Does China need India?

-

China and India stepped back from the brink, at least for the moment. But the flare-up in June - and indeed the ongoing tensions - has strained relationships and nudged India closer to the United States. But, not many people in India would readily buy the argument that India should become a member of the Quad (a grouping of United States, Japan, India and Australia for the control of Indo-Pacific) to face-off China. For them, it really means Indian lives and India's prosperity are put in the line for containing China. Despite all the public outrage at China's misbehaviour and even with all the forthcoming bollywood fare trashing China, that would be a hard sell in India.

Indian leaders, despite their almost pagan love for spectacles, are realists. Even though they sell to the public India's impending great power status, they are well aware of the constraints that India's divided polity, widespread poverty and lack of productive manpower impose. For all the transformative politics of the recent years, Indian institutions, particularly its Civil Service, continue to carry around the legacy of slavish acceptance of Anglo-American concepts and resentment towards Anglo-American leadership. Therefore, India is unlikely to join the Anglo-American camp any time soon and despite the overtures, will remain suspicious of the commitments and real intentions of the other members of the Quad.

So, despite the misgivings, India is China's to lose.

It's rather baffling, therefore, why we have had the conflict in June. Barring some unexpected turn in the future, it seems to be totally unintended. Both sides refrained from inflaming the public sentiment too much. The Indian Prime Minister has even made the unexpected statement that there was no incursion by the Chinese and the Chinese have not claimed any incursion by the Indians, making the incident - which claimed the lives of at least 20 Indian soldiers and possibly of as many on the Chinese side - an undisciplined brawl on a dangerous terrain. [This is, of course, highly unlikely. Both the Indian Army and the PLA are highly disciplined entities, so much so that even in the middle of this deadly fight, no one seemed to have drawn the guns they have been carrying or had access to.]

With limited details available so far, there is little point speculating what happened. But to judge by what followed, it seemed neither side wanted a conflict. Aside from making enemies on all fronts, India matters to China, though that point is underappreciated in Beijing. This is not about India's inflated sense of being a superpower in waiting (it's not) or its consumer market (it's vast, but too poor for most foreign companies and a fraction of China's exports), but as the great connector.  Even in the animosity that has built up since 1962 (or even earlier, since 1839 when the Indian sepoys complemented the British gunboats), China has seen India as an agent of West. Take away that resentment and a confident China would see India for what it is: It's China's bridge with the West.

For some who have too much faith in the world of instant information, this may seem dated. The modern China is actually far more economically connected with the West than India and the road from Shanghai to the West certainly doesn't go through Mumbai. But it would be ironic to put too much faith on the integrative power of economic interest just as we live through the decline of 90s style go-go globalization; we know geography and culture strike back ever so often. This is a moment of history, when we speak about 'decoupling' of China and the West. On the same token, this is the time to recognise India's historical role as a great global connector.

By its geography and culture, India sat at the crossroads of the civilisations. It has connected economically and culturally the world of Indian Ocean and that of Silk Roads, and sat at the centre of the world when the busy maritime life of the Indian Ocean was considered. Therefore, China's gamble on Eurasia, resurrection of the historic Silk Route and greater integration of Indian Ocean and the Pacific are all lame without India as a full and willing partner. India just can not be wished away or dismissed if China has to shift the balance away from the Atlantic world and challenge the Anglo-American hegemony. Without India, China will never be fully connected or complete.

One final point: This is not an one-way street and Mumbai needs Shanghai too. India suffers a jealousy of trade and resent the fast growth and power of China, but caught in the Anglo-American idea universe, it makes no attempt to understand China. Chinese history, literature and philosophy are studied in America better than in India. This culture of disengagement is usually blamed on 1962 and on China's closeness to Pakistan, but neither British colonialism nor American indulgences of Pakistan have ever discouraged Indians from seeking out Anglo-American ideas. This needs changing and India's grand strategy - which must involve leveraging its population (more on that in a later post) - must involve knowing about and engaging with China, even if that involves challenging its practices from time to time. It's the other side of the coin: Without China, India may never be prosperous or at peace.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Lord Macaulay's Speech on Indian Education: The Hoax & Some Truths

-
A friend has recently forwarded me a quote from Lord Macaulay's speech in the British Parliament on 2nd February 1835. I reproduce the quote below: "I have traveled across the length and breadth of India and I have not seen one person who is a beggar, who is a thief. Such wealth I have seen in this country, such high moral values, people of such calibre, that I do not think we would ever conquer this country, unless we break the very backbone of this nation, which is her spiritual and cultural heritage, and, therefore, I propose that we replace her old and ancient education system, her culture, for if the Indians think that all that is foreign and English is good and greater than their own, they will lose their self-esteem, their native self-culture and they will become what we want them, a truly dominated nation." The email requested me to forward me to every indian I know. I was tempted, but there were two oddities about this quote. First, the language, which
Read more

Abdicating to Taliban

-
Nations are ideas. We try to fashion them as territories. But how can a river, a mountain ridge or sometimes an imaginary line in the middle of a field can explain the wide division in the lives, thoughts and futures of the people who live on different sides? Nations are not the people too. Indeed, people build nations and become its body. But the soul of the nation is an idea: People come together on an idea to build a nation. While that's what a modern nation is - an idea - and that way exceptionalism is not an American exception, very few nations are as completely defined by an idea as Pakistan. There was hardly any political, geographic or military rationale of Pakistan other than the idea of an Islamic homeland in South Asia. [In that way, the ideological brother of Pakistan in the family of nations is Israel] This, abated by the short term political calculations of some backroom colonialists, created a modern state which must be solely sustained on that singular idea. Religi
Read more

India versus Bharat

-
Image
This post is a reaction to Aatish Taseer's evocative obituary of secular India in the Atlantic ( read here ).  While I agree with it mostly - and share the reservations about the direction and the future of India - I differ with the author on one key aspect: I do not agree with his portrayal of a resurgent Bharat eating up a secular India.  In fact, I believe while Mr Taseer regrets the Indian elite's loss of connection with the realities of day to day life of the country, his very presentation of Bharat and India as oppositional entities stems from that incomprehension. While I understand that he is only using these categories as RSS uses them - to effectively other the English-speaking elites and non-Hindus - I believe it is a mistake to describe the profound changes in contemporary India as the ascendance of Bharat.  I grew up in Bharat. I never learnt English until late in life, when I started working. My growing-up world was one of small-town India, vernacu
Read more

When Does Business Gift Become A Bribe: A Marketing Policy Perspective

-
Introduction : The Business of Gift Giving Business gift giving has always been common and contentious at the same time. Business gifts are usually seen as an ‘advertising, sales promotion and marketing communication medium’ (Cooper et al , 1991). Arunthanes et al (1994) points out that such gifting is practised usually for three reasons: (a) in appreciation for past client relationships, placing a new order, referrals to other clients, etc.; (b) in the hopes of creating a positive, first impression which might help to establish an initial business relationship; and (c) giving may be perceived as a quid Pro quo (i.e. returning a favour or expecting a favour in return for something). The practitioners of gift-giving generally argue that doing business is often an aggregation of personal interactions and relationships, and gift-giving should be seen as a natural way of maintaining and enhancing these relationships. ‘Business gifts, especially one given in the course of the festive s
Read more

The Curious Case of Helen Goddard

-
Image
Today, Helen Goddard, 26, a highly popular music teacher of a City School for Girls, has been sentenced to 15 months in prison. Her crime was to carry out a year long lesbian affair with one of her pupils, who appeared in the court and admitted that the affair was consensual and it was she who pressured Helen into the affair. For Helen, a bright musician and a devout Chistian, this is an extraordinary lapse of judgement. Also, she was teaching in the £13,000 private girls only school in London. She was surely aware what the consequences of her action will be. The fact that she still could not stop herself tells us that lovers do not always act rationally, something we always knew. There is more in this affair than personal tragedies. For a start, this has all the dramatic elements: a bright, beautiful teacher more in Julia Roberts mould [as in Mona Lisa Smile], a stiff upper lip school [not unlike Wellesley] and a story like Notes On A Scandal with an added twist. Indeed, Helen was gui
Read more

‘A World Without The Jews’: Nazi Ideology, German Imagination and The Holocaust[1]

-
Image
Introduction Erna Petri née Kürbs, a farmer’s daughter from Herressen in Thuringia, arrived in Ukraine with her three year old son to join her husband Horst in June 1942. Horst, an SS leader inspired by Nazi ideologue Dr Richard Walter Darré, settled in the plantation of Grzenda, just outside today’s Lviv, to become a German Gentleman-Farmer. Erna saw Horst beating and abusing the workers in the plantation within two days of arriving there, which was, as Horst explained, necessary for establishing authority. Erna joined in enthusiastically, settling into a combination of roles of ‘plantation mistress, prairie Madonna in apron-covered dress lording over slave labourers, infant-carrying, gun-wielding Hausfrau.’ [2] However, there were clear rules in the plantation, and Erna was very much expected to play the woman’s role of being a Cake-and-Coffee hostess. When four Jews were caught in the estate while trying to escape from a transport to a death camp, Horst told Erna and her female
Read more

The Morality of Profit

-
In most societies today, making profits are accepted as moral, if not especially praiseworthy. This was not as obvious as it appears today – people used to be embarrassed about making a profit not so long ago. Crazy as it seems today, it is worth thinking why it was so. Profits, as economists will put it, is the reward for risk-taking, for putting a business enterprise together in the pursuit of an objective. In this definition, remember, profits are not what it is commonly understood to be – the gross middle-line towards the bottom – but a figure net of entrepreneur’s earning [wages for his labour], dividends and interests on borrowed capital, and provisions for building and other physical assets [a sort of rent, offsetting what these assets could have earned if leased out]. This pure profit – surplus – accrues to a business as a reward to its organisation, for the act of entrepreneurship itself. Economists were divided on how this surplus comes about. The conventional wisdom was, as
Read more

The Road to Macaulay: Warren Hastings and Education in India

-
Image
Introduction: Hastings in the history of Indian Education Whether or not one includes Warren Hastings in the history of Education in India is a matter of perspective. If writing the history of education means writing the history of schools, the impact of Hastings' administration would be quite limited. If anything, the rapid implosion of local rulers in Eastern, Southern and Northern India during Hastings' tenure had meant a bleak period for the indigenous education system, as patronage and funds would have dwindled away for many of them. The Company administration really concerned itself with the schooling of the natives only after 1813, as Nurullah and Naik rightly pointed out ( see my earlier post ) and one can legitimately start the story at this point. However, if history of Education in India is to encompass the transformation of Indian Scholarship, on which foundation the new, colonial, system of Education would be built, the story must start with Warren Hast
Read more

A Conversation About Kolkata in the 21st Century

-
Image
A lot of conversations about Kolkata is about its past; I want to talk about its future. Most conversations about Kolkata is about its decline - its golden moments and how times changed; I want to talk about its rise, how its best may lie ahead and how we can change the times. In place of pessimism, I seek optimism; instead of inertia, I am looking for imagination.  It is not about catching up, I am arguing; it is about making a new path altogether. It had, indeed it had, a glorious past: One of the first Asian cities to reach a million population, the Capital of British India, the cradle of an Enlightened Age and a new politics of Cosmopolitanism. And, it had stumbled - losing the hinterland that supplied its Jute factories, overwhelmed by the refugees that came after the partition, devoid of its professional class who chose to emigrate - the City's commercial and professional culture evaporated in a generation, and it transformed into a corrupt and inefficien
Read more

The Road of Macaulay: The Development of Indian Education under British Rule

-
Image
The story of British influence on Indian Education, to which Macaulay's Minutes of 1835 belong, has been told in six distinct phases. Syed Nurullah and J P Naik's very popular and influential History of Indian Education calls these 'six acts' of the drama:  From the beginning of Eighteenth Century to 1813   The British East India Company received its charter in 1600 but its activities did not include any Educational engagement till the Charter Act of 1698, which required the Company to maintain priests and schools, for its own staff and their children. And, so it was until the renewal of its charter in 1813, when the evangelical influence led to insistence of expansion of educational activities and allowing priests back into company territory. From 1813 to Wood's Education Despatch of 1854 The renewal of Charter in 1813 re-opened the debate, which seemed to have been settled in the early years of the company administration, between the Orientalis
Read more

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

AddThis