Video Editor: Mohd Ibrahim
Prime Minister Modi, the incurable workaholic, finally took a weekend off in Wuhan, China! He took a boat ride on and lazy walk along the edge of East Lake. He had a relaxed lunch where they laid out Gujarati table mats and served Gujarati delicacies (cooked by Chinese chefs).
President Xi, his host, coaxed Modi to try exotic teas brewed by charming oriental hostesses, telling him how much he had enjoyed watching Bollywood blockbusters like Dangal and Secret Superstar.
It’s being whispered that Modi wanted to sue for a cease fire, at least until the 2019 re-election challenge is behind him. For over two years now, Beijing has thrown a tightening lasso around India’s (chicken) neck, prowling the Indian Ocean with an increasingly sophisticated navy, outwitting us in Maldives, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Myanmar, culminating in the “battle for Bhutan” at Doklam (plus an elevated 425 more LAC transgressions by PLA troops in 2017).
If a few more Doklams were to happen, the right-wing’s carefully nurtured warriors of Twitter/TV jingoism and hate could become a Frankenstein, forcing Modi into a military misadventure which could backfire and cost him the 2019 race. So his was a petition for peace.
But what about President Xi? Why did he “invest a weekend” eating dhokla when he would rather be enjoying his favourite steak? Has China been left on the sidelines of a possible Korean truce? Has China under-estimated the potential economic damage that can be caused by a cavalier policy of punitive American tariffs?
That certainly seems to be the case, given the Chinese scramble to de-escalate a crippling trade war. Now, with the gun-slinging cowboy American President actually pulling the plug on Iran’s nuclear treaty, how will China respond to the severe sanctions that may follow? And what if India is snagged into the “dreaded Quad” of an America-Japan-Australia-India military axis?
Best, therefore, to park India with a “Wuhan palliative” and strain every sinew to tackle the troublesome Mr Trump.
But nobody should deny or discredit the positive spin-off from Wuhan.
The mere fact that China deigned to accord India the exalted status of an equal – “backbone of the world’s multi-polarisation and economic globalisation” – is a huge win. But beware China’s clever ambivalence. Remember what happened immediately after both the countries won freedom from colonial rule in the late 1940s.
In the earliest days of Indian independence, relations between the two countries were chummy. Nehru, who was infatuated with what he called ‘the other great country of Asia’, became one of the first leaders to recognise Communist China as a sovereign nation after the 1949 revolution.
In fact, the relationship in those days was colloquially characterised as ‘Hindi Chini bhai bhai’, or ‘Indians and Chinese are brothers’. Despite US pressure, Nehru refused to implicate China as the aggressor in the Korean War. And when China overran Tibet in 1950, he essentially accepted Beijing’s claims as legitimate.
In the 1954 Panchsheel agreement, India somewhat paradoxically agreed to recognise Tibet as part of China, if Beijing would honour Tibet’s autonomy. Doubts about China began to plague Nehru by 1956. Around the same time, the Chinese were discovered to be building a road between Tibet and Xinjiang through Indian-controlled Aksai Chin, territory that soon began appearing on Chinese maps as part of China.
Nehru’s faith in the Chinese began to falter… the prime minister said he didn’t ‘trust the Chinese one bit’ and found them ‘arrogant, devious, hypocritical and thoroughly unreliable’. All of it ended in the humiliating 1962 war!
I don’t mean to be sensational. The chances of war, especially now that India is a nuclear power with an infinitely stronger army, are remote. But one thing remains as true as it was in the 1950s/60s: China respects only power, and India must buttress its strengths, either by itself or through alliances, if it wants China to take it seriously, all the feel-good stuff at Wuhan notwithstanding.
Else, the return of the bhai bhai (brotherly love) slogan can be treacherous.
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