Tuesday, August 29, 2017

Maybe China And India Blinked Together – For Now

By Sanjay Upadhya
August 29, 2017

The official Chinese posture on the agreement by Beijing and New Delhi to ‘disengage’ from their weeks-long standoff in Doklam on Bhutanese territory makes it sound like Beijing has scored a decisive triumph.
The flurry of commentary immediately following the Indian Ministry of External Affairs brief tweet making that announcement seemed to suggest that New Delhi had finally exorcised the ghosts of the 1962 border war.
Then, prominent Indian voices began stressing the obvious: Since no one knows enough yet about what led to this apparent resolution, it is futile to obsess over the winner-loser paradigm. The new narrative? Diplomacy prevailed on both sides.
This, to be sure, raises its own set of questions, ranging from the obvious to ones bordering on the realm of conspiracy theory.
What form of diplomacy prevailed now that so defied us in the past, including those conducted on the sidelines of international summits leaders of both countries attended. Plucky old patience? Lord luck?
Or did the imperative of preserving the sanctity of the BRICS format prevail on both sides – no doubt with pressure from the other members?
The Indian urgency to depict this agreement as an outright win is understandable. The brief 1962 border war took its toll more on the Indian psyche than on the battlefield. So the notion that India proved to be the only country who has successfully stood up to China carries its own resonance.
Since the Chinese have been relatively subdued on the definition of victory, it becomes tempting to read deeper.
Was the spur for Beijing US President Donald Trump’s announcement of his long-awaited Afghanistan (and, by extension, South Asia) policy? New Delhi welcomed Washington’s efforts at ensuring India’s greater engagement in Afghanistan despite New Delhi’s insistence that the US still had not taken its concerns adequately.
In other words, did Beijing already see big enough holes in a putative US-India alliance against China? Have the Chinese detected in the prospect of India becoming bogged down in Afghanistan along with the US enough reassurance regionally?
What all this boils down to is the living reality that India-China tensions have subsided until the next flare-up. The Asian giants have bound themselves into a complex relationship that reaches for the promises of the future without their having resolved the perils from the past.
Sidestepping their border dispute in the interest of substantive progress on newer areas is deft diplomacy, as long as the border remains calm.  The substance and consolidation of the bilateral relationship will depend on how China and India manage and overcome old and new challenges.
Specifically, as they continue to rise in power and influence, China and India will continue to struggle to devise a bilateral framework that provides enough room for cooperation, competition and, yes, confrontation.
So maybe both sides blinked on Doklam. The expectation is not one of no new tensions: there could be another flare-up anywhere, anytime over anything.
Yet if both sides could pull themselves back from the brink after having come so perilously close to war, perhaps they do have what it takes to coexist relatively peacefully.