The Chinese Prime Minister, Mr. Li Peng’s forthcoming visit to New Delhi can mark a turning point in Sino-Indian relations if it is recognised by both sides that they have been victims of misperceptions resulting from the cold war.
Beijing and New Delhi have seen themselves as major players on the international scene, and in competition with each other. But this has been more an exercise in self-deception than in garnering influence.
Facts speak for themselves. Neither India nor China can claim any worthwhile influence even in their neighbourhoods after four decades of exertions to that end. On the contrary, both find themselves under enormous pressure from the West, especially the United States.
Main Issue
The issue is not whether the demands Washington is making are justified or not. The issue is whether either government is in a position to say “no” clearly and firmly if it is convinced that it is being forced to compromise its national interest as perceived by it. The answer has to be in the negative. They can at best stall, as India is trying to do, on the question of signing the nuclear non-proliferation treaty (NPT) and China on that of human rights.
In a sense, the cold war was imposed on China by the United States. China’s alignment with the Soviet Union was not an inevitable result of the triumph of communism there in 1949. Indeed, Mao Zedong had been suspect in Stalin’s eyes since he had seized the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party in 1935 and thrown out Moscow’s nominees.
Stalin did not favour unification of China under Mao’s leadership in 1948-49. On the eve of their by then certain victory Mao and Chou En-Lai had expressed a desire to visit Washington. They were turned down. It might have been a different story if they had been received in Washington.
This is, however, only one aspect of a complicated story. Two other facets need to be noted in connection with Sino-Indian relations. First, the worldview of Mao and other Chinese leaders had been deeply influenced by Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism with the result that they were basically distrustful of non-communist leaders such as Jawaharlal Nehru. They were the first to denounce him as the “running dog” of British imperialism.
Secondly, they were nationalists not only in the sense that they resented Soviet and Western attempts to control them and wanted to assert their autonomy; they also defined nationalism in expansionist terms and found in Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism, as summed up in Mao Zedong’s thought, a powerful instrument for expansionism. This finally accounted for their conflict not only with India but also with Vietnam though, ironically enough, Hanoi could not have fought the United States successfully for a whole decade without their aid.
A united non-communist China too might have sought to incorporate Tibet. But it would not have engaged in a ruthless war on Lamaistic Buddhism and destroyed Tibet’s cultural-religious integrity. Thus Tibet could have continued to serve both as a buffer and a link between India and China under non-communist Beijing’s sovereignty.
The communist version of Chinese nationalism was deeply flawed. It could not serve as the basis either for China’s own self-renewal or of friendly relations with India, especially in the context of the Chinese occupation of Tibet which incidentally necessitated the construction of the road across Akasaichin that finally led to the border war between the two countries in 1962.
To put it differently, like Indian nationalism, Chinese nationalism too needed to be directed inward.It had to aim primarily at ending external encroachments so that China could once again be true to its old genuine self. Even its leaders could not detach themselves from the cold war in view of America’s unwillingness as well as inability to respond to the initial Mao-Chou gesture and of the subsequent American decision to march up to the Yalu in the Korean war and thereby to place themselves in a position to exert pressure on Manchuria, non-ideological commonsense demanded that they pursue an essentially defensive approach. Their ideological commitment and activism, however, made that impossible in the wake of the disastrous failure of the “great leap forward” in the fifties leading to Mao’s isolation further.
US Plans
On the Indian side of the Himalayan border, it cannot be claimed in all conscience that Nehru was able to withstand fully the provocations by the Chinese and domestic pressure and avoid cold war entanglements altogether. There is, for instance, evidence to show that his government acquiesced in US plans to promote resistance to Chinese rule in Tibet. Indeed, there was merit in the Chinese charge that Kalimpong has been converted in a spies nest for purposes of intervention in Tibet. American investigators have fully established these points.
Even so, it cannot also be denied that by and large, he tried hard to steer clear of cold war entanglements. He rejected the US offer of an anti-China alliance from 1948 onwards. He did not waver even in 1954 when Pakistan entered into a security pact with the United States.
As it happened, around the same time the Chinese began to disregard the traditional Indo-Tibetan border in the middle ranges and thus cast doubt on the effectiveness of the 1954 agreement concerning Tibet’s status. This exposed Nehru to rising criticism at home because it could now be argued that he had gained nothing for India in return for the Indian recognition of China’s sovereignty over Tibet.
Indeed, even when Sino-Soviet relations began to deteriorate in the wake of Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin in 1956, Nehru did little more than respond to Soviet offers of economic assistance. In view of Soviet reluctance to break with China, he might not have succeeded in establishing an anti-Beijing strategic consensus with Moscow and securing military assistance from it. The point, however, is that he did not even try.
Nehru’s Fear
It is possible that Nehru was also restrained by his own pacifism and his fear of offending the US. But we are concerned not so much with his personality traits, possible motives and calculations as with the fact that he did not make any move which could entangle India directly either with the main East-West Cold War or the secondary Sino-Soviet one.
The tragedy is that despite its best efforts, India could not escape the consequences of either. It became a victim of the main cold war following the US-Pakistan pact of 1954 and it fell a prey to the Sino-Soviet conflict when the dominant Maoist group in Beijing ordered the attack on it in 1962, partly with a view to embarrassing Khrushchev.
The two sources of threat to India’s security, as it were, converged in 1965 when, well armed with US weapons and encouraged by China’s friendship, Pakistan first tried to occupy the Rann of Kutchch and then sent thousands of armed infiltrators into Kashmir in a bid to grab it. The attempt failed but only to be resumed in the eighties when the circumstances again became propitious for Islamabad with the resumption of US military aid on account of Afghanistan.
China has treated Pakistan as an ally since the early sixties. Between 1965 and 1980 Beijing served as Islamabad’s principal source of military supplies and more recently it has actively assisted the latter in its efforts to acquire nuclear weapons. It cannot, therefore, disown all responsibility for the proxy war Pakistan is waging on this country in Punjab and Kashmir.
Thus it is as unrealistic to try to detach India-China relations from India-Pakistan and China-Pakistan ties as it is to separate the India-China border dispute from the problem of the future status of Tibet or the nuclear weapons issue from the larger question of security. Indeed, even these problems are symptomatic of a deeper malaise – China’s and to an extent India’s failure to see themselves in terms of their cultures and act accordingly. Pakistan falls into a different category.
The Times of India, 2 December 1991