By Tsering Tsomo
Marked largely by economic ties, relations between India and China are relatively better than the icy sixties and seventies. Figures foretell a bright future. According to Chinese data, bilateral trade in 2008 rose to US$51.8 billion – that is a 10-fold increase from $5 billion in 2002. Since 2000, over 100 Indian companies, among them banks and law firms, have set up shop in China investing well over $400 million. China’s contractual investments in India, according to Asia Times Online, were almost $11 billion between Jan. and Oct. 2008.
Indeed establishing warm relations between the two most populous countries in the world deserves support and encouragement. Even His Holiness the Dalai Lama has said many times that despite its many flaws China should not be isolated and should be engaged actively by other countries. But the thaw visible in trade relations has failed to translate into genuine trust among civil societies and the political establishments on both sides. Mistrust of Indians is widespread among Chinese as demonstrated by a June 2009 online survey on the Chinese government-owned Global Times where 90% of Chinese cited India as the No. 1 threat. Likewise, speaking at the Japan Institute of International Affairs in Tokyo in March 2007, India’s foreign minister Pranab Mukherjee admitted that India and China have yet to agree on “substantive” issues. Things haven’t changed much since Mukherjee’s pronouncements.
A Chinese “think tank” member recently said, “For the last 2500 years, we never had problems with India”. The problem began when China occupied Tibet militarily. India’s decision to grant the Tibetans asylum did not go down well with the Chinese who saw it as a direct threat to its control over Tibet and then began decades of tense interactions, and no interactions, punctuated by a war and recurring border standoffs. What was once called “Indo-Tibet border” became “Sino-Indian border”. Subsequent Chinese actions vis-à-vis its southern neighbor were almost always determined by this obsessive fear that India will use the Tibet card anytime. The presence of thousands of Tibetan exiles and their leader, His Holiness the Dalai Lama in India is a constant reminder that not all is well. The series of border disputes particularly the unusually strident and provocative tone adopted by China last year over the status of Arunachal Pradesh showed the inevitable link of Tibet in India-China relations. Although both sides avoided, as usual, a direct reference to the Tibet question, the war of words that ensued was instructive of the underlying problem.
The 1914 Simla Convention, signed by plenipotentiaries of British India and independent Tibet (and also drafted by Chinese representative) serves as legitimate historical evidence of India’s claims over Arunachal. Chinese claim, on the other hand, derives its “legitimacy” from Tibet’s occupation which oddly entitles it to claim the northeast Indian state as “Southern Tibet”. The common perception that China’s refusal to accept McMohan line is because of traditional Chinese aversion to anything colonial is not entirely true. A more apt argument would be that it amounts to accepting Tibet as a historically sovereign nation having the power and authority to execute international treaties.
China has settled all its land border disputes with 14 countries except India and Bhutan. Concentrated mainly in Central Asia and South Asia, these 14 countries have largely submitted to Chinese demands in exchange for economic benefits and other infrastructural investments. A careful perusal of the agreements China signed with these countries indicates a conscious effort to shore up support for the legitimacy-deprived regime in PRC.
For China, the border disagreement with India remains the most sensitive and complex. Sensitive because it involves Tibet, China’s Achilles’ heel, and an issue not only of PRC’s sovereignty and territorial integrity but also the very legitimacy of its rule. As Bhaskar Roy of the Chennai Center for Chinese Studies wrote, “The Chinese Communist Party is faced with a serious dilemma on the Dalai Lama. This has not only to do with issues like sovereignty and territorial integrity, but also the legitimacy of the Communist Party itself.” Efforts on both sides over the years to avoid the Tibet question in solving the border dispute make the issue complex.
Some like Zhang Li of Sichuan University’s Institute of South Asian Studies suggest that it would be wise to minimize the border discord in bilateral relations by stressing on enlarging “common interests”. However, such thinking smacks of ignorance or willful postponement of early resolution.
It may sound preposterous but the border status quo suits Chinese interests particularly on the Tibet question. By purposely avoiding a solution to the border dispute, China is waiting for the right atmospherics to negotiate a political quid pro quo which may well include China signaling India to close the exile Tibetan administration in Dharamsala and thereby hope to displace the base of the Tibetan movement. (Such trade-off is visible most unabashedly in Nepal where the Kathmandu government’s continued clampdown on Tibetan exiles has left many wondering who really is in charge). In Nov. 2006, Zheng Ruixiang, a senior fellow at the Chinese Institute of International Studies told the Times of India bluntly that China wants India to close the exile Tibetan administration in India. “The Tibet problem is a major obstacle in the normalization of relationship between India and China. India made a mistake in the fifties by welcoming the Dalai Lama when he fled Tibet. It is now time for correcting the past mistake and build real and sustainable relationship with China,” Ruixiang said.
This appears to be one of the reasons why China asked India to settle the boundary dispute on the sensitive northeastern sector through political means. In Dec. 2009 issue of Eternal India journal, Rtd. Lt. Gen. Shantonu Choudhry writes, “An unsettled border provides China a strong leverage against India.” Although he meant it in a different context, it just fits so perfectly when reading Chinese intentions regarding the Tibet issue. China will drag its feet, adds Retd. Lt. Gen. Choudhry, as long as it takes to settle the dispute on its own terms.
Of late China has begun using “core interests” to determine its diplomatic engagements. “Core interests”, according to Frank Ching of South China Morning Post, is a new code phrase meaning China’s claim of sovereignty over Taiwan, Xinjiang and Tibet. China badly needs every world leader to follow its diktats on “core interests”.
If India recognizes the overriding importance of Tibet in Chinese scheme of things or China’s tibetophobia, it will help India craft a more effective, realistic and confident China policy.
It is important to note here some diplomatic concessions India made to China on the status of Tibet. From the “peaceful coexistence’ clause in the 1954 Panchsheel Agreement and the 1988 joint communiqué that recognized “Tibet” as “an autonomous region of China” to 2003 joint declaration that included Indian statement that “Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) is part of the territory of the People’s Republic of China”, China has continued to extract repeated assurances to legitimize its rule in Tibet. Such concession when viewed alongside India’s ownership over Arunachal Pradesh, a region that fell into Indian territory following the 1914 Simla Convention, is unfathomable. Little wonder then that in light of Britain’s 2008 abandonment of its century-old policy on Tibet, Steve Tang, a scholar at Oxford University said recently that the British government’s latest concession has weakened India’s case on the border dispute with China. On Oct. 29, 2008, British foreign minister David Miliband quietly issued a statement that amounted to Britain acknowledging Chinese sovereignty rather than suzerainty over Tibet.
From 1947 to 1954, India’s position on Tibet was based on recognizing it as an independent nation, according to Abanti Bhattacharya, Associate Professor at the Department of East Asian Studies at University of Delhi. This was evidenced in Tibet’s participation in the 1947 Asian Relations Conference in New Delhi. The 1954 “peaceful co-existence” agreement, though, changed this position. Not surprisingly, the India-China war in 1962 laid bare the inherent paradox of the 1954 agreement and India’s misplaced trust in Chinese intentions. What is more romantic than two neighbors hoping to co-exist peacefully in the absence of an ancient peaceful buffer country?
In 1988, when India signed the joint communiqué on Tibet with China, the Tibetan capital Lhasa witnessed the largest demonstration against Chinese rule since 1959. Chinese police opened fire indiscriminately on peaceful Tibetan demonstrators and many were arbitrarily detained and tortured. In 1989, Hu Jintao, the then TAR party secretary imposed martial law in Tibet. Events in Tibet during this period showed unmistakable signs that the autonomy granted to Tibet in Chinese constitution was just window dressing. The situation hadn’t changed at all when India reiterated the same position on Tibet in a 1991 joint communiqué.
Boundary question is among the major stumbling blocks to the India-China bonhomie. The series of meetings between the two sides over the last few decades have yielded little results save for China recognizing Sikkim as part of India. This gesture, in 2003, was responded by Atal Behari Vajpayee government by stating that the “TAR is part of the territory of People’s Republic of China.” Bhattacharya points out that this statement imperils India’s security in two critical ways: first, it excluded Tibetan areas in Sichuan, Yunnan, Qinghai and Gansu provinces from the geographical notion of Tibet, thus recognising them as Chinese land. Second, it provided China a greater opening to advance its claims on Arunachal because the TAR, according to China, also includes Arunachal Pradesh or “southern Tibet”. The long-drawn boundary dispute, it appears, has proved a handy tool for China to settle the Tibet issue, one step at a time, on its own terms, by using India.
It is in the interests of both India and China to acknowledge the inseparable link of Tibet in the dynamics of India-China relations. Looking for solutions on the periphery may yield short-term results such as the surging bilateral trade and occasional exercise of confidence building measures, but deep-rooted suspicions and mistrust will remain. Because a sustainable solution needs to answer the Tibet question too.
Tibet will always remain a thorny issue between the two until a sustainable solution is sought. China’s political (mis)calculation of waiting for His Holiness’ demise as the final solution to settle the Tibet question is hugely erroneous. Many Tibetans, even those born in India, have firm determination to return to their country once a settlement is reached amicably with the Chinese. Contrary to many doomsayers, the Tibetan movement has gained momentum over the years – exile, it turns out, has helped embed in younger generation Tibetans a newfound pride in their identity and sense of belonging to a home they have never seen. The collective identity of the Tibetans has never been stronger. In Tibet, the mass protests in 2008 once again demonstrated China’s failure to win the hearts and minds of the Tibetan people. It is not only an issue that India has moral responsibility to resolve according to Tibetan aspirations, but a genuinely autonomous Tibet is in India’s interests.
A genuinely autonomous Tibet can benefit India in securing its borders and forging a more lasting peace with China. (“Genuine” is the keyword here. The Law on National Regional Autonomy that the PRC is so eager to showcase whenever questions arise on violation of minorities’ rights has existed since the 1980s on paper but there’s little to show in terms of their implementation.) It can also ensure the protection and survival of Tibet’s fragile ecosystem – a life-source for billions in Asia. It is now widely proven that China’s reckless avarice in exploiting Tibet’s natural resources has acute repercussions on the livelihood and economy of South Asia and South-east Asian countries. Studies also show the obvious link between Tibet’s melting glaciers and India’s monsoons: more snow-melt means less rain for India.
China’s refusal to engage sincerely with the representatives of the Dalai Lama in resolving the Tibet problem has done little to benefit the party-state in terms of its professed aims of achieving harmony and stability in the PRC. The problem first of all is China’s refusal to state publicly that there is a problem in Tibet. Chinese paranoia and insecurity vis-à-vis the Tibet issue has manifested in actions that the party-state employ to avoid discussing Tibet. Rather than dealing with the Tibetans directly, China has chosen to address the issue with other countries through joint declarations which routinely insists on “one-china” policy and the inalienability of Tibet from China; through ruthless crackdown on Tibetan dissent, domestic censorship, and vilification of the Dalai Lama – all arbitrary actions that the PRC authorities justify as stability-preservation measures. And it has no qualms throwing tantrums and playing the global bully by handing out punitive actions against other sovereign leaders who meet the Dalai Lama or refuse to toe the PRC line. French president Nicholas Sarkozy knows too well what it means to become a victim of the dragon’s fury.
Instead of facing the Tibet issue head-on, China has gone the circuitous road of repeatedly threatening India’s sovereignty and territorial integrity. Reports indicate Chinese hands in supporting insurgencies in India’s turbulent northeastern states. In 2008, Jane’s Intelligence Review reported that China has replaced Cambodia and Thailand as the main supplier of weapons to insurgent groups in India’s northeast and Myanmar. In Aug. 2009, an article issued by China Institute for International Studies, a leading Chinese think tank declared that China should dismember India into 20-30 independent states and puts particular emphasis on supporting United Liberation Front of Assam (ULFA) to achieve independence. China’s nuclear assistance to Pakistan, India’s arch-enemy, is an open secret. China now holds diplomatic and economic influence in almost all countries that surround India making the “String of Pearls” theory an ominous reality.
In 1950s, following Tibet’s invasion by China, Pandit Nehru thought a “psychological buffer” instead of a political and geographical border will help maintain peace between India and China. Not wanting to annoy China, Nehru instead supported an autonomous Tibet. In his letter to Sardar Patel on Nov. 18, 1950, Nehru wrote, “We cannot save Tibet, as we should have liked to do, and our very attempt to save it might well bring greater trouble to it. It may be possible, however, that we might be able to help Tibet to retain a large measure of her autonomy.” Months after signing the 1951 agreement that purported to grant Tibetan autonomy, China wantonly flouted the terms of the agreement.
As India ascends the global power structure with its incredible economic performance and vibrant democratic system, it has much to offer the world in terms of freedom, human dignity and compassion. And a good starting place is supporting His Holiness the Dalai Lama’s vision for a free and democratic PRC.
[OPINION-DISCLAIMER]
