Chinese checkers

The Chinese national emblem and flags are displayed above the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, China | Representational image | Photo: Giulia Marchi | Bloomberg

Li Peng should consider himself lucky, he had only the customary Tibetan protestors to greet him on arrival. This time, he could as well have had FICCI, CII, ASSOCHAM and the other “Chinese toys are coming” scaremongers messing up the red carpet – and Delhi police would have had a tougher time thrashing and teargassing them than the Tibetans. But since Li Peng must have been well briefed on the new wave of corporate Sinophobia, he could be wondering what it is about the Chinese that gets the Indians fleeing in fright so quickly. And that is not just in reference to 1962 when a whole division-plus of our army, in fortified defences, fled without a real firefight.

The debate on whether our defence minister called China our enemy number one or likely threat number one is irrelevant. In the collective Indian psyche, China has somehow been our fear number one. It is difficult to explain, leave alone justify, this fear – even loathing – of not just China but all yellow races. They are by no means ten feet tall. They may be able to look the world in the eye now but they’ve been victims of colonialism, invasions and depredations as much as we have been. Yet, we find it easier to relate to the white man who did that to both our countries in recent centuries than to our Chinese neighbours.

Barring the relatively short Buddhist interregnum, we have had a hard time reaching out to fellow Asians to our east. Over the centuries our lifestyles, culture, language and even social attitudes have found much more in common with the West than with the East. It could possibly be because the 19th century Indian elites learnt to discourse in English and failed to reach out to nationalities closer to home that did not understand that language at all. Nehru was perhaps the only one of our great leaders who was at least fascinated by China. But even this was more patronising than positive. If he was the leader of the post-colonial, developing world, it was obviously his burden to provide leadership and light to the Chinese and he probably expected Zhou Enlai to complete the great non-aligned quartet led by him (already including Nasser and Tito).

The history of his engagement with the Chinese, and world leaders on “behalf” of the Chinese, clearly underlines this patronising attitude. According to the declassified minutes of his meeting with Eisenhower, Nehru was impressing upon him to engage with the Chinese as if communism did not matter. Communism, he said, would die its own death. From his point of view, China would then join the group of the non-aligned and thus automatically, and gratefully, submit to Nehru’s, and India’s, moral leadership. This, more than the military miscalculation, explains the extent of his disappointment and bitterness in 1962. It wasn’t so much a case of how could they defeat my army so easily. It was more like, how could the Chinese think they could ridicule my and my country’s moral authority so casually?

Quite fascinatingly, while Nehru’s intellect and international exposure persuaded him to patronise the Chinese, his army held them in awe. It had never mentally pictured the Chinese as enemies and, fed as it was on stories of their human wave tactics, cruelty and lack of concern for casualties and Maoist cunning, conceded defeat even before the engagement in Se La and Bomdi La. Veterans of that rout still remember how a desperate army leadership rounded up some ethnic Chinese in Calcutta and put them on display in cages at Calcutta and Siliguri railway stations so troops could see they were not up against super-humans.

The tactics did not work then. It is difficult to see what will work now, so we could at least begin to weigh the possibility that the Chinese are not our natural enemies, at least not in the short run. This is in spite of the fact that they have stayed out of our two and a half wars against Pakistan. Meanwhile we have had more peace and tranquility on our borders with China for three decades than with Bangladesh, Nepal or Bhutan. We have voted at the United Nations along with the Chinese much more often than with the Americans and now a lot of the lentils we have on our dining tables come from China. The Chinese arms sales to Pakistan is a vastly exaggerated problem. With a mere Rs 5,000 crore or so, China accounts for about 2 per cent of the world’s arms exports and is way behind even Israel.

Poor in technology, production values, these (mostly Soviet copies) Chinese weapons are the K-Mart equivalent of cheap Chinese plastic toys. Pakistan is its largest buyer because almost no other country would pay hard currency for such old-tech weapons in large numbers. Pakistanis do so because they are so heavily sanctioned in the West. Today this relationship is more commercial than political. Yet we justify our nuclear programme to the world primarily in terms of the threat from China. Among so many of our decision-makers, there is a sense of inevitability about a future conflict with China. Some of us, therefore, naturally see ourselves as members of some global anti-China alliance, as if the world fears the Chinese as much as we do and as if we, with a few Agnis, will tilt the balance so decisively in favour of these good guys against the new imperialist Chinese.

Sure enough, China can be a likely rival to us but, for that to happen, we have to raise ourselves to the same league economically and in terms of our international stature which, today, will come from our economic indicators as well as our own democratic stability and our ability to resolve conflicts, particularly those to do with our borders, quickly. Today’s world is very bored with border disputes and, as the two major countries which still nurse that legacy, India and China have a lot of work to do.

Our border dispute with China diminishes us, militarily and politically. It compels us to maintain large force levels and then spread them along two fronts. It also distracts us from planning for the real future threat, the economic one. If we are able to somehow put the military competition and the border dispute behind us, we may find the mind space and resources to prepare for the future fight for the markets. Yes, China could be our threat number one, but it is more likely to threaten us with more plastic toys aimed at our markets than Dong Feng missiles zeroing in on Raisina Hill. The way to counter that will be our own software, and value added services, not a half dozen Agnis with Shanghai and Chengdu inscribed on them.