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The stiff-upper-lip protocol of international diplomacy requires negotiators to, in the colourful idiom of a Malayalam saying, Ask for a match-stick to light your bidi even when your beard is on fire.

Yet, today, even the most earnest and sang-froid expressions of goodwill between Indian and Chinese interlocutors cannot mask the fact that the beard of bilateral relations is ablaze, torched by mutual wariness and weariness.

Virtually every aspect of Sino-Indian relations today has spectacularly collapsed or is on course to come crashing down.

Negotiations on the border dispute, which have dragged on for an eternity, have yielded no gains — or none that we know of, given the veil of secrecy they’re enveloped in. In fact, they’ve just become more complex by the recent opening up, by the Chinese side, of newer frontiers along Sikkim’s border, which it says qualify as ‘disputed territory’.

For all its platitudes about good relations, China has effectively worked to keep India from getting a seat as a permanent member of the UN Security Council and from gaining a foothold in any Asian regional grouping of substance.

Beyond the public articulations of goodwill, the political discourse in Chinese-language media, representative of official thinking, reflects a far greater emphasis on containing India’s power influence in Asia.

Even the one area celebrated as a success of Sino-Indian engagement — the exponential rise in bilateral trade volumes in recent years — is a disaster waiting to happen.

Since the early years of trade expansion, when the balance of trade was in India’s favour, it has reversed direction and is now weighted in China’s favour, widening by the month. Wait for the howls of anguish when more manufacturing jobs are lost to China.

Since the recent uprising in Tibet, Chinese apprehensions of Indian intentions have intensified to a stage where thousands of Indian traders in China are being forced home after failing to have their business visas renewed.

Although this crackdown ties in with a stricter enforcement of lax visa regulations and applies to other nationalities too, anecdotal evidence points to an excessive eagerness ahead of the upcoming Olympics to clear China’s streets of potential troublesome elements from the country where the Dalai Lama resides in exile.

All these strands of strain are symptoms of an underlying trust deficit in Sino-Indian relations, which, for all the diplomatic spin put on it, has proved
impossible to bridge.

But there’s an even bigger trust deficit building up between Indian officialdom and the people on policy responses to China.

Much of that springs from officials’ unwillingness to share any details of what is discussed behind closed doors. Successive governments’ interlocutors have engaged in tortuous border negotiations with China, but not a word have we heard of what’s happening.

Even when Chinese officials uncharacteristically go public with inflammatory claims — to the whole of Arunachal Pradesh, for instance — the Indian response has been one of craven kow-towing.

Closed-door negotiations suit the Chinese framework more than the Indian
political establishment, which can justifiably claim greater openness.

Working from within this bubble of secrecy hasn’t immunised Indian officials from Chinese tendencies to shift the goalpost in negotiations, as evidenced by the most recent Chinese claims on the Sikkim border.

Why, then, are we not playing this game to our advantage? We can make a virtue of the fact that any settlement of the border dispute must be endorsed by the Indian political system, and lift the veil of secrecy.

There’s even a strong case for a White Paper on the negotiations so far as the first step towards formulating a national consensus on the issue.

Alternatively, of course, we could go on pretending that our beard really isn’t on fire, it’s only reflecting the warm glow of the peace pipe we’re smoking...

The best fit
Closed-door negotiations suit the Chinese framework rather more than they do India