For all the displays of bonhomie, the Modi Govt has failed to read China. Ladakh is a reminder why we need to up our game

In reversing the image of India from the Nehruvian era, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has almost always highlighted his aggressive foreign policy, one which propagandists claim to have elevated us internationally. One which has been built on hugplomacy and charisma and, therefore, is good for optics but not for diplomacy. Certainly not for China, which cannot be bracketed with anybody considering the over 3,000 km of shared boundary and contentious issues we have had with it and its economic supremacy in regional markets. The fact of the matter is for all kinds of muscular leadership that we might profess, we have failed to read China. And continue to be intimidated by it. Our eastern neighbour continues to be as inscrutable as it was in 1962. If Nehru nurtured a romantic notion of civilisational loyalties, then Modi graduated that to a shared sense of Asian leadership, one which saw even more Chinese investment in India and a mounting trade deficit. Yet China has remained just the same, hovering over us, bullying us through salami-slicing of our territories, as sore about our sympathies for Tibetan refugees and still seeing us as a rival claimant to Asian greatness that President Xi Jinping has currently rechristened as the “Chinese dream.” China wants India to fuel that dream with our dependencies on it and believes in an asymmetrical relationship. It certainly doesn’t like the US-led Western endorsement of India in a post-pandemic world. And for all practical purposes it has besieged us. India may not participate in China’s Belt and Road Initiative, or economic colonisation of smaller nations in the region, but those very nations, reduced to serfs caught in a debt-trap, are now China’s bulwark against us. For all our chest-thumping against Pakistan as the arch enemy, the country, which we use to measure our nationalism against, is but a pawn. Nepal is hostile, Bangladesh is silent, Sri Lanka and Maldives have been taken over. And though the PM may assure the nation that not an inch of our territory has gone to the Chinese, the violent ambush by the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) and the brutal killing of 20 Army personnel certainly were acts of offence, not defence by any stretch. Besides, Chinese ingress is not new in Arunachal Pradesh or Uttarakhand. So the PM may keep silent but his brand of engagement has not stopped the dragon from using its forked tongue. Doklam should have been a reminder. We may like to believe that we stared the Chinese down but fact is they moved negligibly and have now ramped up fortifications close to it, something we do not want to talk about. The Chinese continue to insist they won’t restore status quo ante at Galwan Valley, which allows them strategic edge over our troop movements and a key connecting road, though we insist that they had only pitched a tent and were removed. Besides, China has not reconciled to our new map showing Pakistan-occupied Kashmir and Home Minister Amit Shah’s fiery speech in the Lok Sabha that we would take back Aksai Chin. Although External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar assuaged anxieties of expansionism, China distrusts our plans to upgrade border infrastructure. Pandemic-hit it might be, but being the only nation that will not slip into negative growth, it can sustain such adventurism and heat up flashpoints to deter India while staying under the  escalation threshold and claim miscommunication at the troop level that could be settled through talks. By then, we would have lost more men and resources. We must remember that the PLA never does what is not mandated by the Communist Party of China and its head Xi.

For all the “Howdy Modi” and red carpet to Trump, the US has not lived up to its new-found ally in the region. Except for making some noise about “China troubling India” and Trump’s old offer of mediation, there has been no statement by him or even Quad countries in India’s favour. Besides, the US supports the “one-China policy” and has stayed away from taking a stand on Taiwan. Even Australia, which is at the receiving end of Chinese hitback over trade tariffs for leading the global probe on the contagion, remained silent. The US itself wants a better trade deal with China. India’s hopes that it would get all fleeing companies from there to set up shop here are not realistic given the depth and cost-competitiveness of the Chinese economy. Every nation, India included, is just about waking up to the need for self-sufficiencies but the global supply chains will still be dependent on the factory floors of China. We may boycott Chinese goods and investment in government infra and review trade pacts but we account for just two per cent of China’s trade volumes. It won’t hurt it that much. China is one of our largest trading partners and has $1.8 billion of FDIs locked in between 2015 and 2019. Of course, while we rebuild our strengths in the long-term and develop attractive markets for the world, in the short term we must deal with China one-to-one, intensify dialogue, delink it from contexts, keep it business-like and maintain an operational preparedness along the border. We must keep a hawk’s eye on PLA movements. Most importantly, the PM should be transparent and use Parliament to keep the Opposition and the nation abreast of developments. Or silence would be interpreted as appeasement, something the Chinese love to feed on.