India and China: Friends or Foes?  

Professor M D Nalapat

Director, School of Geopolitics,

Manipal Academy of Higher Education

That India and China share several historical experiences and geopolitical attributes is a truism. Both are large, populous and underdeveloped Asian countries with a shared heritage of colonization. Equally, both have cultures that have endured in essentials for millennia. In India there are the related concepts of karma and dharma. While "karma" refers to the effects of the accumulated genetic memory of the past, "dharma" means the actions that need to flow from a concrete - and current situation. If it is accepted that the India, US, China triangle is potentially among the most significant in the emerging international security landscape, then the equation between China and India can be characterized as "karmic" while that between India and the US is "dharmic". In other words, while the past has created powerful undercurrents of chemistry between the two Asian neighbors, the needs of the present are driving the US and India into a new relationship. A discussion on the India-China equation cannot be divorced from the interaction of both countries with the US.

Formal presentations at the UN emphasize "international norms". The reality is that such a concept exists only in theory. Iraq is an egregious example. If Saddamite Iraq was a dictatorship, it was not more so than the rule of the Al Sauds next door. If his country was suspected to be in possession of Weapons of Mass Destruction, then North Korea is known to be having stocks of WMD. And unlike Saddamite Iraq, which had no record of transferring its offensive capabilities across its frontiers, Pyongyang routinely sells missiles and other manufactures for cash. If Iraq in the time of Saddam was a dictatorship, so too are several countries across the globe that the US, Britain and Australia have cordial and profitable relations with. There was no international "norm" that Saddam Hussein broke that has not been similarly discarded by a slew of regimes across the world .

At various times and in different ways, different countries have raised the specter of "breakage of international norms and conventions". For example, the expropriation of some of the land forcibly taken over by settlers from the UK in Zimbabwe has been met with calls for sanctions and boycotts. If history is taken with an Asian sweep (of thousands, rather than hundreds, of years), then the land grab in Robert Mugabe's country dwindles into insignificance when compared with the takeover of land from the indigenous people of the Americas and Australia. In most of the countries that were thus invaded, the native populations were reduced through conflict. In some cases, especially in South America, they were exterminated. However, as yet there has been no call for international sanctions against Guatemala, for example, or a special session of the UN Security Council to discuss the question of the return of land to the indigenous populations of Australia.

Through the 1980s as well as the 1990s, the European Union, China and the United States joined together to attempt to force India and Pakistan to "cap, reduce and then eliminate" their nuclear weapon capability. If any similar effort was being directed against three other countries known to be "a few screwdriver turns away" from nuclear weapons capability - Germany, Japan and Israel - the same has not been reported. A norm to be regarded as such must by definition be universal. If such a criterion is followed, the reality is that there are no international norms. There are reasons and excuses selectively trotted out to justify actions that are often based on other interests. While the Peoples Republic of China (PRC) has assimilated this in its international policies, India is still under the influence of the Nehruvian mindset, in which was should be gets confused with what is. While New Delhi is now seeking to re-invent its foreign policy on the basis of real-politik, the handicaps it faces are:

(1) Incomplete and often inaccurate knowledge of the relevant environment and

(2) a continuing tendency to go back to the "first principles" of Nehruvian policy approaches when confronted with difficult choices. Had there been a genuine adherence to defined "international norms" by the major players, then New Delhi would have been able to navigate its way far more capably than Beijing has done .

The reason for this is that India has de facto adhered to most of the declared "international norms". New Delhi has not transferred missile or nuclear technology across its borders, nor even less lethal defense equipment. In its efforts to overcome the obstacles placed by the Nuclear Suppliers Group, successive governments in India have sought technology alternatives that are legal, rather than follow the example of countries that have clandestinely acquired such knowledge and materiel. The civil services in India are a powerful factor behind such adherence to the path of Virtue. The permanent bureaucracy has acted as a guarantor of "responsible" behavior, with the result that India obeys the rules even in treaties that it has itself not signed, as in the case of the Non-proliferation treaty. In the case of the PRC, the situation is reversed. De jure acceptance does not always mean de facto compliance. Especially in the post-1989 period, a complex network of entities and affiliates have been created that are legally independent of the state, but which in actuality base their decisions on signals from within any of the various institutions controlled by the Chinese Communist Party. This pragmatic focus on national interest is absent in India, where very often, rhetoric gets passed off as policy, as in the case of several elements and phases in diplomacy with Pakistan.

In aviation, a headwind creates drag while a tailwind helps momentum. The collapse of the USSR in 1991 was seen as a catastrophe for New Delhi, whose embassy in Moscow was the only one in that capital to welcome the attempted 1989 coup against Mikhail Gorbachev. Thanks to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, India was given an alternative source of military materiel that compensated for the generous US and PRC deliveries to Islamabad, as well as helped by a USSR veto several times in the UN Security Council. After the CPSU got ousted from power, the earlier association with it of New Delhi became an impediment in continuing close ties with Moscow. Despite India being one of the top three purchasers of Russian military equipment, and New Delhi being the only country not to have repudiated its debt with the USSR, relations with India are no longer the priority for Moscow that they were during the decades of the Cold War. In contrast, relations between Russia and China have bloomed, with Moscow becoming the primary source of supply for the modernization of the Peoples Liberation Army.

During the 1980s, China began to rapidly overtake India in economic indicators. Today, the PRC is within a ten-year distance of being the core of a geopolitical pole that could potentially include Japan, Korea, Taiwan and most of the ASEAN countries. Unlike in the case of the European interaction with Asia during the previous five centuries, when military conquest became the means through which commercial exploitation could intensify, in the case of the PRC, it is commerce that is driving the integration of its neighbors into a Common Market and geopolitical zone. The economics of setting up subsidiaries on the Mainland, combined with the potential of the internal market in a country where the population is slowly getting over its earlier obsession with saving and joining the consumerist society, are both working to soften strategic rivalry with the PRC. Despite the DPP and the emergence of the Chen administration in Taipei, the undertow for relations between Taiwan and the PRC are positive. In the same way, the relative importance of the PRC and the US is changing in the calculus of South Korea, and over the next decade, a similar process may take place with Japan as well. Should a PRC-Japan-Korea-Taiwan economic zone get formed with links to most of the ASEAN states, then the impact would be immediate on the only part of Asia that thus far has remained grossly undertapped, Siberia. This vast territory would become the natural hinterland of the new PRC-centered geopolitical pole, and over time migration will create a greater congruence between its population and that of its neighbors.

Given the following factors:

(a) Continuation of robust growth rates on the Mainland

(b) Absence of conflict with Taiwan and

(c) A solution to the problem of the Pyongyang regime, within 2015 the prospects are for the PRC to emerge as the core of one of the three geopolitical poles in the world.

The other would be one that emerged with the operationalizing of the Euro in 2000, the European Union. While analysts constantly refer to the "speed bumps" that are waiting to be faced by China, few pay equal attention to the immense gamble that the Franco-German alliance has taken, that of tying the continuance of prosperity in West Europe to the success of the East European economies and societies. Helmut Kohl attempted to force-feed East Germany into quickly reaching the infrastructural standards of its western sister, rather than embark on a policy that took advantage of the lower labor and other costs there. Similarly, West European investors in East Europe have been attempting to duplicate the social infrastructure found in their own societies, in the expectation that the population of the countries of East Europe will very quickly become as productive as that in the West. Should the mindset and the negative educational baggage of the past found in East Europe prove more difficult to alter, then the European Union may find itself seeing its share in world trade get reduced, as consumers in the Middle East and in East Asia give less weightage to the "Made in Europe" brand premium. In contrast to Europe, the US is shopping for brains and partners wherever it can find them. Thus the US is looking to the PRC for the provision of several varieties of goods, and to India for a range of services. In contrast, the European Union is focused on its own continent to power itself for the future.

While historically India had had good relations with Moscow, today it is Beijing that is more important to Russia. The question is the future of Vladimir Putin's effort to anchor Russia firmly in Europe, eventually as part of the (Greater) European Union. The odds do not favor his success in this "St Petersburg" strategy. For one the "Old EU" will have no resources to spare for the development of infrastructure in Russia, given the costs of absorption of the East European countries into the alliance. Secondly, in a geopolitical context, the entry of Russia into the core of Europe would sharply dilute the importance of both France and Germany. There is therefore likely to be resistance from the Franco-German alliance to Russia being allowed a position in Europe higher than at the periphery. Such rejection may lead to a closer Russian engagement with the PRC and its partners, especially in the development of its Far East. Thus, the prospects for a Sino-Russian alliance based on economic factors is high. In such a process, India will lose its own special relationship with a Moscow that even today is seeking to leapfrog over New Delhi and establish closer ties with PRC ally Pakistan. Competing geopolitical interests vis-à-vis Russia will be a point of friction between New Delhi and Beijing .

Returning however to the theme of geopolitical "poles", there is little doubt that the European Union, with France and Germany at its core, is developing into the second geopolitical pole within the international order, next to that centered on the US. As for the success of this grouping, apart from the costs involved in attempting to raise infrastructural and other standards in the east to levels elsewhere, another "speed bump" will be the ability of the EU countries to keep pace with the US in the emerging slew of knowledge-based industries. This is a problem that is being faced by the PRC and Japan as well, when manufactures and declining in importance relative to services. In contrast, India - which has been a laggard in manufacturing - is showing high rates of growth in new industries, such as Information Technology, IT-enabled services and biotechnology, including pharmaceuticals. In such sectors, the relationship between India and China is competitive, while that between the US and India is complementary .

The imposition of the Euro has been an experiment based less on logic than on hope. The problem for the future is that a common currency has been implemented in countries without a common government and only a thinly-coordinated monetary policy. Should growth levels remain low or negative and unemployment rise, the temptation in most of the Eurozone economies to regain full control over monetary policy may work to destroy the Euro experiment. However given the continuation of European economic and political integration, the EU will be the other superpower by 2010, followed by the PRC and its economic hinterland by around 2015. Confronted with such a process, the options for India are few. New Delhi is not welcome in Europe nor crucial in East Asia. Thus the only option left would be a closer engagement with the US, which is developing linkages across the board with the modern sectors of the Indian economy.

While social scientists decry mention of zero-sum solutions, the reality is that win-win results have historically been rarer than win-lose outcomes. At present, the dual track of India-China engagement and that of India-US engagement are running parallel to each other. However, after a while, they will begin to diverge. It will be at this point that tensions will get created and choices need to be made. Using a historical analogy, through the second half of the 1970s and much of the 1980s, the PRC was able to get the benefit of the "headwind" created by US strategic rivalry with the USSR. The end of that conflict has left not India but China as the major loser, in that there is no longer any need for Washington to develop Beijing as a counterweight to Moscow. Instead, strategists in Washington are now talking of India being assisted as a counterweight to the PRC, thus looking at ways to provide "headwind" to New Delhi the way a similar benefit was provided to the PRC from the mid-1970s to the end-1990s .

The US approach towards China will have a considerable impact on India-China relations, in that strategic rivalry between Beijing and Washington would enhance the value for both countries of an alliance with India .An India linked in a military alliance to the US - especially if it participates in any implicit security cover for Taiwan - would impact heavily and negatively on the PRC's security calculus. In a worst-case scenario of conflict between the PRC and Taiwan/US across the Straits, other fronts that could be heated up to create diversions for the PLA would include the Himalayas and the Viet Nam border. North Korea - were that entity still to exist - would act as a buffer preventing the Korea front too from heating up, a factor that makes Beijing's acquiescence in a US-inspired strategy of regime change in Pyongyang improbable. Should India maintain its current military neutrality between the PRC and the US, the absence of the need to devote resources to the long frontier between the two countries would strengthen the PLA's ability to apply enough pressure on Taiwan to force a reversion to the status quo ante bellum, assuming a conflict predicated on a declaration of independence by Taipei. Future needs and dangers therefore mandate a greater PRC effort to keep India in the "neutral" box, if not as an ally. In particular, any defense-related alliance between Washington and New Delhi would be harmful to Beijing's security interests in a way in which the US-Pakistan defense relationship has not been. Unlike India, Pakistan does not have the means to challenge the PRC conventionally. Ironically, the only way that Islamabad would be able to pose a threat to Beijing would be to use its (PRC-supplied) missile and nuclear weaponry against Mainland targets, an unlikely scenario even in the worst-case situation of a fully jehadized Pakistan. Both "Crusader" and "Hindu" targets would be the focus of such a regime, rather than China.

Just as India will face a choice between selected linkages with China as opposed to those with the US, China will need to confront the negative impact on ties with India of its "all weather" relationship with the Pakistan army. Born out of a common antipathy to New Delhi that got intensified in China after the 1959 installation of the Dalai Lama's "Tibetan Government in Exile" in India and the 1962 border hostilities, there has grown a complex web of relationships between the Pakistan armed forces and the PRC. This covers cooperation in intelligence-gathering and covert activity. The Pakistan armed forces are known to have elements active in the trade in narcotics, and there is collaboration between them and similar individuals and entities in Myanmar that are in contact with the PLA. The missile and nuclear program in Pakistan is the beneficiary of substantial Chinese help. Just as New Delhi's indulgence towards the Dalai Lama - though on an entirely different scale - negatively impacts on the security environment of the PRC, so does the assistance given to Pakistan create difficulties for India. Unlike in the past, when the United States - and that reliable friend and creator of Pakistan, the United Kingdom - gave far less attention to capping Islamabad's nuclear and missile capability than was done to India's homegrown program, these days that situation has got reversed. The closeness of segments of the Pakistan army with Talibanised elements has given an impetus to US efforts to block Islamabad from improving on its existing nuclear and missile capability. Russia, North Korea and China are the primary sources for technology in such fields, and today the US is in sync with India's security concerns by attempting to stop cross-border proliferation of technology and materiel. In contrast, as yet the PRC is continuing with its robust program of assistance to Pakistan. This is likely to lead to more suggestions that Beijing abide by "international norms" that disfavor such activity. Much more than in the case of India vis-à-vis the US, Pakistan is an obstacle to closer India-China cooperation if the present flow of China-to-Pakistan assistance in the development of its nuclear and missile capabilities continues .

Looked at pragmatically, the rewards of a deeper engagement with India are far greater than the benefits of a continued strategic linkage with Pakistan at the existing level. The effort to "contain" India within a South Asia box by enhancing Pakistani capability has failed. Despite the negative effects of a reactionary and gerontocratic administration in New Delhi that has as its objective electoral victory in the two (extremely backward) Indian states of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar rather than any coherent vision or strategy for overall national interest, the natural expansion of modern sectors of the Indian economy has given New Delhi a lever that is being used to deepen engagement with ASEAN. The increasing strategic divergence between Washington and Beijing has resulted in a change in attitudes towards India by several Middle Eastern powers, as well as Australia and Japan. Thus the Vajpayee government has been extremely fortunate in inheriting a favorable external environment, in contrast to previous regimes that had to deal with hostility not merely from China and Pakistan, but from the US as well, and this at a time when the USSR was no more. It is only towards the end of the 1990s that perceptions about India changed. The 1997 Hong Kong handover and the resultant outflow of Chinese pride at reclaiming their territory from an alien ruler - even though they themselves were under an unelected regime – and the contemporary emergence of IT in India both worked to make more obvious the gulf between the long-term geopolitical interests of the US and that of China. While this gulf is a challenge for the PRC, for India it represents an opportunity.  

How did the joy of the Chinese people worldwide at the Hong Kong handover result in a change in the strategic perception about the PRC? It did so by making clear that the Chinese people did not need to wait for a democratic polity in the Mainland before experiencing the nationalistic fervor that flowed from success of their country. Those voices that claimed that the Chinese people were sullenly awaiting "deliverance" (as the population of Poland or Romania actually did in the 1980s) became less strident, while the simplistic belief that greater economic progress would lead to a greater internal push for democratization became discredited. So long as the Chinese Communist Party maintains the social compact is has forged with the Mainland population, of ensuring a steady increase in prosperity, economic opportunity and the expansion of personal space (as for example the right to travel and migrate), the expectation that the country's economic success would lead inevitably to pressures for political reform seems to be dimming. Even in Europe, one of the most educated populations – that in Germany - went along with a regime infinitely more repressive than that in today's China, ignoring several noxious policies such as the anti-Jewish edicts in the glow created by increasing prosperity during the later part of the 1930s.In Portugal and Spain, not to mention Poland or Czechoslovakia, the authoritarian structures imploded from within or went through a reasonably orderly transition rather than suddenly collapse as the result of popular unrest. Had a Saddam Hussein-style regime got established somehow in the UK, it is anybody's guess whether the British people would have fought the tyrants more effectively than the French did the Germans throughout the Occupation years (1940-44).The Chinese people cannot be expected to be different . However, the end of the illusion of Democracy Creep in the PRC has meant a more overt airing of the strategic divergence between the PRC and the US. Here, India has a policy that is very different, in that regime change has never been a focus for Indian foreign policy except in two instances that took place during the period when Rajiv Gandhi was Prime Minister. These were the "moral, political and diplomatic" support given to the democratic movements in Pakistan during the Zia days in the 1980s,and the backing given to those forces in Nepal that sought to convert the then-absolutist monarchy into a constitutional one. In the case of China, national security circles in New Delhi have never indicated an interest in a change in the system of governance in that Great Power, a stand that is in contrast to that adopted by several such individuals and entities in the US, which seek a "democratic" China in place of the present Communist state. This neutrality between competing political systems - in opposition to "international norms" that favor democracy - is a factor making for improved relations between New Delhi and Beijing. However, to this factor has to be balanced India's reaching out to two of the PRC's close allies, Myanmar and Thailand, both countries that are regarded by Indian geopoliticians as having more of an affinity with India than with China .

If the presence of the US in Asia is seen as an obstacle to the development of strategic linkages between several countries in the continent and the PRC, then similarly such ties with the PRC may be perceived by New Delhi as factors needing to be eliminated through closer engagement with India. While in the economic sphere, New Delhi is as yet the minnow as compared with the PRC, in the strategic sphere - especially if there is an India-US military alliance - India looms large in the region, with a muscular blue-water navy, proven missile and weapons capabilities, and a professional army and air force with experience of operation in hostile environments. Despite the Nehruvian flavor of the Vajpayee government, India is slowly moving away from a policy of disengagement into actively seeking to forge close defense-related ties with its ASEAN neighborhood. A beginning has been made in Singapore that could be followed up elsewhere, culminating in a situation in which India acts as a supplier, trainer and a refit base for ASEAN armed services. This would not be welcome in Beijing, but would generate both hard currency as well as geopolitical rewards for New Delhi .

To sum up on the question of international norms, the first point is that there are none. They increase in relevance and enforceability pari passu with the degree of power projection possible. Today, the rules of the international game are changing in India's favor, with both Terrorism (no matter what its "root" causes) as well as Authoritarianism becoming foci of negative attention by the US and some other powers. Both have replaced the earlier obsession with the USSR, a period that generated significant benefits for the PRC. Today, those seeking to battle Communism in the US have only Cuba, North Korea, Viet Nam and the PRC to contend with. Of these four states, only the PRC has the capability to pose a geostrategic challenge to the US. Thus, it is the only country in this list that requires a long-term strategy o the part of those ideologically opposed to Communism. In the days when it was believed that economic expansion would ipso facto generate pressures for democratization, this lobby was largely silenced. The failure of China's robust economic expansion to create a similar development of elected structures has resulted in a multiplication of the voices calling for what can be described as a strategy of constraining China that puts in place a system for prevention of high-technology, defense-related equipment to the Mainland without crafting the quarantine that was imposed on the USSR. The PRC is a low-price provider of goods to the US that ensures that the inflation rate for the US consumer remains low hence the low probability of a policy of containment of the PRC.A policy of constrainment would be between the two competing ends of containment and engagement. While geopolitical tensions with the US are a negative for the PRC, the situation is reversed for India, which can be the beneficiary of some of the effects of such friction between the two giants across the Pacific.

Whether it is the practice of democracy or the avoidance of supply of missile and nuclear technology, or simply the development of non-polluting industry, India can be expected to increasingly be on the side of the angels, while China remains outside. While during the time when self-determination for Kashmir and non-proliferation of nuclear weapon technology to India were the mantras, New Delhi was the object of sustained coercive diplomacy by the US, and the EU, today North Korea and the rest of the "Axis of Evil" are the focus of US attention. The PRC's defense-related ties with most of the countries that are now targets of Washington's attention makes it vulnerable to a similar effort, one that may be expected to pick up steam as the extent of interlinkage becomes difficult to keep from the US public. There is therefore a reversal of roles between Beijing and New Delhi in the emerging international landscape, which is turning out to be very different from what was the situation during 1975-99 . If the passing by the German Reichstag of the "Law for the Prevention of Distress of the German People" in 1933 marked the end of the relevance of parliamentary structures in the governance of that country, the unanimous passage of resolution 1483 by the UN Security Council has resulted in the banishment into irrelevance of the UN system. The resolution gives unfettered power to the US and the UK over the people of Iraq for an indefinite length of time. After 1483, the concept of "state sovereignty" in international relations has been shown to be non-existent in practice. Before this blow, the unilateral actions by powerful countries, including the NATO intervention in Yugoslavia and the several French armed forays into Africa have indicated that the period when it was judged politically incorrect to subdue by the use of brute force is over. When Britain, France and Israel attempted to establish their control of the canal by force in1954, the US chided them, just as it did the forays of the USSR into Czechoslovakia in 1968 and Afghanistan in 1979.Today,NATO has adopted as valid for itself the powers of intervention that inhered in the USSR as a consequence of the Warsaw Pact, powers that NATO regards itself morally justified in exercising anywhere in the globe, subject only to its own subjective interpretation of what constitutes a "threat to international peace and stability". The only check recognized by it would be countervailing military force that would raise the cost of conflict to a level unacceptable to the Alliance .

On each occasion when New Delhi has intervened militarily in another country, it has done so either under the UN flag or as a result of the request of the government of that country - as in Sri Lanka and the Maldives. It has been more reticent about intervention than the PRC, which launched a battle of "punishment" against India in 1962 and against Viet Nam in 1979. However, since then the PRC has followed a policy that emphasizes Butter rather than Guns as methods of persuasion. Such diplomacy is proving to be very effective in China's neighborhood. As already stated, should an absence of conflict in the region continue together with the PRC's robust economic performance, China is likely to emerge as one of the three geopolitical poles in the new world order, together with the US and the EU. In the case of India, the country is still suffering from the negative overhang of past policies, while even today, much of the decision-making structure remains infected with a Cold War hangover that protects inefficient (but cash-doling) local enterprises from competition .

Thus, by reason of an improving geopolitical environment in the case of India and a powerful economic and military infrastructure in the case of China, both countries are likely to remain immune to the new activism of NATO, even though there may be tensions created by intervention in nearby areas. Rather than the UN or the system of so-called international law (which has failed to prevent any major power from acting for its own advantage), only the internal strength of India, China and the countries allied to either can deter attempts at taking over sovereignty the way that this has taken place in Kosovo and Iraq. Just as in practice "international norms" do not exist, neither does "state sovereignty". While in the past China has been the more adept at recognizing and dealing with this reality, today India is attempting to follow the PRC in adopting an approach that looks after its interests in a world in which talk of principles remains mere talk. The shared experience with colonization of both countries can act as glue binding together their approaches to efforts by NATO to continue on the path of the former USSR in using military force to confront a hostile political reality. This is on the assumption that New Delhi itself does not join a new alliance such as an "Asian NATO", which links selected countries of Asia together with the US and Canada in a military alliance that shares facilities and technology. Should such a "North America Asia Treaty Organization" get formed, then India may join its other partners in future conflicts, as for example in the Middle East, or in the defense of allies of NATO.

Since the Deng Era of the 1980s, China has followed a pragmatic policy that avoided the earlier recourse to force. Should Beijing continue such a course, and make clear that Butter rather than Guns are its weapon of choice, the rewards in the form of enhanced goodwill and closer engagement in the region will be high. Only a China that is perceived as aggressive in intent would be a motivating factor for a new military alliance. If the threat of force were taken off the table, there would no longer be the incentive for such a new security alliance in Asia. Contrarily, were such an alliance to be considered necessary to deal with the prospect of conflict, India's role in it would be substantial .

Within the UN system and the other elements of the Emergent international order, India is way down on the totem pole. New Delhi is outside the UNSC, the NPT, the CTBT and numerous other constructs. Unlike China, India has little to lose and much to gain in a refashioning of the international order. A new UNSC may see India join perhaps Brazil, South Africa, Germany and Japan as Permanent Members. The demise of the CTBT and the NPT would be cheered rather than mourned by New Delhi. While the Vajpayee government's Nehruvian fixation prevents it from factoring in the lowly position of India in the UN while making policy (thus, for example, leading to the efforts by New Delhi to make a UN in which it itself is a marginal player the central authority in Iraq), future governments are less likely to be subject to such nostalgia. The Emergent Order that held sway from 1975-99 served China's interests well and India's hardly at all. A new order may, if not reverse the situation, serve New Delhi's interests better. During the period when it was at the receiving end on Kashmir and Nonproliferation, New Delhi would have noted that Beijing was as insistent as Washington and London that make concessions to Islamabad on the first issue, and surrender its deterrent on the second. Indeed, Beijing was the prime mover behind UNSC Resolution 1172, which sought to punish New Delhi for its 1998 nuclear tests. The PRC has also been unhelpful in efforts to win India a place among the permanent members of the UNSC, or to join organizations such as APEC .

The decline in the standing and effectiveness of current international organizations adversely affects China, which has a privileged position in most of them. In contrast, New Delhi's claim to parity with other Great Powers has not been recognized in any of the present complex of international institutions. Thus, so far as the institutions of the international order are concerned, while China favors the status quo, India is likely to benefit from a shift in the composition and the rules f the major international institutions. It is only since the mid-1990s that the country – now that it has begun making a few steps away from Nehruvian doctrine - has been visible on the radar of putative players in the higher echelons of the international order. Whether it is the NPT, the UN system, the CTBT or other such treaties and institutions, the US-led reform process is good news for India, a country that has thus far been put at the fringe of such institutions, together with Botswana, Burundi and Fiji.

Despite the Vajpayee government's fixation on the UN (except where it is a question of issues in which India is directly involved, such as Kashmir), the reality is that if "multilateralism" is defined as working through the present UN system, then India has little voice. Only a "multilateralism" that comprises of an alliance between India and selected other states can ensure an arena in which New Delhi gets the voice that its size and potential entitle it to.

In what direction will this alliance move? Will it be with China and Russia, thus creating a triad that dominates the Eurasian landmass? Will it be with the US, in part as a counter to the spreading influence of the PRC in Southeast Asia? Will it be with countries such as South Africa and Brazil, to jointly confront the present "haves" and move forward a process of integration of these three powers in their club? It cannot be forgotten that the political leadership in India has a proven penchant for disastrous decisions. In 1942,when the Japanese armed forces were at the frontiers of India and the Germans had overrun much of European Russia, Mahatma Gandhi destroyed much of the goodwill in the democratic world for the Indian freedom struggle by declaring that he was neutral between the Axis and the Allies. Subsequently, London initiated a policy of covert help to the Muslim League that by 1947 vivisected India. In 1962, New Delhi ignored the warning signals from Beijing and launched a "forward policy" that provoked a PLA riposte which humiliated the underfunded Indian army. In the 1970s the ASEAN countries were ignored as much as the Middle East has been by the current BJP-led government. In August 2003, New Delhi publicly spurned Washington's request to send an army division into Iraq, thus creating an opportunity that is now being exploited by the permanent members of the UNSC. The record does not hold out much hope for a policy framework that serves Indian interests in the manner that the policy framework developed by the CCP serves the PRC's. However, the checks and balances of democracy may operate to moderate the negative impact of the social, economic and foreign policy pursued by the current administration in India . 

In sum:

(1) the present international situation is developing in a way favorable to India, analogous to the way that the mid-1970s saw the situation change in a way beneficial to the PRC. Conversely, the present situation is seeing the US look negatively on several regimes that are close to Beijing, whether overtly (as in the case of Pyongyang) or in effect (as is the case with Islamabad). The transmission of missile and nuclear technology is also being subjected to much greater scrutiny than before.

(2) While China would benefit from the status quo, India as a "have not" power would be likely to gain from a change in the international order.

(3) Modern sectors of the Indian economy, as well as migration trends, favor a close linkage with the US rather than the PRC. However, the Nehruvian mindset of policymakers may create a situation in which such geopolitical synergy remain unutilized. Beijing can be expected to fill the gap, especially as the new administration led by President Hu Jintao has shown itself to be much more aware of the need for the PRC to ensure that India remain neutral vis-à-vis the PRC and the US, if not ally itself with China . 

(4) Should there be an absence of war and a continuation of high growth rates, the PRC will join the US and the EU as one of the three geopolitical poles in the international system. A friendly relationship with India would be of immense help in ensuring such an outcome. Conversely, a hostile India would significantly increase the chances for success of a policy of constrainment of China that would affect economic growth, and through that social and then political stability in the Mainland.  

"Paper presented at the Third China-India Research Institutes Roundtable at Hong Kong December 4-5,2003.Acknowledgements are made to the Hong Kong University Foundation for Educational Development and Research and the Japan Foundation Asia Center"