Sol Sanders Archive

But there is not a little grumbling about all this on the Indian side. China is after all largely buying raw materials in India and piling up an increasing trade deficit. That iron ore could just as well be for a handful of foreign steel producers anxious to invest in India’s cheap labor and raw materials. And, as elsewhere, China is dumping chief, subsidized consumer’s goods, threatening the Indian companies which are just beginning to wake up to the glories of a rapidly increasing “middle class”. And the Indians have been a jump ahead of German Chancellor Angela Merkel who decided early on that she didn’t want China’s state-owned big foreign investors – are there any other kind? – muscling in on her equity markets.

But the lovey-dovey [maybe] of the commercial world is only half the story.

Indian concessions and pleas for settlement of its border issues with Beijing which go back to the founding of their two modern states haven’t got anywhere. In fact, there is some irony in the fact that “the Hindu” negotiators [whom their fellow Muslim Pakistanis always believe would get the better of any negotiation] have lost their pants: they swapped Indian recognition of China’s total sovereignty in Tibet, something they had long resisted with their strong cultural and historical relations with Lhassa, for Beijing’s no longer mapping their former Himalayan rajadom of Sikkim as not a part of India. The trouble is that the Chinese have located old suzerainty issues between Tibet and a good swatch of territory in India’s northeast and, therefore, as the successor state in Tibet, their new maps are showing that part of India is China.

Last year India quietly but emphatically was asked and conceded control over the other former British Indian Himalayan appendage, Bhutan, by the locals who are trying to get the Chinese to stop building roads out of Tibet onto their territory, their shortest ground route out to the big world.

When the Chinese refused to visa an Indian diplomat, a native of the contested Indian area, New Delhi turned around and invited the new president-elect of Taiwan, Ma Ying-jeou, to their capital. After all there may even be a few Indian greybeards around who remember that one of Ma’s KMT Party’s sainted elders, Chiang Kai-shek, in the middle of fighting off the Japanese in his last stand in southwest China, went to New Delhi to try [unsuccessfully] to make peace between the British and their then prisoners, Mahatma Gandhi sainted Jawaharlal Nehru. [Gandhi and Nehru said potential Japanese invasion or no, they wanted the British to “Quit India” and refused to cooperate to defend it against the Japanese massing in Burma.] The Brits did leave, peacefully, a few years later, but accompanied by one of the bloodiest periods of modern history between the new Pakistan and India over the Partition of the subcontinent.]

Beijing has just won a round, however, with the new Prime Minister of Nepal, Pushpa Kamal Dahal – known under his guerrilla name of "Prachanda”. His hands still bloodied from his decade-long “Maoist” revolution which toppled the world’s only Hindu monarchy with the deaths of at least 14,000 – most of them innocent school teachers and civilian police and administrators and landlords. His goon squads are still patrolling the streets of Katmandhu, not yet “assimilated” to the former royal military.

Prachanda, who’s Nepali lowlands are indistinguishable from the north Indian plains they border and where there has never been any real frontier, hoped off to Beijing for a look at the last ceremonies of the Olympics. Chinese Pres. Hu Jinatao and Prime Minister Wen Jaiboa treated him more like the old king than just another politician. No wonder the Indian ambassador refused to see him off on this first foreign trip – usually made to New Delhi. Now, Prachanda says it was all just tourism, that his first “political” foreign trip will be to India [with whatever blackmail the Chinese have given him in his back pocket.] His shopping list will be long and expensive; Nepal is one of the poorest countries in the world and his bloody capers have frightened away its main attraction, tourism.

Just to complicate the scene, Prachanda – who once dissed the contemporary post-Mao Chinese leadership as “revisionists” and proceeded to use all Mao’s brutalities to win in Nepal – has closet contacts with the Indian Maoists [nee Naxalites]. Those worthies, pursuing the same bloody tactics, have their own little Maoist insurgencies going in 10 Indian states in a red belt right through the center of the country, mostly among tribals and untouchables. Their original foster parents, the so-called Communist Party [Marxist] which has held local government by hook and crook in Kolkata [Calcutta] for three decades, are also good friends.

The Calcutta boys [many of the leaders former maharajas and landlords by the way], who split with their comrades taking China’s side in the Moscow-Beijing breakup, have just withdrawn their support from Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s government. That was over their opposition to his proposal to make a deal with the U.S. for transfer of nuclear and other hi tech and his continued pursuit of the same kind of foreign investment the Chinese have been so successful at attracting. They, like their Communist and leftwing allies, are dead set against an American “alliance” on any terms.

They also have been welcoming the largely state-owned Chinese investors to their domain in eastern India while they keep the door closed to American and other foreign firms [except they did crack it open for Microsoft]. They thought to get some help from their Chinese friends in the nuclear donors’ club – those who signed the non-proliferation treaty which China has honored more in the breach than in the substance by lending nuclear weapons technology to the Pakistanis, among others. Beijing had been hemming and hawing about whether the special arrangements the Americans were asking for which would exempt the Indians from the nonproliferation treaty signature but subject New Delhi to some inspections and other “guarantees”. But at the last minute Beijing apparently did not join a small group of smaller members who have reservations about the whole deal “blowing” the nonproliferation strategy worldwide. Another case in which the Bengalis seem to be more royal than the king.

But this diplomatic tit-for-tat isn’t the only thing going.

As the Chinese continue to build roads right up to what they call their borders in the Himalayas with India, drag in a few more missiles and perhaps nuclear weapons to the high ground that overlooks the north Indian Indus-Gangetic plain, the Indians have begun to flex their muscles.

They have deployed some of their latest Soviet fighter-bombers to within sight of the contested border in northeast India. They seem to have had some limited success in halting the infiltration of weapons and trainees – from across the Burmese border and from Bangladesh where the military government depends on Chinese largesse — to a half dozen ethnic and religious conflicts in that area. [But they haven’t had much luck at keeping their “Mexicans”, illegal Muslim migrants from Bangladesh, from threatening to swamp the locals in Assam].

Furthermore, the Indians have just announced they have reoccupied a former military post on the western end of the Tibetan plateau in Ladkh, the Buddhist corner of the former princely state of Kashmir. That Muslim-majority area has seen its worst civil unrest in decades with a growing demand for reunification of the two Kashmirs – one under Pakistan control – and probably independence from New Delhi.

It is ownership of Kashmir which has been the main source of three and a half wars between India and Pakistan. For Pakistan it is the fulfillment of the promise of Muslim areas of British India to be grouped in their country. For India, it is the “proof” that India is a secular republic.

It was discovery of a road secretly built by the Chinese linking Tibet with southeastern Singkiang across Aksai Chin in Ladakh that tripped the Indian effort in the late 50s and early 60s to establish the validity of the disputed British McMahon Line between the two entities. India came out of that one badly bruised and shamed when the Chinese declared a unilateral ceasefire after quickly breaking through Indian defenses with not much to stop them from getting to New Delhi had they moved on, with a politicized and demoralized Indian army, no shadow of its former World War II glory.

While the Indian foreign ministry – and some parts of the military – still carry on their old affair with Moscow [increasingly looking like their Soviet forebears, India’s ally all during the Cold War], India appears to be moving toward a strategic alliance with the U.S. New Delhi has, for example, just announced an October joint exercise of their burgeoning navy with the U.S.fleet in the Persian Gulf.

And, of course, no one is more exercised than the Indians about what is happening in Pakistan and the border regions of Afghanistan. Tempted as they have been to play games with Afghanistan’s Hamid Karzai against the Pakistanis or with the Iranians in Pakistan’s tribal areas in Baluchistan, in part a tit-for-tat for Pakistani tribals intrigues and infiltration in Kashmir, in their saner moments the Indians know that a Pakistan implosion would completely destabilize their western frontier. New Delhi worries, too, about Islamabad’s “all weather” alliance with China which has resulted in nuclear technology transfers, loans, and military hardware [including a copy of a Russian fighter] and the building a new deep water port out of range of the Indian navy which blocked Pakistan in each war.

In that old phrase, India cannot live with the Pakistanis nor live without them: a Pakistan dominated or intimidated by Islamofascists would be a domestic threat, not only to the Indian military, nuclear weapons or no, but to India’s own increasingly disaffected Muslim minority which probably exceeds Pakistan’s 160 millions. Therefore, while the Indians grumble that American military aid to Pakistan – more than $100 billion including nonmilitary since 9/11 – strengthens a potential enemy [especially with F16 aircraft], they also know that India’s interests as well as the US’s are served with a successful suppression of the Islamic “militants”.

A muddle? Certainly.

But news that the Chinese in early September are sending a special emissary to New Delhi suggests he may be bearing gifts.

There has long been a proposal to solve the border problem by India abandoning all claims to Aksai Chin in the west in exchange for Beijing’s abandoning its claims on the India state of Arunchal Pradesh in the east.

The fact that the Dalai Lama, 73, suffered some sort of collapse recently and had to be hospitalized for examination, brings up the whole question of After the Dalai Lama, who? And what? No one in the Tibetan community exerts his prestige and influence. But in the mid-1970s His Holiness, Tenzin Gyatso, The Fourteenth Dalai Lama, told a Polish newspaper that he thought he might be the last Dalai Lama. That is what the Chinese leadership in Beijing spins their prayer wheels for!

The Chinese have already ruthlessly demonstrated that while the Tibetan underground may choose and annoint a reincarnation of their religious-temporal leaders [as in the case of the Pachen Lama], they can bunbdle him off to obscurity and pick another of their own.

The Dalai Lama’s concessions for Tibetan autonomy rather than independence have not bought off Beijing [or some of his followers]. Beijing insisted at the very moment they were again bending to itnernational ptessure to talk with the Dalai Lama’s representatives in Beijing that he had instigated the rioting in Lhassa and other Tibetan areas in the days just before the Olympics. Having the Indians close down his “government-in-exile” in Dharmsala in northern India, a haven for the Tibetans continually fleeing over the world’s highest mountains at the risk of their life and limb by Chinese military who shoot them as they would the legendary shatoosh, would probably have to be part of a “settlement”.

Singh, facing elections soon against the Hindu revivalist Bharati Janta Party which would make hay among Indian religious of all castes and faiths over the Tibet issue were it posed, is between a rock and hard place.

But the slow drip of increasing friction between the two giants is all too evident. And despite the economic determinist arguments of some Indian businessmen, there may be more issues ahead than opening the Himalayan passes for Chinese imports.