The recent thaw in the chill that had enveloped India-China ties after the Doklam and Galwan military stand-offs is welcome. However, extreme caution is needed so as not to conflate a tactical signal to Washington, seemingly reneging on a three-decade-long maturing partnership, with a strategic recalibration of Sino-Indian relations.
We would like to believe that the bilateral meeting between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and President Xi Jinping at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit in Tianjin last month was the beginning of this strategic recalibration. But, a handshake does not a détente make. Our argument, as elaborated in our recent book, Everything All At Once: India and the Six Simultaneous Global Transitions, is that it is in India’s national interest to work towards an accommodation with China, irrespective of the state of India’s relations with the US.
With regard to the future of Sino-Indian relations, there is universal acceptance of the axiom that the best foreign policy for India is to accelerate its economic growth and achieve technological self-reliance. But another proposition, that China is India’s perennial adversary and the US-led west its lodestar, is not just naive but dangerous, and decades behind the emergent global reality. It is perhaps the inter-generational vested interest of the Indian elite with its familial, kinship and socioeconomic ties with the west (especially the English-speaking parts)—rather than a profound love for liberal democracy—which we suspect is at least in part preventing the necessary and out-of-the-box thinking on the issue.
The fact is that the global superpower on the ascent is our northern neighbour and it is imperative we craft our strategic engagement with it—and the rest of the world—accordingly.
India has the opportunity to work with China to leverage the ongoing transition of the global centre of gravity from the Transatlantic back to the Asia Pacific, after a 200-year blip. If the opportunity is seized, it would help lift millions into an era of sustained prosperity and ecological security. India should explore all options to create a partnership with China for forging a grand coalition of the Global South, which could design the contours of a new geoeconomic global order. Naturally, as a vibrant democracy, India must also simultaneously continue its engagement with mature western democracies.
To define our strategic foreign policy, therefore, the long view is essential. Especially if we want to avoid massive societal upheaval in the years ahead. Given disruptions on the anvil because of rapid and unregulated deployment of frontier technologies and the potentially devastating impact of climate change, India will need to design and execute its own model of development and not rely on any imported ideology irrespective of the garb in which it may be offered.
The era of major and intermediate powers like China and India, respectively, being assimilated into a western model of political society and economic order is well and truly over. China has shaped this reality thanks to a CAGR over 30 years (1990-2020) of about 10 per cent, resulting in its rise as an economic behemoth, global leader in frontier technologies and significant military power. Notably, its share of the world economy, at 19 per cent, is already bigger than the US’s 15 per cent.
An India with serious economic heft and enhanced comprehensive national power will be empowered to deal with all major powers, of which there are likely to be only two globally in the foreseeable future—the US and China. Thus, the real decoupling needed is perhaps of Sino-Indian relations from the US-India relationship.
The combined GDP of the (expanded) BRICS countries, which has been the primary target of Trump’s line of ire, is now larger than the combined GDP of the G7 and the EU. Therefore, India, could profitably work with China on enlarging BRICS footprint across the global geoeconomic institutional space.
China is well ahead of the US in a majority of frontier technologies and is actively harnessing them for raising living standards. Facilitating technology transfer from Chinese firms while safeguarding our security goals could be complementary to achieving technological atmanirbharta. A blanket ban on Chinese investments that embody advanced technologies for reasons of national security is akin to using a big hammer to kill a fly—it results in damage without achieving its objective.
Modi made the improvement of bilateral relations with China a central plank of his foreign policy when he took office in 2014. The Chinese welcomed him as Gujarat’s chief minister in October 2011, when the west was actively marginalising him. The Xi’an bilateral summit in 2015, within months of Modi becoming prime minister, was hugely symbolic as Xi’an has one of the biggest repositories of Indian civilisational texts in China. So, we need to dispassionately examine why the prime minister’s strategic agenda of constructively engaging with China has been derailed.
An effective working relationship between India and China can serve as the keel for navigating the turbulent geoeconomic and geopolitical transitions that are now upon us. The two Asian powers could lead a powerful coalition of the Global South to put in place a new global order, which will eventually be binding on the currently more powerful countries as well. India would thereby play an exalted role in preventing the global order from slipping into complete chaos, unilateral bullying and unpredictable outcomes.
Thus, in engaging effectively with China, India will not only serve its interests but also help the global community in successfully addressing the enormous challenges global transitions pose. Would this not be a worthy objective, even if it implies both sides being creative with some of their respective red lines for the time being? Such an approach will ensure that the 21st century is, indeed, Asia’s century. Surely, this is the historical task facing us today.
Rajiv Kumar is chairman, and Ishan Joshi is director (partnerships & programmes), Pahle India Foundation.