The brutal killing of 20 personnel of the Indian Army, including a colonel-level officer, by China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) in the Galwan Valley on the night of June 15 will reverberate across India for a long time to come. Indian security personnel — from the armed forces, paramilitary forces, and the police — have often given their lives in the quest to defend India’s territorial integrity, sovereignty and the Constitution. And as often, their contribution is forgotten.But Colonel Santosh Babu and the 19 other men killed in the line of duty will stay on in public memory for three reasons. First, this was the first time since 1975 that Indian blood was shed defending the border against China. Two, the nature of the killing was brutal — PLA, in what India has called a “pre-meditated” attack, violated norms of war. And India and China are not even officially at war. And finally, their killing has highlighted the place of Ladakh in general, and Galwan Valley in particular, as essential to India’s territorial imagination.
This, then, can make June 15 — or Ladakh 2020 — the moment when, for two generations of Indians, the security threat from China has become tangible and real. It can make it the moment when discussions about the “competitive-cooperative” relationship with China and how to navigate great power politics will move beyond the rarefied seminar circuits of elite analysts and assume a strong place in public consciousness. And it can make it the moment when China becomes an issue in Indian domestic politics, strongly tied to public opinion, partisan positions, and the idea of nationalism.
The intersection of domestic politics and foreign policy is old. Indeed, a lot of scholarship suggests that foreign policy itself is the extension of domestic politics and is shaped substantially by it.
Fathoming the Depth of Their Relationship
The tensions between China and India are real, but they will eventually prove to be aberrant. There are three good reasons for believing that: one historic, one economic, and one strategic.
First, China and India sealed their borders in modern times, but in the 2,000 years preceding the conflict of 1962, the two countries enjoyed strong economic, religious, and cultural ties. By the second century bc, the southern branch of the Silk Road—an interconnected series of ancient trade routes on land and sea—linked the cities of Xi’an in China and Pataliputra in India. Trade on the Tea and Horse Road, as the Chinese called it, was a significant factor in the growth of the Chinese and Indian civilizations. Seen in that light, the closing of the Sino–Indian border—not the border’s reopening—is the anomaly.
In fact, Buddhism traveled from India to China in 67 ad along the Silk Road. In those days, the relationship between China and India was one of mutual respect and admiration. The monk Fa-hsien (337 to 422 ad), who traveled from China to India to study Buddhism, referred to the latter as Madhyadesa (Sanskrit for “Middle Kingdom”), which is similar in meaning to Zhongguo, the word the Chinese used to describe China. In the 1930s, no less a scholar than Beijing University’s Hu Shih said that the sixth century ad marked the “Indianization of China.” Even today, visits by Chinese and Indian leaders include a trip to a Buddhist shrine in the host nation.
There was also much goodwill after the birth of the two modern states, India in 1947 and China in 1949. During the 1930s, India’s future prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru frequently wrote about how India supported the struggles of fellow Asians under the foreign yoke. He organized marches in India in support of China’s freedom, organized a boycott of Japanese goods, and in 1937 sent a medical mission to help the Chinese. India was the second non-Communist country, after Burma, to recognize the People’s Republic of China, in 1950. Five years later, India supported the idea that China should attend the Bandung Conference, in Indonesia, which led to the creation of the Non-Aligned Movement, an alliance of developing countries that supported neither the United States nor the Soviet Union. In those heady years, one slogan heard in India was Hindi Chini Bhai Bhai (“Indians and Chinese are Brothers”). The slogan hasn’t been forgotten; China’s premier, Wen Jiabao, repeated it in 2006 when he visited the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi.
Second, economists tell us that neighbors tend to trade more than other nations do. An official committee set up to encourage commerce between China and India recently suggested that bilateral trade could touch $50 billion by 2010. Even the official numbers understate the potential, according to economists who use gravity models to estimate what the trade between two countries should be. Such models calculate potential bilateral trade as a function of the size of the nations, the physical distance between them, and other factors such as whether they share a language, a colonial past, a border, membership of a free-trade zone, and so on. Sino–Indian trade today is up to 40% less than it could be, according to those models. Moreover, Sino–Indian trade is more balanced than China’s trade with the United States and Europe; the latter countries’ large deficits cause political friction.
Third, China and India, after they cut themselves off from each other, evolved in complementary ways that reduced the competitiveness between them. What China is good at, India is not—and vice versa. China instituted sweeping economic reforms in 1978 and has steadily opened up thereafter. A balance-of-payments crisis forced India’s reforms in 1991, but because of political factors, liberalization has been slow and piecemeal there ever since. China uses top-down authority to channel entrepreneurship; in fact, the government is the entrepreneur in many cases. India revels in a private sector–led frenzy, and its government is incapable of efficiency. China struggles to control fixed asset investment, while India is constrained by scarce capital. China welcomes foreigners, shunning only those who are not part of its power structure. India shuns foreigners and mollycoddles its own. China’s capital markets are nonexistent; India’s are among the best in the emerging markets. And so on. There are no two countries more yin and yang than China and India.
Getting the Best of Both Worlds
These complementarities pose both an opportunity and a threat. It’s easy to spot the advantages of treating China and India synergistically and getting the best of both worlds. Companies can use China to make almost anything cheaply. They can turn to India to design and develop products cost-effectively; they can also hire Indian talent to market and service products. For instance, China’s Lenovo, which purchased IBM’s PC business in 2005, recently moved its global ad-management function from Shanghai to Bangalore. That’s because India has a highly creative and sophisticated advertising industry.
To be sure, Chinese and Indian companies will compete intensely with each other. That doesn’t mean that the rise of one will necessarily be at the expense of the other. For instance, as the Chinese government tries to develop a software industry, Indian companies such as Infosys, Tata Consultancy Services, and Satyam have been among the first to recruit Chinese engineers. Does that mean they are sowing the seeds of their own destruction? Not really. Most Indian companies have gone into China to provide software services to their multinational clients. Chinese firms will try to compete for those contracts, even as Indian companies fight for a share of the local Chinese market. China will gain from having a software industry, but the benefits may not come at the expense of India’s software industry.
The Current Backlash
In a hardening of stance in the backdrop of tensions at the Indo-China border, the government has decided to ask state-owned Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd (BSNL) not to use Chinese telecom gear in its 4G upgradation, which is being supported as part of the company revival package, according to sources. The development comes at a time when Indian and Chinese armies are engaged in a standoff in Pangong Tso, Galwan Valley, Demchok and Daulat Beg Oldie in eastern Ladakh. The standoff has stirred anti-China sentiments in India, with protesters and some trade bodies like Confederation of All India Traders calling for a boycott of Chinese products in protest to border standoff. Amid the face-off between Indian and Chinese troops in Galwan Valley, hashtags like “HindiCheeniByeBye” and “BharatVsChina” were trending on Twitter.
The Indian strategic community has long recognised China as a threat. The border dispute and Beijing’s efforts to change the facts on the ground by its consistent incursions; its claim over Arunachal Pradesh, particularly Tawang; the large trade deficit; China’s firm support to its “all-weather friend”, Pakistan, now buttressed by the China-Pakistan economic corridor; its efforts to box in India by encouraging regimes hostile to New Delhi in the neighbourhood; its moves to thwart India’s legitimate ambitions (such as permanent membership of the Security Council or entry into the Nuclear Suppliers Group); and its ambitions to establish new style imperialism through the Belt and Road Initiative have all been closely noted and are a part of the institutional memory of the government of India.
But along with this, there is also a recognition of the power asymmetry between the two countries. India’s economy is much weaker; its military and technological capabilities don’t match up to China; its State capacity is more limited; and in the maze that is international politics, China is a more significant player and India cannot rely on partnerships and external bandwagoning. Along with it, India — at this stage of its economic development — needs foreign capital and investment, and deepening economic interdependence with China has been seen as a way to both neutralise the competitive elements and aid Indian development.
The killings of June 15 have suddenly woken a large number of citizens to the fact that Pakistan is an important, but perhaps not the most important, security challenge India confronts. The Chinese willingness to assert itself abroad under President Xi Jinping, and the power differential with India, makes it a more serious adversary. The calls for boycotting Chinese goods may be populist and rooted in ignorance of economic realities but they reflect the emerging mood about China, which is going beyond suspicion to a degree of loathing.
The evolution of public opinion is bound to have an impact on political discourse. And that is why even a prime minister such as Narendra Modi — who has proudly worn the badge of nationalism and presented himself as a security hawk — had to face tough questions, not just from critics but also more independent observers, about his claim on Friday night that there is no external presence in Indian territory. The Prime Minister’s Office, on Saturday, came up with a clarification. But the response to his initial statement is instructive. Indian public opinion is not in the mood to tolerate even the hint of a territorial concession to China anymore.
This, then, will have an impact on the politics of nationalism in India. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) — by disengaging with Pakistan till it acts on terror and through the surgical and air strikes under its term in office — has projected itself as a staunchly nationalist force. But now, it will have to be accountable for its actions on China too. The well-meaning advice to the Opposition not to “politicise” the national security issue may go unheeded, for if the ruling dispensation has benefited from weaponising national security for electoral ends, the Opposition will seek to emulate the same. Expect the BJP to talk about Pakistan, and expect the Opposition to counter it with China from now on. Ladakh 2020 has introduced the China factor into Indian politics. Its consequences will be long-lasting.
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