The Hindu : Realism on the China border

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Tuesday, Nov 25, 2003

Opinion

Opinion - News Analysis

Realism on the China border

By C. Raja Mohan

NEW DELHI NOV. 24. If there was any need for more evidence to confirm that the Government is exploring an early and final settlement to the boundary dispute with China and has the political will to make the necessary political adjustments, we have it from the External Affairs Minister, Yashwant Sinha.

In a lecture in the capital on Saturday, Mr. Sinha said New Delhi and Beijing must attempt to resolve all outstanding bilateral disputes "without postponing the tough decisions for the next generation."

Mr. Sinha's message on the political urgency of resolving the boundary dispute is aimed at both Beijing and the domestic public opinion.

For years, India had implicitly gone along with the Chinese position that the dispute was a difficult legacy from the past and could be left for future generations to resolve.

But as part of a new approach adopted in the late 1990s, the Government began to insist that a settlement must be found sooner than later.

This message was first conveyed by the then External Affairs Minister, Jaswant Singh, to his Chinese counterpart, Tang Jiaxuan, in a letter in early 2000... India's relentless pursuit of this objective bore fruit during the Prime Minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee's visit to China in June 2003 when the Chinese leadership agreed to raise the discussion of the dispute to the political level.

The two sides appointed Special Representatives — National Security Adviser, Brajesh Mishra, on the Indian side and Senior Vice-Minister, Dai Bingguo, from the Chinese Government — with the explicit mandate to negotiate the framework of a boundary settlement from a political perspective.

Mr. Mishra and Mr. Dai met late last month for the first round of consultations.

Soon after, in his address to the combined conference of the military commanders on November 1, Mr. Vajpayee said resolution of the boundary problem with China would release India's "military and financial resources" and was therefore a "strategic objective."

And in achieving this objective, Mr. Vajpayee suggested that India must be prepared to take pragmatic decisions — an euphemism for big concessions on territorial claims of the past.

Having got the Chinese side to negotiate seriously, the challenge before Mr. Vajpayee is to prepare Indian opinion to accept a radical departure from past national negotiating positions.

The decision to push the idea of "give and take" on the border issue with China is a bold political gamble for Mr. Vajpayee. But the risk may be worth taking, for its rewards could be extraordinary — both for Mr. Vajpayee as a leader and for the nation in strategic terms.

* * *

The Congress holds the key to a domestic consensus on a final settlement of the boundary dispute with China. It is not clear at this stage, whether the Government has taken the Congress leadership into confidence on its negotiating strategy.

The Government would be politically smart and historically truthful if it gave a lot of credit to the late Prime Minister, Rajiv Gandhi, who transformed the Indian thinking on the dispute during his visit to Beijing in 1988.

The full story of Rajiv Gandhi's visit to Beijing remains to be told. As he sought to redefine India's position on the boundary question and recast Sino-Indian relations, Rajiv Gandhi had to face considerable resistance within the Congress party. Many senior colleagues in the Cabinet too were opposed to the visit.

For many Congressmen, Rajiv Gandhi's visit to China and his flexibility on the boundary dispute was nothing less than a political betrayal of the legacies of Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi.

To get a measure of the Chinese leadership, Rajiv Gandhi had dispatched P.N. Haksar, the veteran diplomat and Principal Secretary to his mother, to Beijing in early 1988 in an unannounced visit.

This was followed by public engagement between Congress politicians and the top guns of the Chinese Communist Party.

To get the strategic community to digest the new Indian approach to Beijing, the Government got the India International Centre in the capital to organise seminars on its China policy throughout 1988.

Given the high stakes involved in Mr. Vajpayee's initiative, the Government needs to do a lot more to educate the informed public opinion on the broad outlines and potential gains from settling the boundary dispute.

Meanwhile, whether the Government gives it credit or not, it is reasonable to expect that the Congress will fulfil its obligation to acknowledge Rajiv Gandhi's political foresight on China.

Many of the actors in that drama are around and could be brought together to reflect on how Rajiv Gandhi altered the Indian approach to China. And what better occasion than the fifteenth anniversary of Rajiv Gandhi's historic visit to China, which falls next month!

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