Six ways on how to improve Sino-Indian ties, post-Wuhan

No matter how you do the sums, you cannot come up with an easy answer as to whether the Wuhan summit between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and President Xi Jinping has been a success or not.

That is because, the outcome of this kind of a summit can only be determined not through the communiques and words, but action taken on the ground. Many things are not visible right now and will unfold on the ground in the coming months and years.

Though, by pulling the rug under the feet of the Dalai Lama, assuring China that India will not militarily intervene in Maldives and refusing to have the Australians at the Malabar naval exercises, India has front-loaded some of its commitments. Just what the Chinese have committed themselves to is not clear.

At this point, we can, however, say that the principal achievement of the meeting is to put the strategic communications between the two countries on a new track. While meetings between officials of the two countries take place regularly, the Wuhan summit has inaugurated a new era of diplomacy where the top leaders of India and China meet more frequently and find time to take up issues in much greater detail. What the summit has also accomplished is to show the world that China and India may have troubled relations, but their leaders also have the maturity to recognise when things are going out of hand and exercise political will to do something about it.

The significance of the meeting lies in the regional and global situation. Both India and China have a long history of a disputed border. But now as they are rising economically and militarily, they are also rubbing against each other in their South Asian neighbourhood and the vast region stretching from the Western Pacific to the Indian Ocean.

The Wuhan summit signals that they do not want to clash against each other through misunderstanding and miscalculation. At the same time they would not like to have their bilateral relationship be mediated by third countries like the US and neither would they like to have their relations with other countries– whether it is the US or Pakistan — negatively impact on their own interaction.

They are also living in a period when the world’s greatest power, the US, has a leader who is unpredictable and erratic. The Sino-Indian meeting is of import to the developing world as well which increasingly looks to them for guidance and example.

The difficulties and challenges that the two sides confront lie in several important areas :

First, the disputed border. Unless the Line of Actual Control (LAC) is clarified, as Modi suggested in 2015, it is difficult not to have periodic incidents like in Depsang in 2014 and Chumar in 2015. Also, there is no point in asking the Special Representatives designated to discuss the border issue, to intensify their work. Actually their work has finished. What is needed is action by the respective leaderships of China and India.

Second, both sides need to urgently revitalise their peace keeping mechanisms on the border. They have layer upon layer of confidence building measures, yet, they are not available to avoid crises.

Third, India and China need to resolve their problems on the economic front because the potential for their relationship is high, but the performance as of now is well below par. An immediate area of attention is in that of the trade balance which is heavily skewed against India. But many Indian products like pharmaceuticals, Information Technology products and non-basmati rice are blocked from the Chinese market. China needs to open up its markets to Indian goods.

Fourth, terrorism emanating from Pakistan remains a problem for India. As a friend of Pakistan and an important military partner, India feels that China should do more to restrain Pakistan.

Fifth, both sides must have a diplomatic mechanism through which they can discuss regional issues like Pakistan, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Nepal, Maldives, Sri Lanka. Building on the idea of a joint project in Afghanistan, the two sides should explore joint third-country projects in some of these countries.

Sixth, there is need for the top leaderships to sensitise lower level officials and military personnel as to what they are trying to achieve. Unless the lower level officials implement the ideas, the high level meeting will be of no value.

At the end of the day, the success of the Wuhan summit is in the outcome of short and long term considerations. The former relate to the election cycle in India and Modi’s need to ensure that his election prospects are not marred by Chinese activity along the LAC.

But equally, there is a medium-to-longer-term interest in the two Asian giants learning to live with each other. Both are growing and dissonance in their relations can have consequences for the region and the world, and, of course, themselves.

Indian Express online May 1, 2018

The Wuhan summit

There is a facile similarity  being made out between the Modi-Xi summit in Wuhan and the  repeat of the Rajiv Gandhi-Deng Xiaoping meeting of December 1988. The thirty years of history that have passed since the latter event make the Wuhan meeting very different.

It is true that both events come in the wake of face-offs that have gone well for India. In 1986-87 under Operation Falcon, the Indian Army for the first time looked at the PLA eye-to-eye and forced it to recognize that the balance of power on the border was no longer what had prevailed a decade before.

In 2017, the Indian Army intervened in Doklam to block a Chinese road-building project in territory disputed between China and Bhutan. In the end, given their adverse position, the Chinese backed off. The 1988 visit followed the 1986-87 crisis, and the 2018 visit is following the Doklam faceoff.

The result of the 1988 Rajiv Gandhi visit was that India agreed to set aside its demand that China settle the border issue before there could be a normalization of ties. Talks took place that resulted in two far reaching agreements in 1993 and 1996 that created an elaborate structure of confidence building that has ensured that despite occasional face-off the two sides have managed to maintain peace and tranquility along their disputed 4,000 km border.

Since then, of course, Sino-Indian relations have developed much greater complexity. For one, the two sides have major trade relations. Indeed, China is India’s main source of merchandise imports. In this period we have also seen the rise of China as a huge economic power with its GDP rising from $1 trillion in 2001 to $ 14 trillion today. In the same period, its foreign exchange reserves have risen from $220 billion to a huge $ 3 trillion.

More important, China has become economically and diplomatically active in a region we saw as our sphere of interest—the South Asian neighbourhood and the Indian Ocean region. India has watched this uneasily and sought to reach out to the US to balance China. But the US has its own complex relationship with Beijing and is not likely to resolve our dilemma in the South Asian-Indian Ocean region.

In the run up to the elections, Modi had  attacked the UPA for allowing China to get away with its border transgressions. In 2014 and 2015, Modi sought to work with China. But subsequently, since 2016, the Modi government took a hard line on China. On one hand it encouraged the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan government-in-exile and on the other it publicly attacked China for not backing India’s membership in the Nuclear Supplier’s Group and designating Masood Azhar as a terrorist under the United Nation’s 1267 Committee. It also led a campaign against  XI Jinping’s  Belt and Road Initiative.

But the 2017 Doklam crisis brought home to the government the risks of an unrelentingly tough stand. It had led to China building up its forces along the Line of Actual Control  and there were worries that a face-off between the two countries could derail Modi’s re-election campaign. So, India decided to backtrack and reach out to China. Beijing was only too happy to oblige since it is in the midst of a trade war with the US, with the Trump Administration threatening to attack China’s efforts to develop an autonomous industrial base.

In this context the question to be asked is: What has the 2018 visit yielded? Though officials had played down the possibility of any specific outcome from the Modi-Xi informal summit in Wuhan on Friday and Saturday, there have been some specific outcomes as outlined by the Foreign Secretary Vijay Gokhale at a press briefing.

An important outcome is their decision to provide “strategic guidance” to their respective militaries to keep peace along the Sino-Indian border. This would involve enhanced official level meetings to build trust and understanding and the implementation of the existing confidence building agreements and institutional mechanisms to resolve problems in the border areas.

Additionally, it was noted that the two sides also recognize the common threat posed by terrorism and the need to oppose it in all its forms and manifestations. India and China have decided to cooperate in joint projects in Afghanistan and we could also see possible collaboration in third countries such as Nepal or Bangladesh.

The leaders endorsed the work of the Special Representatives (NSA Ajit Doval from the Indian side and State Councillor Yang jichei and now Wang Yi from the Chinese) to find a fair, reasonable and mutual settlement to the dispute. Gokhale told the media that the two leaders felt that the two countries were mature enough to settle their differences through peaceful discussions and keeping in mind the larger context of their relationship. Also the two should bear in mind the need to “respect each other’s sensitivities, concerns and aspirations.”

This last phrase is important because this is what the Wuhan summit is all about. It is similar to the one used in the wake of the 20th meeting of the Special Representatives in December 2017, the meeting which probably set the stage for the Wuhan summit. 

It would be surprising if we see a sudden change in Chinese behavior either on the border on in relation to Pakistan. But the aim of the summit was not that. It was to work out the terms of peaceful co-existence of the two Asian giants. These are not spelt out in declarations, but implemented in practice. It is through such informal summits where the two leaderships get to know each other and get a better understanding of their motives and policies that the business of international relations is done.

Greater Kashmir April 30, 2018

After PM Modi-Xi Meet, Will New India-China Relationship Work?

As in all structured events, the Wuhan summit between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and China’s President Xi Jinping has gone off well. It has highlighted what was seen as a major lacuna in the relationship — the need for the two sides to communicate more effectively with each other.

As for the other outcomes, they are more or less predictable because they contain elements of various decisions and confidence-building measures going back 30 years.

The summit’s short-term goal was to prevent inadvertent military or diplomatic confrontations across their borders or the South Asia-Indian Ocean region. The long-term one is to set their respective growth trajectories in order to create synergy instead of crossing each other in the Indo-Pacific region.

A New Relationship Model Between India and China?

The Wuhan summit has echoes of the 2013 meeting between Xi and US President Barack Obama at Sunnylands, California. It was at this meeting that Xi – who had just been elected president at the time – pushed the idea of a “new type of great power relations”. The only way to “constructively manage” US-China differences, XI argued, was if both sides:

1. Prioritised dialogue over conflict and treated each other’s strategic intentions objectively.
2. Expressed mutual respect for each other’s core interests.
3. Abandoned the zero-sum game mentality and cooperated in advancing areas of mutual interest.

In essence, XI sought American agreement to accommodate China as a global power on terms of equality with the US, even before China had reached that position.

India and China are seeking a new model of relationship as well. Just as Xi sought to persuade the US to gamble on China’s future status as a world power, so is Modi wanting China to accept that India, too, is on the verge of becoming a power with the heft of China.

To that end, the Indian side has been calling for a policy perspective in which both sides should respect “each other’s sensitivities, concerns and aspirations.”

On its part, China, which sees itself as a rising world power, knows that it needs to reduce tensions in its periphery, especially with large nations like India which occupy a strategic location at the head of the Indian Ocean, a waterway whose importance to China cannot be understated.

Change will not occur overnight, but it is worthwhile to keep a keen eye out for the signs of a strategic shift in behaviour. These signs should be visible in our problem areas, like the border or in the relationship between China and Pakistan.

Also Read: Fight All You Want, China’s Money Will Keep Coming to India

During his visit to China in 2015, Modi pressed for the idea of clarifying the Line of Actual Control (LAC) as a means of preventing inadvertent confrontations. This would be pending the final resolution of the dispute. Such an action was actually envisaged in the 1993 Border Peace and Tranquility Agreement.

But after exchanging maps of the Central and Western Sectors, the Chinese have balked. Minus a clear understanding on where the LAC lies, it is impossible for the two militaries to implement the “strategic guidance” of the Wuhan summit to prevent a recurrence of incidents such as the one in Depsang in 2013 and Chumur in 2014.

In Wuhan, Modi and Xi have commended the work of the Special Representatives; but truth be told, there work is largely done. It is the leaders themselves who need to take the next step to achieve a final settlement of the border dispute. This settlement lies at the heart of the Sino-Indian problem.

China’s Close Relationship with Pakistan a Lost Cause for India?

The second major action point for India would be in China’s ties with Pakistan. This is a fairly straight-forward subject. India can hardly object to good relations between the two countries, but there are obvious red-lines, such as the Chinese block on the designation of Masood Azhar as a terrorist under the UN’s 1267 committee.

There is also the more complicated area of China’s support to Pakistan’s nuclear weapons programme. While India cannot object to the Sino-Pakistan relationship insofar as conventional weapons are concerned, it certainly has a right to expect that China will not encourage Pakistan’s WMD production.

Pakistan may be a lost cause for India in South Asia, but there are countries like Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Maldives that New Delhi views as being important for its security and well being.

Though China has been fairly circumspect so far, India’s own mishandling of the region and the growth of China’s economic power is generating insecurity in New Delhi.

China would also expect India to be circumspect in its support for the US Indo-Pacific strategy to the extent that it is directed against China. What China does in the South China Sea is not something that affects India directly but one that the ASEAN needs to take up.

Without necessarily backing China’s expansive maritime claims in the region, New Delhi does need to understand that China’s actions in the South China Sea are also driven by concerns over its security.

India has had a long-standing grouse over the balance of trade between the two countries. This is something that is not difficult to handle. In comparison to China’s trade issues with the US, the Indian problem is quite minor. But because of the indifferent relations, the two sides have not been able to iron out problems relating to trade and investment. Though, both recognise that this is an area that offers huge payoffs for both of them.

China’s Lifeblood Flows Through the Indian Ocean

An important aspect of any reset would be the importance of misjudging the strategic intention of the other party. Chinese investment in Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka or Maldives is viewed with suspicion in India. There is no reason why the two countries cannot discuss this in a frank manner.

The idea of a joint project in Afghanistan is a good beginning; its experience can possibly be replicated in other countries to reduce Sino-Indian mistrust.

Like all great trading powers of the past, China is also looking to create capabilities to moderate the risks to its economic security that arise from its global trade.

China is hugely dependent on the Indian Ocean sea lanes for its economic prosperity. An estimated 80 percent of its oil imports go through the Straits of Malacca, just as 75 percent of India’s oil goes through Indian Ocean sea lanes.

A significant proportion of its cargo traffic also uses these routes.

Traditionally, the flag has followed trade, and so it is with China as the PLA Navy expands into the Indian Ocean. India cannot block it, but it can engage China and understand its motives. In fact, far from conflict, the two countries do have a common agenda of maintaining the freedom of navigation and overflight in the Indian Ocean, as much as the South China Sea.

The bottom line in assessing the Wuhan summit comes from then US Secretary of State John Kerry when discussing the New Type of relations in 2014: “a new model is not defined in words. It is defined in actions.”

That, indeed, should be the leitmotif of those looking for a reset in Sino-Indian relations after the Wuhan summit. It is actions, and not words, that will matter in the months to come.

The Quint May 1, 2018

Baggage of history: India and China need to dump this so they can both rise, without friction or fire

The two words that have driven India and China into an unusual summit in Wuhan are “fear” and “trust”. Prime Minister Narendra Modi is apprehensive that an uncontrolled event on the border could undermine a sure-shot reelection in 2019. President Xi Jinping fears that an increasingly confrontational US could disrupt his second term and undermine the Chinese economy at a critical transition point. New Delhi reached out and Beijing reciprocated and hence the summit.

Chinese and Indian leaders must ask themselves as to why they are locked into the kind of relationship they are in. History, of course, has played a big role. But if history alone were to decide foreign policy, the world would forever be a Dar-ul-Harb (House of War). More important, in the Sino-Indian context, the processes that kept peace between the two sides since the Rajiv-Deng meeting of 1988 have run out of steam.

The succession of confidence building measures on the border beginning 1993, failed to prevent the Depsang and Chumur incidents in 2013 and 2014 respectively. The high special representatives of the two sides finished the technical work of defining a mutually acceptable border. But their respective political leaderships have been unable, or unwilling, to make that final political push towards the final settlement.

Chinese activism in South Asia and the Indian Ocean Region, the 2017 Doklam crisis, India’s enthusiastic participation in the revived Quadrilateral Group, showed that the simultaneously rising Asian giants were rubbing against each other in dangerous ways. This negative drift could escalate to a larger confrontation shattering their respective dreams of national rejuvenation.

Both sides have lamented the lack of trust and the need to enhance “strategic communications”. Even so they have attributed the worst motives to the actions of the other and ridden roughshod over each other’s sensitivities. China has blocked our membership to the NSG and the designation of Masood Azhar as a terrorist in the UN, and India has feted Dalai Lama and campaigned against BRI.

They are not unaware of the opportunity costs they are paying. China is ideally suited to fulfill India’s pressing need for investment and infrastructure. Indian and Chinese companies do good business in each other’s territories, trade is booming, but the economic relationship remains well below its potential because of issues of trust.

Things began changing after the Xi-Modi meeting at the Brics summit in Xiamen last September. There has been a surge of “strategic communications” – high level meetings of top ministers and officials in New Delhi and Beijing. The most significant was the one between Ajit Doval and Yang Jiechi, the designated point men of the relationship. Their meeting was held after a gap of 20 months and they spoke of the need to resolve their differences “with due respect for each other’s sensitivities, concerns and aspirations.”

That phrase captures what the Modi-Xi summit is all about – the need to do all those things listed, so as to enhance that elusive thing called “trust” which would, in turn, allow the two rising Asian states to rub against each other without the friction that could touch off a fire. But to build that trust, they need to dump the baggage of history – the border dispute and 1962 war, China’s use of Pakistan to contain India, New Delhi’s own alliances, first with Russia, now with the US.

India has to accept that China has interests in “our” region but, in turn, Beijing should know that India has a heft and will stand its ground on its key interests. Latin phrases remain irreplaceable because of their precision. That’s why the phrase that comes to mind is ‘modus vivendi’. That’s what India and China need across the Indo-Pacific. This can’t be achieved overnight, but as the Chinese saying goes: A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.

Times of India April 28, 2018

Pragmatic India junks past rhetoric for Xi-Modi summit

Given their relationship, as Asia’s two rising powers who share a disputed border and a relationship that has long been troubled, there are multiple reasons India and China are reaching out to each other, and the leaders of the two countries, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and President Xi Jinping, will hold an unprecedented informal summit this week in Wuhan, in central China’s Hubei province.

Given the recent sequence of events, which famously included New Delhi throwing the Dalai Lama under the bus and assuring Beijing that it will not intervene in Maldives, it would appear that the outreach has been initiated by India and reciprocated by China.

Given the many-layered relationship between the two countries, India’s reasons are also manifold. But at this juncture, it would appear that Modi is reaching out to China to remove possible risks to his re-election campaign next year. His advisers believe that a confrontation with China in the border region always has the chance of going against India. Such a development would have grave political consequences for a leader who has thrived on the image of being a tough guy.

The Doklam issue has led to the People’s Liberation Army building up its forces along the entire Line of Actual Control (LAC) that marks the Sino-Indian border. New Delhi is aware that the outcome to the Doklam standoff being favorable to India last year was in great measure because of the overwhelming military advantage its forces had over the Chinese in the locality of Doka La Pass. But such a situation may not obtain elsewhere along the 4,000-kilometer LAC. As it is, there is some unease that the Doklam crisis has shaken the elite circles in Bhutan and if Thimphu throws in the towel, India doesn’t have a legal leg to stand on.

Modi now agrees with some of his senior advisers that India was wrong to handle China the way it did through 2016 by publicly hectoring it over the Nuclear Supplier Group and Masood Azhar issues. So there is an effort now to put diplomacy in command when dealing with them,  rather than using them to score propaganda points.

Likewise, Modi and his team believe that they may have erred in going out of their way to use the so-called Tibet card. This has only served to get China’s back up and in realistic terms, there is little to be gained by encouraging the Tibetans in exile in India, since China has firm control of Tibet. The Dalai Lama has been ready to make a deal with them, but it’s only the Chinese hard line that prevents such a development.

Before he came to power, Modi was a known admirer of the Chinese economic miracle, and his visit to China in 2011 was described as “historic” by his supporters. As candidate, though, he attacked the incumbent United Progressive Alliance government for having failed to secure India’s borders with China and Pakistan.

Today, as the Indian economy continues to be troubled by niggling issues such as a declining investment rate in recent years, China looks like a good prospect for an economic partnership that could see investment in infrastructure, improving manufacturing capability and skill development. Indeed, despite the two countries’ political difficulties, Sino-Indian trade is booming, as is Chinese investment in India.

Though India has joined the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, or Quad, and has emerged as a major element in the US Indo-Pacific strategy, the government does not see any immediate payoffs from this. Modi is also worried about the risks of tying India’s policies to the erratic administration of US President Donald Trump. On the other hand, along with China, it could be targeted by the US on trade and currency issues. Reaching out to China helps moderate some of these risks.

The Modi team realizes that as of now India cannot compete with China in Southeast Asia  and must focus its attention in the Indian Ocean region and work out ways to ensure that the two largest Asian countries are not played off against each other by the smaller nations of South Asia and the Indian Ocean Region (SA-IOR).

What are China’s aims in reciprocating India’s moves towards détente?

The very obvious one is that it is seeking to shore up its flanks to protect itself against a political and commercial attack from the United States. India may not be a significant economic player, but it is an important political actor and its neutrality in the event of any US-China clash would be useful.

As China’s economy slows down and India’s picks up pace, Beijing may have realized that it is at that cusp of history where its bargaining power with India is at its maximum and as the decades unfold, India’s comprehensive national power will grow and the Chinese advantage will become progressively less. This is therefore a good time to alter the trajectory of its relationship with India, which has so far been dominated by their conflicts arising out of their border issue and China’s use of Pakistan as a foil against India.

So these questions beg another one: What can India offer China and what can the latter offer India? At a broad level we know that China has its core interests – the primacy of the Communist Party, and the recognition that Taiwan, Tibet and Xinjiang as inalienable parts of China, now along with the Diayou/Senkaku islands, and the South China Sea.

As for India, it has never quite spelled out its core interests like the Chinese, but certainly national sovereignty and territorial integrity are central. This, of course, includes Jammu and Kashmir and Arunachal Pradesh, which brings it into collision with China and Pakistan.

Naturally, neither side is expected to offer up its core interests in any bilateral bargain. But better strategic communication can lead, first, to a modus vivendi on potential areas of concern, such as expanding China’s forays into South Asia and the Indian Ocean Region, or India’s interest in joining the US, Australia and Japan in the Quadrilateral grouping.

Second, better political understanding can unlock the economic complementarities of their huge economies. India is looking to prop up its declining rate of investment and build its infrastructure, and China is in a position to provide both; indeed, Chinese companies are very eager to do business in India. The Chinese are not unaware of their enormous export dependence on the US.

Third, it could open up a more sustainable path toward cooperation if China and India could settle their border dispute. The 20 rounds of border talks between the two Special Representatives have more or less completed the technical aspects of a border settlement. What remains is the political push, which can only be given by Modi and Xi. Are they up to it?

In 2014, there were expectations that there could be swift movement in this area given that both were strong leaders, capable of pushing a compromise in their respective domestic constituencies. Now that does not appear any longer to be the case.

Usually in such summits, detailing these issues and working out solutions and options are done well in advance. So have the two sides worked out a deal in advance, or are they truly going into an informal and unstructured summit? If the latter is the case, there could be hazards for India, considering the existing asymmetry of economic and military power between the two countries.

Asia Times April 25, 2018

When Modi meets China’s Xi in Wuhan, India starts from a position of weakness

So, India threw the Dalai Lama under the bus. Not my words, but those of a retired senior government official with years of experience of India’s China policy. He was commenting on a news report that appeared this week, which said that just before the Centre sent out a note to all government officials in February asking them not to participate in events commemorating the Tibetan spiritual leader’s 60 years of exile, India had already informed Beijing of its intended move.

Now we know why that happened. Prime Minister Narendra Modi wants to talk peace with Beijing. Why? The answer is obvious. In the run-up to general elections in 2019, the only thing that seems to matter to him is to make sure there are no unpleasant shocks for his government.

Among external actors, the one country that can spring an unpleasant surprise on India is China. After the Indians tom-tommed their great victory in Doklam – where Indian and Chinese troops faced off for around 70 days last year – the Chinese have been seething. And they have 4,056 km of the disputed Sino-Indian border across which they could spring that surprise.

So, Foreign Secretary Vijay Gokhale was sent to Beijing on February 23 to inform the Chinese that a) India would abjure from using the Tibet card as it had been doing for the past four years, and b) that it had no intention of intervening militarily in the Maldives, where China has interests.

Wuhan meeting

The reward, as it were, is the Wuhan summit between Modi and China’s President Xi Jinping that is to take place on April 27-April 28. We can only speculate about its outcome, but we do know that it is India that is going into it from a position of weakness. Hopefully, the two sides have already negotiated an outcome, because a truly unstructured event could blow up in our face.

There is a facile comparison being made that the Modi-Xi summit in Wuhan would be a repeat of the Rajiv Gandhi-Deng Xiaoping meeting of December 1988. Actually, the time that has passed since has ensured that it cannot be similar.

Both events came in the wake of face-offs that went well for India. In 1986-’87, under Operation Falcon, the Indian Army for the first time looked at the People’s Liberation Army eye-to-eye and forced it to recognise the fact that the balance of power on the border was no longer the one that had prevailed in the 1960s.

In 2017, the Indian Army intervened in Doklam to block a Chinese road-building project in territory claimed by both China and Bhutan. In the end, given their adverse position, the Chinese backed off.

The result of Rajiv Gandhi’s China visit in 1988 was that India agreed to set aside its demand that China settle the border dispute before there could be normalisation of ties. Talks took place that resulted in two far-reaching agreements in 1993 and 1996, which created an elaborate structure of confidence-building that has ensured that, despite occasional face-offs, the two sides have managed to maintain peace and tranquility along the border.

Since then, of course, relations between India and China have developed much greater complexity if only because they have developed much larger economies and corresponding interests in their respective regions. Indeed, the big problem is that their interests are now rubbing against each other in the South Asia-Indian Ocean region.

What can the 2018 visit yield ?

The Wuhan summit, although billed as informal, is a carefully prepared event. The story began in Xiamen, where Xi and Modi met on the sidelines of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) summit in September. It was at this summit that China signaled that it was not entirely deaf to India’s concerns about terrorism emanating from Pakistan.

It was also at this summit that the two leaders, aware of the dangerous confrontation in Doklam, gave their officials instructions to enhance “strategic communications” between the two sides – essentially, to step up high-level communications to resolve problems before they turned into confrontations.

The first step in this direction was the decision to hold the 20th round of talks between the special representatives in Delhi after a gap of 20 months. At this meeting in December, India’s National Security Adviser Ajit Doval met his counterpart, State Councillor and Politburo member Yang Jichei.

As usual, little was revealed about the content of the meeting, but the Indian press release did note that the two officials spoke of the need to emphasise their convergences and to find “mutually acceptable resolutions of their differences with due respect to each other’s sensitivities, concerns and aspirations”.

Subsequently, Gokhale – who was the Indian ambassador to China till October – made an official visit to Beijing on February 23. It was on the eve of this visit that he sent a letter to his colleague, the cabinet secretary, asking him to advise leaders and government functionaries to stay away from events marking 60 years of the Dalai Lama’s arrival in India.

On March 20, Modi spoke directly with Xi to congratulate him on his re-election as president and it was during this conversation that the Wuhan visit was finalised. Since then, we have seen Doval visit China, where he once again met Yang Jichei – now secretary of the Central Foreign Affairs Commission, the body that determines Chinese foreign policy – and the new Chinese special representative Wang Yi. Then earlier this week, External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj and Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman visited Beijing. These visits were in the context of the summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation in Qingdao in June. But you can be sure the high-level discussions took into account the shifting Indian position on China.

Odds are against India

At first glance, the deck is stacked against India. It is the one that has publicly drawn back on Tibet and Maldives, moves that have not been reciprocated by China in any way. In that sense, they reflect the deeply asymmetrical nature of the Sino-Indian situation. China is also a far bigger economic and military power than India.

But at this juncture, Beijing also needs to secure itself from a putative American assault. Even though many see the trade war between the two countries as shadow-boxing, China knows it is in President Donald Trump’s crosshairs and is seeking to ensure that countries like India remain neutral.

Also, China is looking at India through a long-term perspective, in which it sees the Indian economy growing at a faster pace than its own in the coming decades. This huge economy can provide opportunities for investment and markets for Chinese products in an era where Beijing’s over-dependence on the United States is becoming manifest.

New Delhi’s handling of Beijing has been somewhat immature in the last four years. Instead of give-and-take diplomacy, it has hectored China, demanding that it support its membership to the Nuclear Suppliers Group and its efforts to get Jaish-e-Mohammed chief Masood Azhar declared a United Nations-designated terrorist. It has sought to take a position in the western Pacific, to counter China’s forays in the Indian Ocean. Its attempts to match up to Beijing reached ridiculous heights when it created a Forum for India-Pacific Islands Cooperation, even though it has no discernible interests in the South Pacific.

But there also seems to be a realisation in New Delhi that the sum total of these positions, which emphasise confrontation, are unsustainable. What worries Modi now is that Beijing could lower the boom in an election year, with all its unpredictable consequences.

Scroll April 25, 2018