Can China be India’s friends, or for that matter anyone’s? Or can India trust China? These questions have roiled India’s China relations for over five decades and India seems not to have learnt the bitter lesson that the answer to both questions is a resounding “no”. From “Hindi-Chini bhai bhai” to the “Wuhan spirit” and the promise of an “Asian Century”—it seems to be a case of, the more things change the more they remain the same. For every time India has believed China will not do anything confrontational, in accordance with the spirit of “brotherly relations”, China has done exactly that. At a time when the world, including China, is reeling under the coronavirus pandemic, Delhi believed that Beijing would not try to change the status quo along the Line of Actual Control. But that’s exactly what it did and this time with heavy military deployment. But of course this is not the 1960s and if there is one thing that has changed from then is India’s resolve not to give in or give up. As well as the building of infrastructure by the Indian side under the direction of the current political leadership, right up to the areas near LAC, which obviously has unnerved the Chinese, one of the reasons behind these latest incursions. The only positive to come out of this is that the mechanism to defuse border tensions seems to be working, but until China reverts to status quo ante, India should not de-escalate. The bottom line is, all hopes of China and India together ensuring the dawn of the Asian Century are freezing into a coma on the icy plains of Ladakh. If this is China’s way of teaching India a lesson for having “big power ambitions”, and getting “too close” to the US, China needs to realise that India would not have got into any strategic partnership with like-minded democracies if China was not threatening it from all sides. The Asian Century can be built only if China treated India with respect and not saw it as a challenger to its big power status. India is not a threat to China, has never been, but since an “insecure” China sees India as a threat—and now increasingly as an American proxy—it wants it to be a subregional power, as it competes with the United States for global superpower status. India has its independent foreign policy and its own strategic interests and these are not served when China props up the terrorist state of Pakistan to breathe down India’s neck.
China is flooding Pakistan with arms and PLA’s coordination with the Pakistan military is increasing to the extent that a Pakistani ISI officer has been given a “posting” in the Joints Staff Department of China’s Central Military Commission (CMC). It is said that the PLA is so close to the Rawalpindi GHQ that it is as if the Pakistani generals who are writing China’s India policy. It also does not build confidence when China uses salami-slicing tactics against India—by incrementally grabbing territory to change status quo along the LAC. In fact there is almost nothing about China that inspires confidence—certainly not its bellicose behaviour with its neighbours; its rapacious debt-trap diplomacy; the way it goes around killing democracy, for instance, in Hong Kong; the way it hides information; and certainly not its aggressive behaviour when asked for accountability for the current global pandemic unleashed from its territory. As for India, at the most it can try to manage its differences with China, just as the standoff along the border is being managed. But since it is China, and whatever be India’s trade relations with China, India will have to be on its guard. Always.