Bangladesh offers some instructive cues for the expanding India-China bilateral. India’s strategic objective must be to ensure that Bangladesh does not become another Pakistan, writes C Uday Bhaskar for South Asia Monitor
By C Uday Bhaskar OCT 2, 2019
It is instructive that within 10 days of China@70, President Xi Jinping is scheduled to meet Prime Minister Narendra Modi in a picture-pretty temple town on the east coast of India. It is expected that the cordial Wuhan spirit which permeated their first informal meeting in late April 2018 in central China will be carried to Mamallapuram, in Tamil Nadu, particularly after the spectacular Houston political extravaganza that saw a distinctive Modi-Trump bonhomie.
India’s bilateral relationship with the USA and China are its most critical. Hence, managing these at the highest political level almost concurrently offers an insight into the complexity for the Modi government, more so when the USA and China are locked in what appears to be an intractable trade war mired in deep strategic mistrust.
India and China had a certain correspondence as two Asian giants with similar national indicators that came out of the colonial yoke around the same time. India in 1947 and China in 1949. Yet in the last 70-plus years China has acquired a far more credible index of comprehensive national power and the GDP contrast is stark. In 2018 the GDP of China reached USD 13. 6 trillion, while India is still under USD 3 trillion and the aspiration to become a USD 5 trillion economy is fraught with many challenges. While there is an element of cordiality and stability in the uneasy Sino-Indian bilateral relationship that was resumed only in 1988, the areas of discord and divergence have remained intractable since the October 1962 border war.
A complex territorial dispute festers and the Doklam standoff is a reminder of how quickly tensions can increase over territoriality. Wuhan was initiated to contain the Doklam fallout and one hopes that Mammallapuram will help to enhance the high-level political commitment to deepen areas of cooperation and prevent any kind of conflict, accidental or otherwise.
India’s disappointment with China has some substantive issues, chief being the deep and opaque Sino-Pakistan strategic and security linkages. Beijing has its own list of issues wherein it believes India has stoked Chinese anxiety and these include the nature of the India-US relationship (now more visible after the Houston spectacle and the Modi-Trump bromance) and the so-called Tibet card.
The genesis of the Chinese wariness apropos India may be linked to the 1971 war for Bangladesh. The emphatic military victory that a democratic and impoverished India was able to achieve in the face of many odds, including the fact that both the USA and China were supporting Pakistan, impacted Beijing. Thus the Chinese long term strategy, as it has unfolded over the last four decades, has been one of providing uncritical support to Pakistan and enabling it to acquire nuclear weapons and condoning Rawalpindi’s support to terrorism.
Pakistan symbolizes all the negative and discordant aspects that inhibit a meaningful realization of the vast potential that India-China cooperation can engender. Paradoxically, even while supporting Pakistan politically, Beijing which is currently pre-occupied with the Hong Kong protests has a deep concern about Islamic jihadi ideology. This is reflected in the manner that Chinese Uighur Muslims are being treated. India’s concerns about terrorism emanating from Pakistan need little reiteration.
Against such a backdrop, Bangladesh offers some instructive cues for the expanding India-China bilateral. India’s strategic objective must be to ensure that Bangladesh does not become another Pakistan. Dhaka under the leadership of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina has emerged as a vibrant economy and a South Asian success story. Many of Bangladesh’s human-security indicators are better than that of India and while there is an undercurrent of religious assertion, the country under Hasina has remained a more tolerant and moderate Islamic nation than what Pakistan is today.
It is in the strategic interest of both India and China to prioritize Bangladesh as a case study where their respective aspirations can be advanced in a mutually acceptable manner and deeper anxieties contained. Coincidentally, Prime Minister Hasina will be received by her Indian counterpart on October 3, a few days before the Xi Jinping visit and the Modi sagacity will lie in ensuring that Dhaka does not have to make a binary either/or choice between the two Asian giants.
(The writer is Director, Society for Policy Studies, New Delhi)