Mr Kosygin’s visit has once again focussed attention on what kind of policy this country should adopt towards China. In view of its attack on Vietnam we would have had to review our earlier approach of wishing to normalise relations with it even if the Soviet Prime Minister had not undertaken the present trip specifically in order to be able to tell us face to face that it would be unpardonable for the world community to let Beijing (Peking under the previous spelling) get away with this act of aggression. For, the event is too big, indeed traumatic, to be left out of account in our own search for a viable policy towards China.
There are still some individuals among our policy-and-opinion makers who are willing to accept China’s protestations of being a peace-loving country. They have apparently had no difficulty in convincing themselves that Hanoi has deliberately provoked Beijing by expelling people of Chinese descent, overthrowing the pro-Chinese Pol Pot regime in Kampuchea (Cambodia) and conducting armed raids across the common border. They are, therefore, ready to believe that the attack on Vietnam has been intended to serve the specific purpose of compelling the Vietnamese to behave properly, that it is not a guide to Beijing’s overall approach to the region and the world, and that it raises no major policy implications for India.
Background
But these individuals must find it less easy to carry conviction with others than they did earlier when they were able to persuade Mr Atal Bihari Vajpayee to accept their view that the time had come to settle outstanding issues, including the border dispute with China, and that the latter was fully ready to reciprocate any gesture by New Delhi. For, now the memories of 1962 have been revived – China’s strongman, Mr Deng Xiaoping himself has compared the aggression against Vietnam with the attack on India in 1962 indicating that he was perhaps as responsible for the latter as he is without doubt for the former – and these are not likely to recede into the background too soon. Mr Morarji Desai and Mr Atal Bihari Vajpayee can be insensitive to this uncertainty and fear in the minds of millions of their countrymen at considerable risk to themselves.
It does not follow that we should join a crusade against China which is what Mr Kosygin has invited us to do. In fact no such crusade is likely to materialise, however hard the Soviet leadership may try, partly because right now the issue of the Chinese attack on Vietnam is inextricably tied up with the Soviet-US competition and partly because Beijing has cut its losses by ordering the withdrawal of its troops. But it does follow that New Delhi must adopt a more cautious approach and seek more convincing evidence of Beijing’s peaceable intentions towards itself and China’s other neighbours.
We live in an extremely complicated world where it is just not possible for us to take foreign policy decisions on the basis of some unexceptionable principles. This is so as much in the present case, as in any other. Who, for could, have said even six months ago that Thailand would possibly be supporting the pro-Chinese guerillas in Kampuchea or that it will gladly permit Chinese mule trains to reach supplies to them or that Beijing would be relying on the same tribes in northern Laos as the Americans in the struggle against the country’s communist rulers? Like everyone else, we have to be guided by our appreciation of our national, especially security, interests. But in the present case our interests and the principles may well point in the same direction.
Cavalier
The present Chinese leadership has been cavalier, if not downright insulting, in its attitude towards us. It got our minister for external affairs to Beijing around the time which it had chosen in advance for “punishing” the Vietnamese; it selected the same week for playing host to a high-power military delegation from Pakistan; it did not think it necessary to inform Mr Vajpayee of the attack on Vietnam even after it launched the invasion and publicised it; and no senior Chinese leader got in touch with him when he decided to cut short his visit and tried to explain to him the “compulsions” behind the attack. But since as a people we are not unduly concerned with face, we perhaps will not make too much of all that. But we can no longer afford to set aside our old doubts regarding China’s ambitions and designs.
The Chinese will, of course, continue to deny most vehemently that they have been trying to treat Indochina, if not the whole of south-east Asia, as their sphere of influence and that their quarrel with Vietnam is essentially the result of the desire to dominate the region and exclude the influence of other major powers, to begin with that of the Soviet Union. This cannot convince anyone who has followed their policy towards the Pol Pot set-up in Kampuchea, without doubt one of the crudest and maddest in the post-war period. What else was its qualification except that it was pro-China and anti-Vietnam? Even so it can be argued that if it is all right by us that the Americans and the Russians do all in their power to preserve their respective spheres of influence in Latin America and Eastern Europe, we cannot criticise China too harshly if it also has similar ambitions in respect of south-east Asia.
Principles apart, the trouble, however, is that China is our immediate neighbour by virtue of its forcible occupation of Tibet in the sense the Soviet Union is not (the United States is too far away to be mentioned at all in this specific context) and that there can be no guarantee that its ambitions will not extend to South Asia which is of direct and vital interest to us. Indeed, its policy towards Pakistan, Nepal and Sri Lanka is evidence enough that its ambitions extend to our own immediate environment. If we were prepared to ignore this reality in our anxiety to befriend Beijing, we cannot continue to do so with an easy mind after the attack on Vietnam.
Thus while we can afford to be indifferent to U.S. machinations in Latin America and Soviet domination in Eastern Europe, we cannot do so in respect of Chinese expansionism in south-east Asia. It impinges directly on us. There is not enough distance to serve as a buffer. Incidentally, the same would be true if Pakistan was to break up and a pro-Soviet puppet regime was to be established in Peshawar. That would bring the Soviet power too close to us for comfort just as the incorporation of Tibet has brought the Chinese might too close to us.
We might have had no choice but to acquiesce in China’s ambitions in south-east Asia and try and buy peace in the Himalayas if it had already become a superpower and if the other two superpowers had felt obliged to concede to it the same right to enforce its will in its neighbourhood as they themselves try to exercise in theirs. But that has not happened and is not likely to happen in the near future. On the contrary, it will be reasonable to assume on the basis of experience elsewhere that Mr Deng Xiaoping’s modernisation drive will run into trouble – it will also in all probability unleash another power struggle because it is not easy to dispose of the Maoist legacy as Mr Deng is trying to do – and that both the United States and the Soviet Union will wish to do whatever they can to preserve and, if possible, extend their own influence in the region bordering China.
Pertinent
For us, it is vital that we try to commit the Chinese to certain norms before they acquire the ability to use their conventional military power on an extensive and sustained basis outside their frontier which they are not capable of doing at present. For, the expansion of China’s conventional military power remains more pertinent for us than its growing nuclear capability, though after the attack on Vietnam we cannot assume ever again that Beijing will not use the latter to blackmail neighbours who otherwise refuse to bend to its will. In sum, this means that while we may need to continue the dialogue with the Chinese, we cannot afford to be too hopeful about the prospects of friendly relations with them and to lower our guard.
The world is in a flux. No one can say when it will settle down, if ever. No one can anticipate the result in respect of the likely new power balance. Indeed, we cannot even be sure that it is any longer pertinent to continue to think in terms of a new power balance because implicit in that is the statement that the world remains bipolar. The opposite – that it has ceased or will soon cease to be bipolar – is equally difficult to assert. In such a situation it will be as absurd to project Sino-Soviet tensions also far into the future as it would be to take it for granted that the West, especially the United States, is seeking an anti-Soviet alliance with Beijing and is, therefore, willing to sacrifice the interests of China’s neighbours, including India’s. In such an uncertain setting one has to be resilient, resourceful, sensitive to developments and rather distrustful of those who have or may have something to gain at one’s expense.
The Times of India 14 March 1979