POLITICS: Business First Before Border Talks at India-China Summit

By Ranjit Devraj Reprint | | Print |

Analysis - by Ranjit Devraj

NEW DELHI, Apr 10 2005 (IPS) - It comes as no surprise that Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao kicked off his four-day visit to India from the southern city of Bangalore – the information technology hub of the subcontinent and one of world’s four biggest technology clusters. This is a clear indication that Beijing prefers to put business first before its 45-year-old border dispute with its southern neighbour.

Wen who landed in Bangalore, on Saturday spent the weekend touring private institutions such as the Tata Consultancy Services, a global software giant, as well as government institutions like the Indian Institute of Science and the Indian Space Research Organistion which exports satellites and space services.

”Business is more important for the (Chinese) people than the border,” China’s ambassador in New Delhi, Sun Yuxi, himself a graduate of the London School of Economics told reporters.

Wen, who is accompanied by a 140-member entourage, will attend to the vexed border problem between the Asian giants only on Monday when he will be in the national capital meeting Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and other top Indian leaders.

The Chinese leader’s visit coincides with the 55th anniversary of the Himalayan neighbours establishing formal diplomatic relations with each other. Nonetheless, the intervening years have really been nothing much to write home about and have been hostile after the border dispute spiraled into a brief but bloody border war in 1962.

Immediately before he set out on his South Asia tour covering Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, Wen told Indian correspondents in Beijing that he had reason to believe that relations between India and China were presently at an all time high and the border issue was solvable. “Our two countries see eye-to- eye and share common interests on many major international and regional issues, as demonstrated by the successful strategic dialogue we had for the first time,” Wen was reported as saying.

That positive comment can be attributed to the work of the special representatives appointed by the two sides, during the June 2003 face-to-face summit between Indian and China in Beijing, to tackle the boundary dispute.

Wen has expressed satisfaction that the special representatives have conducted ‘useful discussions’ on the political guiding principles and had made ‘sound progress.’

Indian officials said there was every chance of Wen and Singh announcing a set of guiding principles that would become the basis for the final resolution of the dispute over a border that extends over 3,000 kilometers.

Wen’s visit to India came about when Singh invited him to visit New Delhi after both met each other at the sidelines of a summit of the Association of South-east Asian Nations (ASEAN) held in the Laotian capital of Vientiane last year.

The 1962 India-China war left unresolved the status of some 40,000 square kilometers on the Aksai Chin plateau in Kashmir which India accuses China of occupying. China in turn claims that India holds some 90,000 square kilometers of its territory, mostly in the north-eastern state of Arunachal Pradesh.

But Wen and Singh are more interested in setting the stage for a new strategic and economic relationship that would include an ambitious free trade agreement (FTA) and build on the fact that two-way trade has soared to 13 billion U.S. dollars in 2004 from a paltry 100 million dollars a decade ago.

The two rapidly liberalizing neighbours, already being widely seen as global growth engines in the coming decades, are aiming to boost their bilateral trade to 50 billion dollars by 2010.

So far, relations between the Asian giants have resembled a roller coaster ride. Bilateral ties really hit a low spot when New Delhi carried out surprise nuclear weapon tests in 1998 and India’s leaders said they were prompted by security interests vis-^-vis China rather than rivalry with South Asian neighbour Pakistan.

Curiously though, analysts have noted that since the nuclear tests relations between India and China have been on an upswing and indeed there has been subsequently better cooperation at several international forums – in particular at the meetings of the World Trade Organisation.

Irritants, however, remain.

In the 1950s when India was invited to take a permanent seat at the U.N. Security Council, it declined and instead allowed China, as a bigger country, to take its place. Now, New Delhi is sore that Beijing has not reciprocated in a similar manner when India is trying to seek a seat in the soon-to-be-revamped Security Council with an expanded membership.

Much of the hostility between the two countries go back to over 45 years ago when India offered sanctuary to the Tibetan leader Dalai Lama and his followers when they fled over the Himalayas following a failed Tibetan uprising against Chinese rule.

India has since formally recognised Tibet as an integral part of China. Wen, however, had a taste of continuing resistance on Sunday when a Tibetan refugee positioned himself on a high balcony of the main tower of the Indian Institute of Science building and threatened to kill himself by jumping on to the Chinese leader’s limousine.

The protestor, believed to be a member of the 40,000-strong Tibetan expatriate community in southern Karnataka state of which Bangalore is capital, was quickly whisked away. But his efforts were not wasted.

Before he was bundled into a police car, he managed to unfurl a large red banner that read ‘Free Tibet’ and drape it down the side of the institute’s tower.

But it would take more than such isolated protests to derail the steadily warming relations between New Delhi and Beijing.

Since the Doha Round of the WTO talks, the two countries have been coordinating trade positions on agriculture, development, service, investment, intellectual property rights, public health and many other agenda items. Beijing and New Delhi have also supported each other in efforts to protect the interests of developing member states in the world trade body.

Realising that the two countries have emerged as major consumers of energy and raw materials, their leaders have seen the benefits of cooperation in the international arena if only to better safeguard their own national interests.

Indeed, the National Intelligence Council, the premier think-tank of the U.S. has sounded warning bells that increasing Sino-Indian cooperation could soon irrevocably change global geo-politics.

There are other modern day issues that are bringing two of the world’s oldest civilizations together and Jairam Ramesh, author of the recently released and aptly named book ”Making Sense of Chindia,” includes the threat from HIV/AIDS that both countries now face.

Ramesh notes that at the moment there are two schools of thought, one that fears China and the other that is enthralled by it. But the author admits the answer could lie somewhere in between.

Wen himself pointed out before embarking on his tour that cooperation between the two countries far outweighs competition. ”We have every reason to be friendly and cooperative. There is no reason for conflict or confrontation.”