PM Modi has proved that he understands the external affairs department well enough. (Source: Reuters)
Unlike Pakistan, China is a big and successful country. On the eve of the visit of China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi, the Indian government should revisit its China policy. The Indian leadership should understand one basic truth. It hardly matters in China’s context as to how many times our leaders have visited China or vice versa. The notion that diplomacy is all about proximity doesn’t hold any water in China’s context. Nehru to Nixon had good experience of it.
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What plagues our foreign policy with regard to China is the utter lack of knowledge about the Himalayan neighbour in our country. With Pakistan, our obsession is security, whereas with China we are overawed by the talk of development there. Ordinary individuals and ministers alike look at China only through the prism of its development and fail to appreciate the complex civilisational traits of that country.
All neighbours are not alike. China is certainly not like any other neighbour. China is not just a country or a government; it is a civilisation. To understand China, our leader should better understand their civilisational behaviour. We should know Sun Tzu’s Art of War; we should study Confucius. China’s policy behaviour is largely shaped by its civilisational experience. Diplomacy, for them, is an art of deception.
In 1954, India and China proclaimed Panchsheel as the basis of our relations. Successive Indian leaders, including A.B. Vajpayee, never missed the opportunity to refer to Panchsheel and “peaceful coexistence” as enshrined in it in bilateral talks. No wonder, if the present leadership is also forced to continue the ritual by MEA mandarins. But we forget that the obituary of Panchsheel was written by Mao in 1962 itself when he told Zhou Enlai that India and China should practise not “peaceful coexistence” but “armed coexistence”.
Another important aspect of China to be borne in mind is that, as in Pakistan, the military plays an important role in China too. The Central Military Commission, the all-powerful body that controls the Chinese military, reports to the Communist Party of China more than to the government of China. While we deal with the government leadership on various bilateral issues we can’t overlook the fact that the view of the military on various cross-border issues is also significant.
The Indian government enjoys one advantage in India-China relations, that of the ignorance of the masses in India about the complexities involved in it. In the case of Pakistan, the people of India are very aware of the sensitivities, forcing government’s options to a limited few. However, in the case of China, no such constraint in the form of popular backlash is going to happen. The very fact that, while there were animated debates over whether Nawaz Sharif should have been invited to the swearing-in ceremony, there is no such commotion with regard to the phone call or proposed visit of the premier of China within the next few months proves this point.
But the government must understand that this popular approval, born of a lack of knowledge, can be dangerous if it decides to take things easy with China.
Madhav is a member of the Central Executive, RSS, and the author of ‘Uneasy Neighbours: India and China after Fifty Years of the War’
