India and US agree to disagree on China, too

New Delhi

22 May 2011

A "national consensus across the board" was required on whether China is "a threat or is [it] a neighbour that we can go along with", former national security adviser MK Narayanan had posed three years ago, delivering the 25th Air Chief Marshal PC Lal Memorial Lecture here.

Much water has flown down the Brahmaputra since then, but China has remained reluctant to resolve the boundary question. There is no explicit agreement on the issue of stapled visa, either. China's foray into Pakistan-occupied-Kashmir (PoK) has further roiled the Sino-Indian discourse, all of which forced New Delhi to tweak the Dragon's tail, first by feting Nobel Laureate Liu Xiaobo in Norway, and then by omitting any reference to one-China from the joint statement issued towards the end of Premier Wen Jiabao's visit here in December 2010.

Today, just when New Delhi was coming around to the view that its relationship with Beijing was indeed "adversarial" in many respects, and, therefore, it required to be handled with prudence and firmness, comes sobering news from an American official and an academic that only reinforces what Admiral Robert Willard, head of the US Pacific Command, had said during his visit here in September 2010.

The Admiral had told journalists that the US shared India's concerns about China's assertiveness and its presence in PoK, but while "any change in military relations or military manoeuvres by China that raises concerns of India" could certainly be considered as occurring within his area of responsibility, India will have to tackle its issues on its own.

Michael Auslin from the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, told this correspondent in New Delhi that the issues of stapled visa and Jammu and Kashmir were problems between India on the one hand and China and Pakistan on the other, unlike the South China Sea, which was a global common. Auslin noted that the contours of US-China ties had of late changed from "engage, then hedge" to "hedge, then engage."

A further indication of where Washington stood on India's core issues was provided by an American official who insisted that the US-China relations was neither an either/or case nor a friend-or-foe choice. This official said it was "only natural" that as China rises, it becomes assertive; that "confrontation is not inevitable", and both the US and China had much to gain from cooperation than conflict.

By India's own admission, the challenge of fashioning a coherent China policy is made difficult by the cold reality, brought home after Osama bin Laden's killing, that Pakistan's strategic value to the US will likely remain; India was alone in its fight against terrorism, and that Washington could not be expected to fight New Delhi's battles.

Save for former US national security adviser Gen James Jones (Retd)'s remark about how lucky the US was to have Prime Minister Manmohan Singh who took "personal risk along the Pakistani-Indian border to make sure that there's no provocation", there has been no recompense for India or the 26/11 victims.

The dissonance between India and the US also extends to Afghanistan and Iran. India's abstention on Libya vote, and rejection of US aircraft from a multi-billion dollar tender, have accentuated the divergences.