By Sanjay Kapoor Delhi
In 1969, the Chinese and Soviet troops fought a short but bloody war near River Ussuri in China’s northeast. Although ceasefire was declared after USSR’s Premier Kosygin stopped by at Beijing and met with his counterpart, Chou en Lai, there was little love and trust left between the two communist powers. The US, as subsequent events proved, was the clear beneficiary of this rupture as it began to woo China in right earnest. The efforts of the US were helped by the views of Chinese leader Mao Ze Dong who believed that a relationship with Washington would provide security against the enemy at the doorstep (Soviet Union).
The growing mistrust between the USSR and China presented an opportunity to Henry Kissinger and President Richard Nixon to make a trip to Beijing and shake hands with Mao in 1972. It was a week that changed the world. This relationship played a major role in limiting the arc of influence of communism in the world and led to the final collapse of Soviet Union. India was a casualty of this historic handshake for 30 long years, until Washington made a strategic shift a few years ago. It was important to recount the River Ussuri face-off between Soviet Union and China to lend perspective to the ties between Beijing and Washington, which run deep and are differently layered.
It was this strategic shift by a pragmatic Chinese leadership that helped change the face of their country. Its phenomenal rise would not have been possible without getting access to its West’s technology and its markets. The relationship with US helped China to not only keep Soviet Union at bay, but also prevented regional players like India from realising their own potential. Washington began to woo the Chinese long before the Ussuri face-off.
They allowed the communist State to go nuclear so that they could stand up to the Soviets. After Chinese tested the bomb, they put a freeze on any other country trying to get into the exclusive club thereby denying India to go nuclear. There is plenty of evidence to show that India was peeved at the way Chinese nuclear ambitions were accommodated by Washington spoiling the balance of power in Asia. India had real concerns as they were invaded by the Chinese in 1962 in which they were forced to cede large tracts of land in Aksai Chin.
According to George Perkovich, “From late 1964 through 1967— Indian officials vaguely and ambivalently sought security guarantees, first from the West and then through the United Nations, to protect against possible Chinese nuclear threats. Washington, London and Moscow were unreceptive.” Later, when Indira Gandhi decided to test the ‘nuclear device’ at Pokhran in 1974 it was an attempt to tell the ‘United States, China and the Soviet Union that they could not impinge on India’s autonomy’. Twenty four years later, India again exploded a nuclear bomb in 1998. At that time, the Indian government categorically told the US and the domestic constituency that the bomb was meant to counter the Chinese threat.
The US government under President Bill Clinton was upset with New Delhi for keeping it in the dark about its intentions, but persuasive diplomacy of the then foreign minister, Jaswant Singh, helped in ending India’s isolation. Clinton’s visit to India provided the first inkling of new thinking in Washington towards India. President George W Bush lent greater energy to the India policy, which many began to see as an attempt of the US to create a counterpoint to China. Is there any truth in this?
This question was raised to the present World Bank President, Robert Zoellick, in 2005, when he was the deputy secretary of state in the US government: “We are too interconnected to try to hold China at arm’s length, hoping to promote other powers in Asia at its expense,” he said. The Indian strategic community, which is ecstatic about the growing ties with the US and the possibilities of stealing its affections away from China, should bear in mind that Washington is too involved with Beijing to give up its embrace of the dragon. The US does not see its growth in relationship with India as a zero sum game, but on the contrary a more nuanced extension of its China policy.
We have to return to Zoellick again to get a sense of how the US perceives China and how they expect their relationship to evolve in the coming days. A better understanding of this relationship would help in understanding how and where India stands in this dynamic trilateral scenario. In his significant Asia Society speech in 2004, Zoellick sought to lend perspective to the fears expressed in the US and other parts of the world about how China’s rising economic power impacts the world and the shifting power relations.
He recalled the classic insight drawn by Thucydides in his work on the Peloponnesian War. That clash, the historian concluded, had been caused by the “growth of Athenian power and the fear this created in Sparta”. He also mentioned the case of a rising Germany that had to fight two world wars before it could be accommodated in the new European order without threatening its neighbours. The US endeavour, according to Zoellick, has been to work with China to integrate its rising power into regional and global security, economic, and political arrangements. For its part, China warrants respect, but needs to be careful not to trigger fears.
The Zoellick formulation on China may seem a bit patronising but it provides ample evidence of how Washington wants to address the China question. Integrating China to regional and global arrangements has taken different forms in Asia and rest of the world. “We have been urging India to have better ties with China. And we are glad that the trade between the two countries is so healthy,” told a US official on condition of anonymity to this reporter in Washington. India’s ‘Look East’ policy initiated during the days of PV Narasimha Rao in 1991 and carried forward by subsequent governments has been an outcome of gentle prodding from Washington.
The major endeavour of the US is to make China behave and act as a “responsible power” that fits with their foreign policy. Support to India in terms of giving civilian nuclear technology is meant to send a message to Beijing to behave. China, which realises the implications of closer ties with the US and how India could indeed become a regional power, responds to Washington more seriously. The US is working on the same logic that works in ‘a ménage e trios’ where in a ‘one man and two woman’ situation the man can manipulate both the partners by distributing affections unevenly.
The purpose of this exercise was to disabuse the notion ecstatically discussed in the strategic community in India that the US-India relationship would help fix hegemonistic China for good. It would also help in clearing the air about the Left parties helping the Chinese by putting the spoke in the civilian deal by reiterating that the US and China have a good working relationship on a lot of key global issues including North Korea and Sudan. Therefore, they don’t need the support of Prakash Karat and AB Bardhan to give another spin to it. India, which has to engage with the US, should take a more informed view of where its national interests lie rather than allowing itself to be used by others to attain some larger objective.
(Cover Photo by Rod Ramsell on Unsplash)