With India and China displaying flexibility and foresight in resolving the incursion incident, India’s External Affairs Minister Salman Khurshid will be holding wide-ranging talks in Beijing that will set the stage for Chinese Premier Li Keqiang’s first trip to New Delhi later this month.
Premier Li will be coming to India on a three-day visit, starting May 19 – the first time a Chinese premier will be travelling to New Delhi within months of once-in-a-decade leadership transition in Beijing.
While the motive and grand strategy, if any, behind the April 15 incursion of Chinese troops into Ladakh for three weeks till the May 5 restoration of status quo ante remains “a bit of mystery,” to India’s China policy-makers, New Delhi believes that there is no alternative but to engage constructively and creatively with the new Chinese leadership.
It is in this spirit of realism that India’s foreign minister has travelled to Beijing – perhaps his toughest diplomatic assignment since he took charge nearly six months ago. Khurshid has struck a positive note on the trajectory of India-China relations under the new dispensation in Beijing. “India and China had developed a very sound relationship over the past decade. I hope that bilateral ties would be enhanced under China’s new leadership,” he said. “The first signals that have come from the new Chinese leadership are extremely positive and welcome and will reciprocated in full substance from us. We are looking forward to a meaningful decade working with the new leadership of China,” he told the Chinese media in New Delhi ahead of his trip to Beijing.
Khurshid can be expected to do a fine balancing act during talks with his Chinese counterpart and host Wang Yi. On the one hand, Khurshid will be carrying a firm message from New Delhi that pending the final settlement of the boundary dispute, both sides should exercise maximum restraint and responsibility to ensure peace and tranquillity along the un-demarcated frontier that is at the heart of subterranean tensions between them.
By and large, the India-China border has remained peaceful except for off-and-on incursions that both sides have been realistic enough to acknowledge emanate from misperception of the Line of Actual Control, which serves as the effective border between the two Asian giants. The April 15 incident was, however, of a different magnitude and the most serious case of incursion since the 1986 Sumdorong Chu showdown, reviving all sorts of conspiracy theories about China’s strategic intent vis-à-vis India. Against this backdrop, cross-border peace and confidence-building has climbed to the top of the agenda and will figure prominently in discussions between Khurshid and his Chinese counterpart. India has already indicated outlines of managing the incursion incidents. “To keep them (disputes) at a proportional level and contain them as limited and localised, and not necessarily part of large scheme of things, it’s important to have a fundamental understanding of each other. We have developed that for years and that’s a wonderful thing,” state-run China Radio International quoted Khurshid as saying
The two foreign ministers will be laying the groundwork for Premier Li’s New Delhi trip and the joint declaration that will follow the talks between the leaders of India and China.
Besides issues of trust-building and the need to intensify strategic communication, the two sides will also be looking to recast and expand their economic relationship, the most sturdy pillar of India-China relations that has cushioned the larger relationship from the vagaries of power politics and competitive posturing. In this regard, India will be looking for concrete concessions and initiatives from China on market access for Indian IT and pharma companies. Bilateral trade has surged to over $70 billion, with both sides setting an ambitious target of scaling it up to $100 billion by 2015. India’s China-watchers feel it’s a doable target, but point out that Beijing needs to deliver on its promise of addressing trade deficit – which has ballooned to around $39 billion – by providing Indian companies greater market access and expanding Chinese investment in India. The Chinese side, on its part, will be looking for India’s nod for allowing Chinese investment in high-speed railways, says Srikanth Kondapalli, a China expert at New Delhi-based Jawaharlal Nehru University.
The burgeoning bilateral trade is, however, no guarantee against volatility in the India-China relation as the twists in China-Japan relations show. The latest incursion incident showed that if not handled deftly, the relationship can skid off the track, to the detriment of the larger project of national resurgence in both countries. It remains to be seen how the leaders of India and China manage this subtle dialectic between the political and the economic in their relationship in the years to come. Premier Li’s talks with Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh should provide some clues to those wishing to go beyond the feel-good atmospherics and theatrics of summitry.
Author Profile
- Manish Chand is Founder-CEO and Editor-in-Chief of India Writes Network (www.indiawrites.org) and India and World, a pioneering magazine focused on international affairs. He is CEO/Director of TGII Media Private Limited, an India-based media, publishing, research and consultancy company.
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