When Chinese President Xi Jinping sat congenially on a swing with Prime Minister Narendra Modi in Ahmedabad two years ago, India’s relationship with China seemed to be entering a new collaborative orbit – economically and geopolitically.
But it’s not for nothing that the Chinese are called inscrutable. Over the past few months, despite several Modi-Xi meetings at the BRICS, G-20 and other summits, the relationship has noticeably chilled.
Modi’s bilateral meeting with the Chinese president at the BRICS summit in Goa this weekend is unlikely to change Beijing’s hardline stand on Maulana Masood Azhar, head of the terrorist group Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM). He remains one of Beijing’s levers to keep the pressure on India.
China has twice blocked a move in the United Nations to designate Azhar a global terrorist. Beijing has used every artifice to defend the indefensible, saying its action is based on technical grounds.
China has been equally bloody-minded over India’s membership of the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG). It has blocked India’s entry by advancing the specious argument that Pakistan’s claim to membership should also be considered. As a serial nuclear proliferator and cheat, Pakistan is the last country on earth, bar North Korea, with a claim to NSG membership.
China has further insisted that only signatories of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) should be allowed into the NSG. Since the NPT is an over 40-year-old discriminatory treaty which India has rightly criticised, this would seem to rule out New Delhi’s early entry into the NSG.
Fortunately, membership of the NSG is no longer crucial to meet India’s geopolitical and security objectives. The India-US civil nuclear deal has given India most of the waivers on access to nuclear technology and fissile material it needs. NSG membership is therefore not a priority anymore. India’s entry into the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR) earlier this year has further reduced the immediate importance of NSG membership.
China’s stand on Masood Azhar is more galling. Beijing knows he is a globally-designated terrorist. Why is it playing hardball?
Beijing has been increasingly worried over the strengthening India-US strategic partnership. It sees the partnership as a long-term threat to its hegemonistic aims in the arc from the Indian Ocean to the South China Sea. China has no compunctions in using a terrorist-sponsoring nation like Pakistan to slow India’s global rise and hence dilute the impact of a powerful future India-US geopolitical axis.
By 2030, the combined GDPs of India and the US will exceed the GDP of China. With the European Union (EU) beset by economic and political sclerosis, Japan mired in stagflation and Britain isolated by Brexit, China see itself replacing the US as the world’s principal superpower over the next two decades.
Its defence budget ($146 billion) is already the world’s second largest and a quarter of America’s ($570 billion). With a sharply higher growth rate in defence spending (while America’s defence budget shrinks), China could achieve military parity with the US in two decades.
India remains the obstacle. A rising India can help compensate Washington’s relative decline. Hence China’s aggressive realpolitik with New Delhi.
India has many options to deal with China’s aggression. Tibet and Xinjiang (where Islamist terrorism is a growing concern for Beijing) are China’s soft underbellies. India must leverage them. Beijing’s tensions with Japan, Vietnam and the Philippines over maritime sovereignty in the South China Sea provide India another opportunity to isolate China diplomatically. Beijing respects strength. Modi must recalibrate his strategy towards China as he has done with Pakistan.
The days of wooing Xi Jinping on an Indian jhoola are over. India has a large consumer market that a slowing Chinese economy needs. Modi must use every economic and political lever, including Tibet and Xinjiang, to deliver this weekend in Goa an uncompromising message that China will hear and in a language it will understand.
Columnist
Minhaz Merchant is the biographer of Rajiv Gandhi and Aditya Birla and author of The New Clash of Civilizations (Rupa, 2014). He is founder of Sterling Newspapers Pvt. Ltd. which was acquired by the Indian Express group
