The Hindu : A new and positive orientation

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Saturday, Feb 01, 2003

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A new and positive orientation

A NASCENT, YET very encouraging effort has been mounted to give a new orientation — marked by a spirit of realism and positivism — to India's relations with the People's Republic of China. The Minister for External Affairs, Yashwant Sinha, and the Defence Minister, George Fernandes, have in recent days articulated views that have sufficient commonality to suggest that New Delhi has given deep and serious thought to the kind of relationship that must be established with Beijing over the long term. A healthy development, discernible in the presentations made separately by the two senior members of the Union Cabinet to a conference on Asian Security and China 2003-2010, is that New Delhi has finally discarded a conceptual framework in which China was seen always as a rival, often-times as an enemy. Mr. Sinha's specific declaration that India did not perceive a conflict with China to be inevitable was a conscious effort to break ranks with those inside the country, with a mindset shaped by the unfortunate events of 1962, and those outside, who have sought to exploit this attitude to use India an instrumentality to promote their objective of containing the other Asian giant. The Foreign Minister has sought to set the tone for the future interaction by stating that the policy would neither be based on fear of China's power nor envy of its economic achievements but would be forward looking and infused with a sense of optimism. If the new attitude is persisted with, there could be a definitive turn-away from the lows to which the relations between the two countries had sunk after the Pokhran-II tests when New Delhi sought to justify its actions by pointing to the concern over an intrinsically inimical China. It is to be hoped that New Delhi has finally decided that the engagement with China should develop on its own merits rather than as an offshoot of the interaction between India and Pakistan or between India and the U.S.

While the policy of bifurcating the dispute over territory from the other issues of importance in the interaction between India and China has been in place for a while, Mr. Sinha has claimed that a substantial measure of success had been achieved in the endeavours to establish mutual understanding. Functional delegations from each country have been criss-crossing the territories of the other to learn from its experiences and the overall purpose of these efforts is to direct the relations between the two towards greater economic integration. In Mr. Sinha's presentation, the over-arching paradigm that will shape economic exchanges between India and China will be the conviction that a prosperous India is as inevitable as a prosperous China. Mr. Fernandes' warning that India could not continue to entertain the notion that its better democratic credentials somehow balanced out China's far more impressive economic record also made for a very timely intervention. New Delhi would be well advised to persist with this new readiness to treat economic cooperation as the thrust area of diplomatic efforts directed at China and to steadily move away from the once excessive focus on the ways and means of achieving strategic parity.

New Delhi must guard against a frequently displayed tendency to be hugely disappointed if its foreign policy initiatives do not produce dividend in the very near term. Since India has taken a long time to get over some of its national sensitivities it cannot expect China to move at a rapid pace in the immediate future. China would like to test the policy parameters that India is setting out before the interaction between the two countries gathers momentum. It has, of course, to be noted that the articulation of a new orientation towards China has been made so far at the political level. While an enunciation from the political echelons is of utmost significance, what is equally important is that the positive attitudes towards China be imbibed by those working at the operational levels of India's diplomatic establishment.

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