Just a thaw is not enough, India and China need to turn the page on past

Delhi and Beijing are holding their breath as their analytical frameworks for international politics are upended with each passing day. Having burnt its fingers in Ukraine, the US under Trump is attempting to extricate the West from its own folly. The unthinkable — a US-Russia détente — is within the realm of the possible. At any rate, the shift towards multipolarity is irreversible.

It was during the unipolar moment that the dominant narrative on India-China relations turned towards an existential rivalry, largely fuelled by the West. India’s political leadership and strategic community too embraced the idea of it as a geopolitical lynchpin and a western sentinel in Asia. Not only was our foreign policy since the early 2000s restructured around this basic paradigm, but also the China policy. That framework is now obsolete. While the US will pursue transactional benefits from India, in the broader churning underway, the purported geopolitical significance once attached to India has lost its meaning in Washington. As a consequence, India has begun seeing itself less as a dispensable chip in western grand strategy and more as a major regional and future great power with national interests and objectives. Naturally, its China policy will evolve too.

The challenge is building a stable relationship with Beijing despite a comprehensive China-India power asymmetry, which will remain for several decades. The false US promise to alter the India-China setting in India’s favour must be replaced by enlightened realism. Our powerful and prosperous neighbour cannot be kept at arm’s length until some distant future moment when India is strong enough to dictate the terms of engagement. The ‘give and take’ has to occur during this prolonged phase of catching up. The onus is on China as well to adopt a revised India policy in light of the diplomatic revolutions afoot elsewhere. Priorities include stabilising the LAC to mutual satisfaction, resuming a serious conversation on resolving the border dispute, articulating innovative approaches to managing parts of the common neighbourhood including those areas where India and China might have similar interests, and, removing the subcontinent from future geopolitical contests between other great powers. Such an agenda is within the reach of both leaderships who already have a clear understanding of each other’s core interests and concerns.

As a late industrial economic power, Delhi had good reasons to pursue national capacity building. But where it faltered was by letting geopolitics come in the way of leveraging interdependence with leading economic centres. China did not let its geopolitical differences with the US come in the way of a bold globalisation strategy. The duality of its economic policies — keeping the door open while developing a robust domestic ecosystem and infrastructure — accounts for its spectacular economic transformation.

Terms of Engagement

For India, the primary economic centre to be leveraged now is China. There is no way around this reality. It is not whether but how to economically engage China. What should be debated are the inter-sectoral trade-offs, the types of economic partnerships between Indian and Chinese economic actors, the extent of access to Chinese capital and technologies, and India’s participation in China-centred supply chains. These are sophisticated policy themes that require serious deliberation but were previously swept aside during the unipolar euphoria.

From the Himalayan thaw at the 2024 Kazan BRICS summit to PM Modi’s recent remark that “for centuries, India and China have learned from each other,” both sides are signalling a cooperative and less adversarial narrative for the relationship.

But a mere thaw will not suffice. A modus vivendi for at least the next two decades is the prerequisite for Asia’s major powers to collaborate on stabilising, reforming and benefiting from the rapidly changing world setting. For India, the economic advantages and geopolitical peace on its periphery if a détente is executed intelligently are too vital to be stymied by naysayers. For China, a stable southern periphery, a more purposeful multilateral partner at BRICS, and an India that thinks and acts for itself in the geopolitical realm holds tremendous benefits. This is an opportunity that both leaderships should grasp.

(Zorawar Daulet Singh is an author, most recently, of Powershift: India China Relations In A Multipolar World)