invoked the spectre of intervention in Indo-Pakistani relations. China again adopted a more neutral posture on Kashmir in the late 1990s, but that now appears at risk.
China is also “starting to believe its own propaganda” about its ascent on the global stage, and is “flexing its muscle” and opening new fronts to provoke India, says China analyst Gordon Chang. “I think they want to push India around to see how far they can go without starting a fight... You have a situation where they are acting more aggressively for any number of different reasons, and they’re seeing that they’re not getting any pushback, so they figure they might as well go for it.”
The official almanac of the Chinese government, the latest available is the one published in 2006, has Kashmir as a part of India. However, things have changed since and tensions between the two countries have escalated with increased incursions and angry exchanges. In all, not the ideal environment for talks between the leaders.
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