Theatre of the Absurd
The defense secretary’s entreaties to the US admit India’s inability to handle China
Sushant Singh | 21 March, 2024
The Chinese president, Xi Jinping, and the Indian prime minister, Narendra Modi, during the BRICS Summit in China, in September 2017. KENZABURO FUKUHARA / AFP / Getty Images
In 2017, Indian and Chinese soldiers had a 72-day long standoff inside Bhutan which ended with an announcement of disengagement by both sides. While the Indian soldiers returned to their post by stepping back a few hundred metres, the Chinese stepped back by an equal distance to stay in the Doklam plateau. Satellite images later captured the military infrastructure—roads, watchtowers, bunkers, helipads, accommodation, warehouses—built by the Chinese in the area post the disengagement. The Indian military had moved in to stop the Chinese from making a road to Jampheri Ridge. The ridge is strategically important because it overlooks the Siliguri Corridor, the narrow strip of land connecting north-eastern India to the rest of the country. The Chinese built a road hugging the Amu Chu river—which runs close to the Doklam plateau—towards Jampheri Ridge, even though they are yet to reach it. Since 2020, while Thimphu has been constantly engaging with Beijing, New Delhi’s ties with the latter have plummeted. In this time, India’s responses to the border crisis—if they can even be called responses—have become increasingly incomprehensible. Indian statements instead give the impression that there is little sense to be had in New Delhi’s China strategy.
In 2021, China and Bhutan signed a memorandum of understanding on a “three-step roadmap,” to expedite their bilateral border negotiations. Last October, they agreed on guidelines for a joint technical team to delimit and demarcate the boundary. Then Bhutanese prime minister Lotay Tshering emphasised last year that there were no “real differences between Bhutan and China” and that one more meeting “while we are in office will clinch the issue.” He also told the media, “Theoretically, how can Bhutan not have bilateral relations with China? The question is when and in what manner.”
Lotay is no longer in office, having lost the election earlier this year, but his successor, Tshering Tobgay, has stuck to the same line. China has emerged as Bhutan’s biggest trading partner, surpassing India. While the Chinese power corporation is involved in major hydel projects in the country, the Chinese railway company is exploring railway connections through a link between two major Tibetan towns, Lhasa and Gyantse. The Modi government recently proposed the construction of a motorable road connecting Tawang in Arunachal Pradesh and Gauhati in Assam through Bhutan, but Thimphu is not enthusiastic about the proposal until its border with China is demarcated. Bhutan does not even acknowledge, let alone object to, the construction of Chinese well-off villages in its territory.
At the end of the Doklam crisis, the Indian prime minister, Narendra Modi, sought an informal summit with China’s president, Xi Jinping, to do a China reset. Two such meetings were held—one at Wuhan in 2018 and the other at Chennai in 2019. Both leaders agreed to provide strategic guidance to their respective militaries but to little effect, as the events of 2020 were to prove. In June that year, India and China recorded the death of Indian soldiers in the Galwan valley in Ladakh. These were the first military casualties on the Line of Actual Control in forty-five years.
All this while, many Indian analysts had continued to hail the government and the military for standing up to China, that too inside Bhutan. Beijing saw it differently. In a 2017 analysis of the Doklam crisis, the PLA’s Western Theatre Command asserted that the aim was “to make India succumb without a confrontation between the two armies,” adding that the approach served lessons “for future struggles.”
Beijing has learned lessons from Doklam and applied them well to the Ladakh border crisis. And the Modi government, by no longer asking for a return to status quo as it existed before May 2020, or restoration of full patrolling rights for Indian soldiers, has succumbed to Chinese designs. The former foreign secretary Vijay Gokhale argued that “hardening global perceptions about Beijing might create opportunities for fresh bilateral approach,” foreseeing a new political move after the Indian general elections. Since Doklam, others have echoed the call for a “China reset” as well, but, as recently as February this year, the defence secretary Giridhar Aramane hailed India for standing up to China “on almost all fronts.” Doing the same thing and expecting a different result may be a definition of insanity, but with its timidity and fear of escalation, the Modi government has cornered itself into a box of poor options against China. Its quiver is full of broken arrows.
The answer lies in Jaishankar’s reasoning for the Modi government not making any aggressive move against China, which he offered on a podcast last year. “Look, they are the bigger economy. What am I going to do? As a smaller economy, I am going to pick up a fight with the bigger economy? It is not a question of being reactionary, it’s a question of common sense.” Pakistan has a similar imbalance vis-à-vis India, and it has chosen to equalise it by a threat of nuclear weapons, by use of asymmetric warfare and by borrowing power from countries like China and Saudi Arabia, having forged alliances with them. Jaishankar’s common sense demands that New Delhi will have to do something similar vis-à-vis Beijing. For reasons of global censure, India is unlikely to indulge in nuclear sabre-rattling against China. The military component of the so-called Tibet card no longer exists to provide viable means of waging asymmetric warfare against China. Borrowing power from other more powerful countries is the only thing the Modi government is left with.
Speaking at the Raisina Dialogue last month, Jaishankar even acknowledged this need to balance the power differential with China by involving external actors. He argued that “mind games” will be played by Beijing to suggest that the issue is “just between the two of us.” “The other 190 odd countries do not exist in our relationship. That will be the mind game which will be played. I do not think we should play it,” he said. “Because if there are other factors out there in the world which can be harnessed by me to get better terms on an equilibrium, then why should I forgo that right?” The minister did not single out any of the “190 odd countries” explicitly, but India is evidently looking towards the United States.
Last month, Aramane conceded that “the one thing which helped us quickly” during the China border crisis in Ladakh in 2020 “was the intelligence, the situational awareness which the US government and the US equipment could help us with.” He argued that “the strong resolve that we support each other in the face of a common threat is going to be of a critical importance to us,” going on to plead that “we expect that our friend, US, will be there in case we need their support.” The plea was as much an admission of India’s inability to tackle China on its own as it was of the help the United States had provided to India in 2020. It gives rise to fears in New Delhi, such as the one articulated by Jaishankar, that US-China competition is “healthy,” and much better than a compact that would squeeze out India.
The Modi government has made it amply clear, and the decision-makers in Beijing would certainly be aware, that India does not have any real leverage over China, other than through some rhetoric and by harassment of Chinese firms. India’s desire to decouple from China has yielded no results, with the minister Rajeev Chandrasekhar telling the Financial Times that Chinese investment would be welcome. In fact, Chinese investment is believed to be coming into India via third countries like Singapore, with the government looking the other way. After taking a hard line on visa for Chinese technicians, the Modi government has been forced to concede to demand from Indian manufacturers who cannot install machinery. India’s assembly of mobile phones remains dependent on Chinese imports and 89.4 percent of India’s imports of laptops, tablets and computers in December last year were from China. Indian suppliers of solar cells to the United States are being questioned by the US Customs Department for exporting banned Chinese products.
Last month, the Modi government asked a group of think tanks to study the proposal for a BRICS currency, which is likely to be dominated by the Chinese Yuan. Private Indian importers of Russian crude oil are already paying for parts of their cargo in the Chinese Yuan. To be fair, India is not alone in its struggle to deal with the industrial behemoth that China has become. The Pentagon’s first-ever national defense industrial strategy, released in January, warned that China “became the global industrial powerhouse in many key areas—from shipbuilding to critical minerals to microelectronics—that vastly exceeds the capacity of not just the United States, but the combined output of our key European and Asian allies as well.” But the United States, unlike India, does not have China sitting on its territories which is refusing to concede a return to the situation as it existed before May 2020.
The statements by Jaishankar and Aramane will also feed into the narrative that has been gaining ground inside Beijing, which portrays New Delhi as not having agency of its own in the bilateral ties. This line of thought considers the Modi government to be acting against China at the behest of Washington DC. “Take me to your master” works well when the aliens say it in sci-fi movies, but it would be very insulting for India to have Beijing suggest something similar. Beijing still does not have an ambassador in Delhi, the sixteen-month gap since the last appointment being the longest since 1976, when diplomatic ties were re-established between the two countries. The delay is supposedly at the Indian end, and it could end up creating an ominous situation during these troubled times. After 21 rounds of Corps Commander talks and 28 rounds of diplomatic engagement through the Working Mechanism for Consultation and Coordination on India–China Border Affairs—which was set up in 2012 to enable information exchange between the two countries—there is little sign of any quick solution of the border crisis in Eastern Ladakh. Not only are the two countries unable to agree to a joint statement—agreeing to disagree—the Chinese military spokesperson has denied the Indian officials’ claim that “the new round of China-India Corps Commander Level Meeting did not make any progress.”
The annual threat assessment of the United States intelligence community, released by the Director of National Intelligence in mid-March, warned that there was risk of an armed conflict between India and China. India and China “are maintaining large troop deployments, and sporadic encounters between opposing forces risk miscalculation and escalation into armed conflict,” the report said. Even Jaishankar conceded earlier this month that the situation on the border is “very tense and dangerous.” By contrast, a few days later, General Manoj Pande, the army chief, characterised the overall situation on the LAC as “stable, but sensitive.” After Modi visited Arunachal Pradesh, the foreign ministry in Beijing threatened that such “moves will only complicate the boundary question and disrupt the situation in the border areas between the two countries.” The Chinese defence ministry reiterated the threat, saying that India should “stop taking any moves that complicate the border issue and earnestly maintain peace and stability in the border areas.”
New Delhi limited its reaction to asserting Indian claim over Arunachal Pradesh, by arguing that China was “repeating baseless arguments” and making “absurd claims” over the border state but did not respond to the threat held out by Beijing. Meanwhile, General Anil Chauhan, the chief of defence staff, has acknowledged that “the unsettled borders with China and the rise of China will remain the most formidable challenge that India and the Indian armed forces will face in the foreseeable future.” That deduction is elementary—more Dr Watson than Sherlock Holmes. But there is, as their creator Arthur Conan Doyle wrote, “nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact.”
To cut through deception, we ought to ask one simple question: Does India even have a strategy to deal with China? In February, the Mumbai police released a pigeon held for eight months on suspicion of spying for China. The probe concluded that the bird was no Chinese agent of espionage, but a disoriented Taiwanese racing bird that had lost its way. China clearly has far more sophisticated tools of espionage than pigeons, and the absurdity of arresting a pigeon for eight months on suspicions of being a Chinese spy should not be lost on anyone. When you do not have a cogent and coherent plan to deal with a strategic adversary like China, the vacuum is bound to be filled by the theatre of the absurd. Now it is the racing pigeon from Taiwan, but in June 2020, it was Modi with his claim that “Na koi hamari seema mein ghus aaya hai, na hi koi ghusa hua hai”—No one crossed our border and neither is anyone still there. If that is his China strategy, India and Indians better be worried.
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Source:
The Caravan
