When Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee boards the plane bound for China this Sunday, the memory of his trip to Beijing in February 1979 is bound to haunt him. Then Vajpayee had retreated to the lake city of Hang Chou, after completing his official engagement as external affairs minister in the Chinese capital. A call from the Indian embassy in Beijing sent the Indian entourage in a tizzy. The caller said the BBC had broken news about China invading Vietnam. The words came like a slap in the face. For, China had attacked a friend; India was committed to Vietnam and China had shown utter disregard to this sentiment.
The Indian team immediately went into a huddle to fashion its response to the embarrassing development. It was a sensitive matter; an uproar in Parliament was inevitable. Foreign secretary Jagat Mehta eventually stepped out to announce Vajpayee's decision to cut short his visit. But the cruellest cut was yet to come. When the Chinese ambassador to India Chen Chao Yuan was informed about the decision, he shrugged it off saying that the official leg of the visit was anyway over. The ambassador's implication: the insult to India was more imagined than real.
Within days of his return to Delhi, Vajpayee made two statements in Parliament, illustrating vividly the classic duality of the Indian attitude to China. First, Vajpayee informed the nation about China's assurances of not assisting the Naga militants and maintaining peace and tranquility in the boundary areas on the basis of the prevailing status quo; there was also a mention of Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping's offer of a "package" solution to the festering border problems. The second statement was brief: it criticised China and called upon it to cease fire and pull back from Vietnam.
Obviously, the Chinese leaders did not take the last statement seriously. There was then a palpable disdain for India and Indians, best illustrated through the transcripts of the private conversations between then US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and various Chinese leaders like Zhou Enlai and Chairman Mao during the covert US warm-up to China. Chairman Mao was recorded as saying, "India did not win independence. If it did not attach itself to Britain, it attaches itself to the Soviet Union." He considered the Indian philosophy as "just a bunch of empty words".
In 1999, years after the generation of Mao and Deng had faded away, Chinese President Jiang Zemin was in Paris, telling his French counterpart Jacques Chirac in a mocking tone of the Chinese military forays across the vast and disputed border areas. He said, "Each time we tested them by sending patrols across, the Indian soldiers reacted by putting their hands up." Jiang then proceeded to raise his own hands up to emphasise the point. He rounded off this description with a terse remark: "If India were to attack China again, we will crush it." And just in case Chirac missed the point, Jiang reportedly squeezed his hands together to stress the word 'crush'. India hadn't been on the agenda of the Jiang-Chirac meet. The Chinese leader was just sending out an unmistakable signal to the French who had stood by India during the post-Pokhran II days.
Perhaps the Chinese have changed from Mao's days. When Vajpayee was in St Petersburg last month, the new Chinese President Hu Jintao told him that "the new leadership attaches priority to the relationship with India". With Vajpayee now winging to Beijing, can New Delhi take Hu's assertion seriously? This question assumes special significance because of India's traditional anxieties over China's strategic intent and the unresolved border dispute. For one, China has settled about 20 territorial disputes (some disputes involved more than one country), but hasn't demonstrated the same alacrity and accommodation in resolving its border problems with India.
China has also successfully managed to stymie India's desire to break out of the South Asia context and enhance its profile. Beijing has done this through clandestine nuclear and missile technology transfers to Islamabad, consequently pairing India and Pakistan as Siamese twins. Senior government sources say there is no evidence to believe that China has now ceased such transfers to Pakistan. This issue was in fact discussed during the security dialogue between India and China in 2001.
Has China now addressed India's concerns to justify the prime minister's visit there? Can New Delhi convince Beijing to accept Sikkim as a part of India, or resolve the border dispute? One senior diplomatic source shrugs his shoulders and remarks cryptically, "Look, if you start looking at yardsticks and touchstones that are unrealistic, it is very difficult to project this visit."
A week before the prime minister was to take off for Beijing, there was little clarity on the big issues on the negotiating table. Officials were not sure whether Vajpayee's trip would result in Beijing clearly recognising Sikkim as an integral part of India; ditto about exchanging maps of the western sector; forget expecting any fundamental transformation in Sino-Indian relations.
More certain are the small steps of confidence-building: opening a cultural centre in each other's capitals, a more liberal visa regime, instituting an India chair in Beijing University, and the like. It was not even clear whether the Chinese were willing to selectively (on grapes and mangoes) lift the phyto-sanitary ban they have imposed on Indian fruits, thereby preventing them from entering the Chinese market. However, diplomatic sources say there will be gains in the area of trade with China.
Sikkim is one big sore point. The Chinese had previously demonstrated their willingness to open a trading outpost to conduct trade between Tibet and Sikkim. But Indian officials want China to make a clear announcement or indicate in unambiguous language that it considers Sikkim an integral part of India. Diplomatic sources say the Chinese leadership has yet to veer around to this formal view. "Why would we be interested then?" asks a senior official. "After all, Tibet is an international issue. Sikkim is not. It's their problem, not ours."
There are more questions surrounding Sino-Indo relations than there are clear answers. Senior officials feel China has made a conscious decision to improve ties with India but at the same time maintain status quo on all outstanding issues. The change in attitude, say
Indian officials, is largely a result of India's nuclear tests and the way India managed the fallout. When India conducted the tests at Pokhran five years ago, the letter Prime Minister Vajpayee wrote to President Bill Clinton explaining the rationale for the tests (in short, China) was leaked to the American press. Five months later, then US Assistant Secretary of State Karl Inderfurth thought India's security concerns were legitimate. One of the critical decisions the Bush administration took was to "fundamentally transform relations with India". In fact, when Vajpayee met Bush for the first time at the White House in November 2001, Bush warmed up to the China topic by saying that his trip to Shanghai hadn't left him any wiser about the Chinese.
Are Indians any wiser about the Chinese? The most sophisticated turn of phrase on this came in a defining speech made by external affairs minister Yashwant Sinha this January. He said, "The wounds inflicted by the conflict of 1962 have been slow to heal and the scars have not fully disappeared." Yet, despite China's nuclear transfers to Pakistan, despite doubts sown by China's lack of endorsement of India's candidature to the UN Security Council, despite a sense of disappointment over the pace of improvement in the relationship, Sinha declared, "India's policies will not be based on fear of Chinese power nor envy of China's economic achievements." They would be "based on the conviction that a prosperous India is inevitable. So is a strong and prosperous China. It is, therefore, logical, reasonable and in the enlightened self-interest of both that the two countries learn not just to live with each other but also address differences and build on what is common. Further, both India and China are too large and too strong to be contained or cowed down by any country, including each other".
A crucial factor in the changing dynamics of Sino-Indian ties has been India's rapprochement with the US. Days after US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld met George Fernandes on November 5, 2001, the Chinese ambassador made his first call on the defence minister, who had called China Potential Enemy Number 1. But the expectation that the coming closer of the US and India would yield significant benefits has been steadily diluted by the tight embrace between General Pervez Musharraf and George Bush. Ironically, when Vajpayee is in Beijing meeting the Chinese leadership, Musharraf will be in Camp David, the diplomatic equivalent of a ticker tape parade. Aid and sophisticated arms will be showered on Musharraf like confetti, thereby making Vajpayee's visit to China pale in comparison. Strange to see Pakistan get more out of China and the US than India.