China Must Learn To Balance Its Relationship With Rising India
By
Colonel Awadhesh Kumar, Special Forces
A year after the skirmish along the LAC of Chinese Occupied Ladhak between China and India, there are a lot of speculation as to how the future relationship between China-India will evolve. Many Western observers believe and hope too that differences between China-India are irreconcilable. They think that the relationship will always remain on opposite sides.
Many Chinese observers feel that the conflict was inevitable as India has begun siding with the West in general and with USA in particular in what for them is essentially a conflict between China and USA for world domination.
A few Indians too believe that, India is a weak nation and should ideally join the US led Western alliance.
They all forget that India is an ancient civilization which has a recorded history of over 7000 years. Till 16th century India controlled a bigger share of the World GDP, over 25% than even China under the Ming Dynasty. The country was under colonialism for just around 200 years. The political leadership which emerged in 1947 was too idealistic especially on aspects of international behaviour. Now after some 75 years, the current leadership has matured and knows that we need to be strong not only Nationally but also assert ourselves internationally.
Both USA and China must realize that India cannot be dominated by either of them and that both should give up their dream of World domination. India was always a balancing factor with its leadership of the Non Aligned Countries, even during the Cold war between the West and Soviet Union. India is now growing in strength and stature and quite soon will be the third pole on its own. In fact India always favours a multipolar world with other powers like Russia,Japan,Brazil, France, Germany, South Africa, Egypt and Indonesia among others.
So the entire World must understand that India can be friends with both China and USA but will never be any one’s lackey. The Indo Russian friendship is a shiny example of friendship based on equality. India will never get in a position to meet the expectations of others, in fact it has been conducting its independent foreign policy right from 1947. No one should even dream of coercing a country with size and population of India or making it a junior partner in any alliance. In fact till date India has never been part of alliances of any kind.
Though just like China did in the days of Deng –Nixon for the sake of it’s modernization, India too can have greater partnership with the US and the West for shaping the future of the World. In fact India has friendship and balanced relationship with Israel on one hand and host of Arab Countries on the other. We maintain good relationship with both USA and Iran, Argentina and UK and so forth.
The world today has Many blocks of Countries with their similar views of world politics. Each block is actively trying to shape the global order. The world will always have such diverse sets of ideas on how to organize societies. However the important thing for India is to prevent these differences from being turned into a cause for conflict. India will ensure that there are collective solutions to various differences and these take place under the aegis of an impartial United Nations.
So it will be in the interest of China that it vacates all occupied territory belonging to India and should also arrive at a negotiated and marked Indo Tibetan border in Ladhak at the earliest. There also has to be a negotiated and marked China Tibet border on the Himalayan Plateau. Freedom to the Tibetans can be discussed at a later stage.
