There’s a fundamental problem when a mercantilist power like China is admitted into a global order premised on open markets and free trade, setting up an anomaly that grows ever larger and becomes unsustainable as China’s economy grows in size. Above all, New Delhi must avoid the trap of Huntingtonian views about a clash of civilisations adopted by Hindutva’s proponents (or by the Pakistani elite, for that matter)

by Swagato Ganguly

For long China had been in the best kind of fight, the kind where only one side saw a fight going on while America presided benignly over China’s rise. India was the loser from the dramatic Nixon-Mao rapprochement of 1972, facilitated by Islamabad’s good offices as a go-between. It was taken as axiomatic within the American establishment that the highway to winning the Cold War passed through Beijing: Consequently New Delhi, for a long time, came to be cast as the spoiler in this equation (and as a disrupter of international agreements, in general).

That changed with the US-India nuclear deal of 2005, piloted by President George Bush and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh despite distrust and political opposition in both countries. And it changed definitively with US secretary of state Mike Pompeo’s speech last month, describing Communist China as an existential threat to democracies. If one of President Ronald Reagan’s seminal slogans during the erstwhile Cold War with the Soviet Union had been “trust but verify”, Pompeo went one up on that in summing up the current US administration’s approach to China: “distrust and verify”.

In the view of some heightened geopolitical tensions between the US and China are only a temporary phase, stemming from administration rhetoric designed to win upcoming presidential elections. And it’s arguable that Pompeo’s speech went too far in terms of hardline Cold War-like rhetoric. After all, the US and Chinese economies are too closely entangled, and they will need to engage in tackling global challenges.

However, as I’ve argued at greater length earlier (‘The China Syndrome’, June 19), there’s a fundamental problem when a mercantilist power like China is admitted into a global order premised on open markets and free trade, setting up an anomaly that grows ever larger and becomes unsustainable as China’s economy grows in size. As is already evident in the battles over Chinese 5G tech some degree of economic decoupling, even if partial, is inevitable between China and Western economies. There’s little doubt an era is ending, and post-Covid geopolitics will be different from pre-Covid.

The China-India relationship, too, is defined by a fundamental anomaly, or disequilibrium. While Beijing used the rules based, liberal international order to rapidly climb the global ladder, it has also held to a starkly ‘realist’ view of international relations as a zero sum game, where lesser powers owe deference to more powerful states, and India’s rise is to its detriment. India, on the other hand, approaches China as a fellow legatee of a great classical civilisation, both of which dominated the world order till about the 16th-17th centuries, and therefore expects to be treated as an equal.

To be sure, New Delhi already makes many concessions to Chinese expectations without reciprocity. For example, China backs Pakistan whenever the latter raises Kashmir at the UN, and provides diplomatic cover for Pakistan’s practitioners of asymmetric warfare seeking to attack India in Kashmir and elsewhere. But New Delhi never raises issues such as China’s suppression of human rights in Xinjiang or Tibet – occurring on a far greater scale than in Kashmir and in the absence of any armed insurgency – or its violation of the core “one country, two systems” agreement with Hong Kong. New Delhi might have met China’s moves in Pakistan by undertaking matching moves with Taiwan, but never goes there.

All this, clearly, isn’t enough to placate Beijing, as it expects more overwhelming deference – which can hardly be forthcoming as New Delhi has to look to its own interests too. Thus, China’s current belligerence and the grave situation along the LAC where China continues to hold the ground in Pangong Tso, Gogra-Hot Springs and Depsang Bulge it recently occupied. New Delhi’s efforts to persuade Beijing to “restore status quo ante” have proved fruitless so far.

This, indeed, could be the new status quo ante that the Modi government will have to deal with. The PLA, by deploying troops, tanks and artillery along the border for the long haul, could force New Delhi to expend resources to remain on guard along the LAC – as well as along the LoC since in the event of a Chinese attack, Islamabad would likely open a second front. Joining forces, the China-Pakistan axis could essentially do to India what the West did to the Soviet Union.

To break out of this encirclement New Delhi’s only viable option is to join – and indeed play a role in organising – the global pushback against Chinese belligerence led by the West, which will be a feature of the post-Covid world. New Delhi must throw its weight behind a rules based, liberal international order which is plurilateral if not multilateral. What should facilitate such an engagement is that China’s, as well as Pakistan’s, star is beginning to fade in the West – and India is no longer seen as a spoiler.

Above all, New Delhi must avoid the trap of Huntingtonian views about a clash of civilisations adopted by Hindutva’s proponents (or by the Pakistani elite, for that matter). Remember, if one wants to adopt a Huntingtonian framework then Sinic and Islamic civilisations, acting jointly, possess far more resources than and are likely to overwhelm the Indic one.

Thus New Delhi needs to ensure that Hindutva doesn’t become the new non-alignment, which allowed Pakistan to diplomatically outmanoeuvre it earlier. For it to geopolitically leverage the common interest of democracies, and for the rest of the world to take an interest in India’s fate, New Delhi must keep at bay the forces of radical-populist anti-globalism busily chipping away at its own polity.