| Following the PM's visit, India's bonhomie with China should be calibrated. |
| When elephants fight, they say, the grass is trampled. It's also trampled when elephants make love but south-east Asia much prefer that when it comes to India and China. The Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN) was additionally delighted when Manmohan Singh pledged his trust in the "Asian way" over which ASEAN claims patent rights. It claims to have invented the mushawara and mufakat (consultation and consensus) process to tackle tricky problems. |
| Not that ASEAN believes the euphoric China visit will solve Himalayan territorial disputes. Or that it will save India being pressured through Pakistan and Bangladesh. And certainly not because of ASEAN's faith in some silly construct called "Chindia" fallaciously suggesting that India and China constitute a single entity such as even the European Union is not. South-east Asia's relief springs from two causes. First, spillover expectations from Sino-Indian trade and investment which years ago prompted Singapore to set up a company called Intraco to enable foreign firms to trade with China even without political goodwill. The more important second reason is that an emerging India whose emergence China acknowledges and accepts might ease some of the pressure the region feels under the looming shadow of a single power. |
| They might not all feel the pinch like Vietnam whose former foreign minister, the urbane Nguyen Co Thach, lamented that "a billion Chinese will be at our door for eternity." But if Indonesia had not been seriously worried about China's influence, India would never have been admitted into various ASEAN and East Asian forums. Earlier, when Singapore kept knocking on ASEAN's door to let India in, it was Indonesia, the biggest kid on the block (as the Americans say), that refused. |
| I asked Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew why he did it even before India was particularly interested, and his answer was revealing. China threatened the region's security in the fifties, sixties and seventies by supporting guerrilla movements. From the eighties onwards, China has been burgeoning into an overpowering economic force. "We don't want to be overwhelmed and become like Laos or Cambodia!" he exclaimed, repeating that India alone had the girth and weight to balance China. |
| Naturally, Indian spokesmen are more circumspect. Shyam Saran's Distinguished Public Lecture in Singapore on Thursday under the auspices of the S Rajaratnam School of International Studies was a masterly exercise in diplomatic correctness. I was reminded that Rajaratnam, Singapore's first foreign minister, spoke of two kinds of foreign policy. One was of words to uphold all the moralities that nations swear by; the other of deeds that actually serve the national interest. That distinction came to mind because taking his cue from the picture of blissful harmony the two prime ministers presented in Beijing, Saran refused to be worried about areas where China is forging ahead "" schools in Cambodia, gas and oil from Myanmar, development loans in Africa, nuclear reactors for Pakistan and Bangladesh, the list is long. Or about China's position on India's Security Council and Nuclear Suppliers Group aspirations. |
| The Beijing dialogue does not explain either why ministers were forbidden to attend a ceremony to felicitate the Dalai Lama on receiving the US Congressional Gold Medal. Or the mystery of India reportedly being asked to remove army bunkers from outposts at Batang La near the India-Bhutan-China tri-junction. A paragraph in the Manmohan Singh-Wen Jiabao Joint Declaration was even more baffling: |
| "The two sides take a positive view on each other's participation in sub-regional multilateral cooperation processes between like-minded countries, including South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation, Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation and Shanghai Cooperation Organisation." |
| There's a surprise. I had no idea until I read it that China was dipping its toe in the Bay of Bengal, beyond its surveillance facilities in Myanmar's Cocos Islands. BIMSTEC, I imagined, was Bangladesh, India, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Bhutan and Nepal. I also thought China's observer status in SAARC was adequate quid pro quo for Indian participation in the SCO, and that the privilege was extended to Japan, the US, South Korea and the European Union mainly to dilute China's influence. |
| It now appears that India has unobtrusively agreed to China's presence in another patch of our backyard, for that's what "participation" in BIMSTEC "" presumably as an observer "" must mean. If so, it will delight Thailand which has been badgering for Malaysia's entry into BIMSTEC. Malaysia, as everyone in south-east Asia knows, is China's cat's-paw, especially in obstructing India. |
| Do I hear behind the applause a faint echo of "Hindi-Chini bhai-bhai"? |
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