On Iran and Trump, India Has Landed Between a Rock and a Hard Place

For some years now, India has liked to think of itself as a “leading power” rather than simply a “balancing power”.  But if the Modi government’s response to Donald Trump reneging on the Iran nuclear deal is anything to go by, India may find itself being classed among the craven powers.

It is not surprising that in the run-up to the decision, Trump met French president Emmanuel Macron and German chancellor Angela Merkel on the issue and spoke to British prime minister Theresa May. He didn’t speak to Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin because China and Russia’s stands are well known. But he did not bother to consult Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the leader of a country which is a close ally of the US and stands to lose a great deal from the decision. This is because Trump knew he could take India for granted; after all, the Modi government’s weak-kneed approach was evident when it avoided substantial comment on the US shifting its embassy to Jerusalem.

India’s official statement on Trump’s Iran decision began with the non sequitur that Iran’s right to peaceful uses of nuclear energy should be respected, that the issue should be resolved through dialogue and diplomacy. “All parties should engage constructively to address and resolve issues that have arisen with respect to the JCPOA,” the MEA said, using the acronym for nuclear agreement’s formal name, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.

There was, unlike the Chinese statement, no expression of regret that an international agreement which had the mandate of a UN Security Council resolution and whose termination has profound implications for the stability of a region which is, arguably, the most important external region for India, had been terminated so wantonly.

With his ill-considered actions, Donald Trump may trigger a war which could be more destructive than the American invasion of  Iraq in 2003. Credit: Reuters

The issue is not about Iran’s right to the peaceful uses of atomic energy, but about ensuring that it does not develop nuclear weapons. The JCPOA is not some treaty that is under negotiation, but as the Russian statement pointed out, it is “a key multilateral agreement approved by the 2015 UN Security Council Resolution 2231.” In other words, it has the force of international law.

The US which frequently swears by the “rule of law” now says it is “withdrawing”, not “violating” the JCPOA because it goes against its strategic interests. Mind you, this is a treaty in which the then Obama Administration was the lead negotiator. National security adviser John Bolton declared, on May 8, that “any nation reserves the right to correct a past mistake.” To this end he cited the Bush administration’s withdrawal from the 1972 ABM Treaty, which he said the Americans abandoned not because the Russians were violating it, “but because the global strategic environment had changed.” The Trump administration earlier withdrew from the Paris climate accord, presumably because it does not serve its strategic interests.

This, of course, is a catch-all which can justify China trashing the arbitration award on the South China Sea under UNCLOS in 2016, or any future Indian decision to scrap the Indus Waters Treaty of 1960, or for the Iranians to simply walk out of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty as the North Koreans did in 2003.

Everyone else – the Europeans, the Chinese and even the UN watchdog IAEA–  says Iran is conforming to its obligations there. But what the US is saying is that not only must Iran implement the letter of the JCPOA, which seeks to prevent them from developing nuclear weapons, but must also meet other demands made by the US, Israel, Saudi Arabia and all their allies, as though it is a defeated nation. So it must not have ballistic missiles, it must not support insurgents in other countries – even while the US, the Saudis, Emiratis and Saudis are free to do so. Israel, of course, can do what it likes. It can possess nuclear weapons, ballistic missiles and militarily occupy another state and repress its people. In short, the US wants to decide who is going to be a power in the Middle East by dictating the manner in which countries can arm themselves.

As of now, according to Bolton, sanctions come into effect immediately insofar as new contracts are concerned. As for the older ones, they need to be phased out between three to six months. There is little doubt that the US action will create a great deal of needless turmoil and possibly, war. It is bound to give Russia and China greater room in the region. Europe is in a dilemma, even though it supports the JCPOA and has criticised the American “withdrawal”, the reality is that its exports to Iran – worth $400 billion – are dwarfed by the $18 trillion worth of goods and services it sells to the US every year.

China has shielded Iran from the effects of previous rounds of sanctions, and there is little doubt that it will continue to do so now. Not many know that Beijing has had an active presence in Iran for the past 30 years. Iran has been the largest recipient of Chinese foreign assistance in the 2001-2014 period, some $143 billion. China is Iran’s biggest economic partner and customer of oil. It is playing a major role in aiding Iran’s oil exploration and infrastructure construction. Xi Jinping was the first visitor to Tehran when sanctions were lifted in 2016 and the decision taken to raise bilateral trade to $600 billion in 30 years from a figure of around $40 billion today.

China is a major supplier of weapons to Tehran and has helped set up its military-industrial sector, including the establishments that fabricate missiles. But it has also played and continues to play a major role in developing its railway system by building everything from rails to manufacturing wagons. Iran is an important way station in Beijing’s Silk Road Economic Belt route to Europe. As part of this, the first train from Yiwu arrived in Tehran in February 2016; since then several more trains have done the route. A Chinese company is electrifying the railway track between Tehran and Mashad, from where it goes on to Turkmenistan and China. An ambitious project will see the Iranian system link to the Turkish one to carry freight through the Bosporous tunnel to Europe.

Narendra Modi with Hassan Rouhani. India’s bilateral trade is around $13 billion currently and it has committed some $500 million on the Chah Bahar port project .

Where does that leave India ? Between a rock and a hard place. The Persian Gulf region is by far the most important external region for the country. Iran is the closest major source of hydrocarbon energy to the Indian land mass. Iran is India’s third largest supplier of oil after Iraq and Saudi Arabia, prior to the sanctions it was number two. Iran supplied 18.4 million tonnes in the April 2017-January 2018 period and the year before that as much as 27.2 million tonnes.

The issue of oil trade with Iran or the future of Chabahar is not our primary concern, but the very stability of the larger region that provides us over 60% of all our oil, where nine million Indian citizens work and send back $40 billion in remittances from what is the largest single external source.

The regional stability India seeks there is built on carefully nurtured relationships between the various antagonistic powers there — Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Israel and Iran. One of its most important recent pillars was the carefully crafted JCPOA, a measure aimed at normalising Tehran’s relation with the West (and their regional allies) by ensuring that it winds down its capacity for making nuclear weapons.

India’s bilateral trade is around $13 billion currently and it has committed some $500 million on the Chabahar port project and has also said it would fund the $1.6 billion rail link between Chabahar and Zahedan. There are ambitious plans to invest in gas-based fertiliser and other projects in a special economic zone that is planned around Chabahar. But there is little doubt that US sanctions will become a major impediment here.

There is an aspect of India’s relationship with Iran which goes beyond oil and energy. It is related to business opportunities in the country, as well as connectivity schemes through it to Afghanistan and Central Asia via Chabahar and Europe through the International North South Transportation Corridor originating in Bandar Abbas.

Indeed, ties with Iran are important for India’s emergence as the “leading power” that it aspires to be. However, it may soon have to choose between its strategically autonomous goals and those which the Trump administration has in mind for the region.

With his ill-considered action, Donald Trump may trigger a war which could be more destructive than the American invasion of  Iraq in 2003. But almost certainly what it will do is to promote a  major geopolitical shift that could catalyse the political and economic integration of a  vast Eurasian region from Vladivostok to Baghdad and Moscow under Chinese auspices,  rivalling the Mongol empire at its zenith.

The Wire May 12, 2018

Why border dispute will remain a thorn in India-China relations

A lot has been said about the significance of the Wuhan summit and how it will change the texture of the Sino-Indian relationship. According to the Indian press release, it will emerge as “a positive factor for stability amidst current global uncertainties,” and would also be conducive “for the development and prosperity of the region, and will create the conditions for an Asian Century.”

But all this is conditional on the two countries being able to overcome the issues that presently hobble their relationship. None is more significant than the disputed Sino-Indian border. We often hear brave words about how the problem is a leftover from history and how it can be kept aside while the two countries work on their development partnership, but the fact is that the dispute limits their ability to move ahead.

Strategic guidance

The Indian press release at Wuhan said that the two leaders had issued “strategic guidance to their respective militaries” to enhance communications and implement various confidence-building measures (CBMs) and effective management of the border. The Chinese statement was pithy, noting merely that the two sides will strengthen CBMs and enhance communications and cooperation to uphold peace and tranquillity.

Significantly, though, both press releases use the same phrase in referring to the importance of the work of the two special representatives “to seek a fair, reasonable and mutually acceptable settlement” to the border question.

The two immediate fallouts of this have been noted in the Indian media. The first is the decision to set up an India-China hotline at the level of director-general of Military Operations. The second was the set of instructions that have gone out for the army to maintain peace on the border, avoiding excessively aggressive patrolling tactics and to follow the 2005 protocol in dealing with the PLA on the border.

There are some 20-odd places on the Line of Actual Control that mark the Sino-Indian border where the two sides have overlapping claims. Both sides patrol to what they consider is the limit of their border, but in these places since the claims overlap, there are occasions when the patrols meet.

Face-off

For this, the 2005 protocol said that the patrol must conduct what is called a “banner drill”. When patrols meet, they will display the first banner saying, “This is Indian/Chinese territory.” And then, the second banner saying, “Turn around and go back to your side.” This is what the Army terms a “face-off”. Following this, the two sides may seek a border meeting at any of the designated sites.

In recent years, however, this well-choreographed drill had stopped working and confrontation between patrols had become more violent with fisticuffs and shoving becoming the norm. This is the reason that last week, following a meeting between NSA Ajit Doval and Army chief Bipin Rawat, orders were issued to tone down the attitude and go by the 2005 protocol book.

Now, there is also talk of coordinated patrolling of those areas, meaning that both sides inform each other when their patrol is going to visit one of those sites. The other side can simply avoid sending its own patrol in that period to avoid even this face off.

Urgent matter

The resolution of the border dispute, too, is something that needs to be looked at urgently. Incidentally, shortly after he came to power, speaking at the sidelines of the BRICS summit in Durban on March 27, 2013, Xinhua cited Xi Jinping saying, “China and India should improve and make good use of the mechanism of special representatives to strive for a fair, rational solution framework acceptable to both sides as soon as possible.”

A few months later former PM Manmohan Singh gave the same message to Premier Li Keqiang who was visiting India in May 2013 after the Depsang face-off. In June 2013, Foreign Minister Wang Yi said during a visit to New Delhi in June 2014, “Through years of negotiation, we have come to an agreement on the basics of a boundary agreement, and we are prepared to reach a final settlement.”

But a month earlier, when PM Modi sought to push the Chinese side to move on the settlement in his visit to China in 2014, he came up against a wall. The Chinese were not even willing to move on an earlier agreement to clarify the Line of Actual Control.

That is where the situation lies right now.

To expect that CBMs alone will be able to help China and India to build a strategic partnership is to live in a fool’s paradise. If they want to move ahead along the lines indicated in Wuhan, they need to settle their border dispute first, not set it aside as they have been doing in recent decades.

Mail Today May 7, 2018

Tribute And Return Gifts?

The PM’s new approach to China may herald a return to India’s traditional realist stance, which would strengthen our position if followed through

There is a lesson to be learnt from the Wuhan summit: wishes are not horses. Those who thought that with Narendra Modi as prime minister, New Delhi would  look Beijing in the eye as an equal, now realise that this promise was, just like various other things, a jumla.  

After four years of ups and downs, including a period in which the armies of the two countries faced off in a region contested by China and Bhutan, India has taken a step back and wants to reconstruct its relationship with Beijing on the basis of pragmatism, recognising  that even while India has issues with China on its border and in its relationship with Pakistan, a policy that ­emp­hasises confrontation over constructive engagem­ent will not work, especially given the asymmetry of military and economic power ­between the two countries.

The recent summit in Wuhan saw some ­wonderful optics that come with Modi visits everywhere. Xi played up to it by giving Modi the feeling that he was special. This was billed as a meeting where there wouldn’t be a formal ­outcome, but there were delegation-level dis­cussions—and their respective press releases outline the direction that the two leaders want to give to the relationship.

Given the careful preparations for the visit, which began in the wake of the BRICS summit in Xiamen last September and saw a flurry of meetings between officials at the level of the NSA, foreign secretary, various ministers and their Chinese counterparts thereafter, it would be highly unusual if some of the outcomes had not been negotiated in advance by the two sides.

The Indians have plainly front-loaded some of them. We visibly backed away from the Dalai Lama after embracing him in the last couple of years. Instead of what his bhakts would have preferred, Modi has assured the Chinese that there will be no Indian military intervention in the Maldives. Third, after having initiated and embraced a quasi naval alliance with the US, Japan and Australia, New Delhi has excluded Canberra from the latest iteration of the Malabar exercise. What the Chinese put on the table is not yet clear. Hopefully, they agreed to ­concessions on Doklam, Pakistan and the Indian Ocean Region (IOR).  If we have not worked out something in exchange for our actions, more fools we.Neither side is expected to back off from what each considers its vital interests. But the aim of the Wuhan exercise is to work out ways in which they can give and take in other areas.

In 2013, candidate Modi was critical of the UPA’s handling of the border and criticised it for its weakness in dealing with China in the Depsang face off.  At the same time, he looked up to China as a country that India could do business with to advance its own economic prospects.

But Prime Minister Modi’s policies took many twists and turns. In 2014, he received President Xi Jinping in India, feting him at the Sabarmati riverfront in Ahmedabad and in New Delhi. But right through the visit, there was a serious, if ­inexplicable, standoff between the PLA and the Indian army in Chumur.

In May 2015, when Modi went to China, he ­directly broached the idea of a border settlement with Xi in his one-on-one meeting with him in Xian. Xi was taken aback since the subject was not on the agenda. Modi persisted, but got nowhere with the protocol-conscious Chinese. Speaking at Beijing’s prestigious Tsinghua University later, Modi said that to realise the “extraordinary ­potential” of the Sino-Indian partnership, “we must try to settle the boundary question quickly.” In the interim, there was a need for the two sides to clarify the location of the Line of Actual Control that marks the border.

He also pitched India’s candidature for the UN Security Council and the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) to the Chinese. But while Modi’s focus on the border was correct, Indian diplomacy got needlessly entangled with China on the issues of the NSG and Masood Azhar, both prestige issues, rather than subjects of substance.  

The Chinese had other ideas, and they shocked the Indians by saying that the dispute on the border was only in the east where they were waiting for New Delhi to make concessions. They also began to publicly back Pakistan’s candidature for the NSG. But tin-eared Modi didn’t get the message. In June 2016, on the sidelines of the SCO summit in Tashkent, he demanded and got a one-on-one meeting with Xi, but instead of foc­using on the real issues, he hectored him on the need to support India’s NSG membership. The bem­used Chinese did not. And then came 2017, which was, of course, the year of Doklam.

It’s 2018 now, and it is Modi who has had to rec­onsider his approach. Given the record of the past three years, one positive development is that his current style is considerably more refined and sophisticated than it was, and he is not shying away from course corrections.

The Chinese should not mistake this for a sign of Indian weakness. If anything, New Delhi has reverted to its traditional stance of dealing with Beijing through realist lenses. And these tell India that there is a growing economic and military asymmetry between the two countries which cannot but impact their geo­political interactions in South Asia and Indian Ocean Region. Instead of trying to tackle China head on, there is a need for subtlety, skilful dip­lomacy and getting your economic act together. For the present and near future, this requires a mental shift in India’s posture and a retrenchment and reorientation of its policies which, if done, will actually strengthen its position.  

India is uncommonly gifted by geography and possesses heft that comes from its size, population and economic potential. Its loud opposition to the Belt and Road Initiative does not bode well for Beijing. In the longer term, New Delhi has the capacity to seriously disrupt Chinese goals in the IOR, especially if it teams up with the US and Japan—and the Chinese know thisThe IOR is the most important external region for China.  No matter how Beijing games it, and no matter how many bases and carrier groups it has, New Delhi has advantages that cannot easily be neutralised.

A history of the relationship between the two countries makes it obvious that the one key element that is lacking between them is trust. Both of them recognise this and feel that “strategic communications”—high-level meetings like that in Wuhan—will help. They certainly will. But, equally important is to recognise that they have real problems— the disputed border and the use of third parties to offset the other (read Pakistan in the case of China and US for India).

For both countries, though, there is an entire alternative framework that is also available. But this is provided they can reset the relations in the manner articulated in Wuhan. Besides peace on the border and strategic and decisional autonomy, the two sides could build a balanced and stable relationship. With their sprawling, surging economies, there are a range of complementarities which could generate synergy to transform them and their vast neighbourhood. Both have connectivity projects in Iran, Myanmar, Ban­gladesh and Nepal, and linking these could have a transformational impact. And we are not even speaking of Pakistan, which is a separate and more difficult category here.

But at the end of the day, all this may be nothing but a short-term daydream intended to get Modi through to his re-election and stave off the American pressure on Xi. But the logic of this reset will not go away. Look at it any way and you will see that a zero-sum model of relationship only leads to, at best, a cul-de-sac, and at worst to a full-blown disaster.

Outlook May 14, 2018

India should cherry pick the Belt and Road Initiative

India needs to get off its high horse on the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). It is a Chinese project, funded and largely executed by China in third countries.

True, New Delhi has the right and duty to object to the project including what we call Pakistan Occupied Kashmir. But in reality, this is a  pro forma complaint, since the road there between China and Pakistan has been operational since the 1970s. We have since has many occasions to talk to Pakistan on a variety of areas, but the Karakoram Highway has never been on the agenda.

Chinese motives in investing in Gilgit-Baltistan do not have to do with their support for Pakistan, but their self interest in stabilizing the area which is proximate to their troubled province of Xinjiang. The Pakistani role in that area has been dubious, to say the least. The military has encouraged migration of Sunnis Islamists into that area so as to alter its sectarian balance. That process has resulted in a great deal of tension and even riots.

As a sovereign country, New Delhi had the right to boycott the Belt and Road Forum last year and campaign against the scheme. But it does sound a bit condescending when we warn other countries not to fall into the Chinese debt trap. They, too, are sovereign, presumably they are run by mature people and if they choose to fall to Beijing’s wiles, there is nothing India can do.

India’s official statement of May 13, 2017 boycotting the Belt Road Forum was full of self-serving remedies like the need for connectivity projects to be based on “recognized international norms, good governance, rule of law, openness, transparency and equality.” Further, they should not create unsustainable debt for communities and must develop skill and technology for communities.

Who is going to decide that these norms are being observed ? Certainly not a country that has officially criticized the project. This is best left to development banks and financial institutions to warn recipient countries. This is what the IMF and the ADB have done. At a conference in China IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde warned that the BRI could put a huge burden on countries which have a massive public debt to start with. Likewise, the ADB has cautioned against unsustainable borrowing to fund infrastructure projects which could get countries into a debt trap. But neither the IMF, nor ADB have all that great record in forecasting developments.

Actually, what India could do is offer practical alternatives, instead of these catch-all nostrums.  But since we lack the money to even develop our own shoddy infrastructure, it is unlikely that we can come up with funds to compete with China on that score.

This is not to say that the BRI doesn’t have problems. It does. A Washington-based think tank, Center for Global Development has recently reported that 23 nations are at a risk of debt problems because of financing associated with the BRO, eight of high risk category, they said were Pakistan, Maldives, Mongolia, Tajikstan Kyrgyzstan and Laos. IN all likelihood, China is fully aware of the situation and has no problems in continuing to offer these countries loans because it serves its geopolitical ends to create dependencies on its periphery.

There have been brave words by the Americans and the Japanese about coming up with alternate financing models. But nothing concrete is on the table. The Japanese run an impressive Overseas Development Assistance (ODA) model, but even they do not have the resources or the energy to rival the scale and scope of the BRI which extends from Europe, to the Middle-East, Central Asia, South-east Asia, Africa and the Indian Ocean.  

One of the intriguing possibilities arising from the Wuhan summit is the possible of some form of Indian participation in the BRI. Since the BRI is a grab bag of Chinese investments and development projects it is just a matter of labelling.

Following the Wuhan summit, Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Kong Xuanyou, who is the counterpart of Foreign Secretary Vijay Gokhale,  said that there were no differences with India on the issue of inter-connectivity. When it comes to connectivity India does not exclude this cooperation. He noted that it was not a big issue as to whether India had to accept “the expression Belt and Road initiative.”

For their part, the Chinese seem quite willing to accommodate India to the extent they can. The report that India and China will develop cooperative projects in Afghanistan could be the thin end of the wedge. This opens up the possibility of other “third country projects”, say in Nepal or Bangladesh. For the moment Pakistan  is out because it is not willing to open its borders to India.

In any case, there is no such thing as a “membership” of BRI and it is not necessary to express official support for it to do business with China. And truth to tell China-India business ties are actually booming.

What New Delhi needs to do is to cherry-pick the BRI and look for business opportunities that can be fruitfully exploited. It can also adopt a more constructive attitude and engage Beijing in a discussion over the objectives of the BRI schemes in areas of its own interests. Taking a hard-line is not going to achieve much, but a lot could be gained through old-fashioned give and take kind of diplomacy.

Greater Kashmir May 7, 2018

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