Asian Century: Time is running out and fast — and China is responsible for that

Addressing a university audience in Bangkok, Thailand, External Affairs Minister (EAM) S Jaishankar talked about an ‘Asian Century’ and the Quad in the same breadth. He said that the ‘Asian Century’ would not be possible without India-China cooperation. At the same time, he also said that the ‘Quad is the most prominent platform’ (in the Indo-Pacific). Only countries that have ‘mindsets built around spheres of influence’ and are ‘uncomfortable with democratisation’ oppose the Indo-Pacific, he added. Of course, Jaishankar did not name China, or even the US. But whatever he said about democracy applied also to Russia, India’s ‘time-tested friend’.

Chinese ambitions and the Indo-Pacific do not travel together. Likewise, China and democracy too are not fellow-travellers. India and the rest of the world should recognise that China prospered not under democracy as selectively understood by the ‘liberal West’ (?) but because they adopted economic liberalisation sans democracy. Here too, Deng Xiaoping’s original Chinese model of economic reforms was confined mostly to the external world, not as much internally. He was still around when Tiananmen Square happened in 1989.

The Western world poked at China on democracy (for the record?) but continued to do business with the nation, because it helped — and it alone helped. If they are hitting hard on China on the economic front in recent years, it’s only because it began hurting them on the economic front this time, as different from their self-propagated ‘democratic sensibilities’. As the then American President, businessman Donald Trump, understood this better than his predecessors, both Republicans and Democrats. His successor, incumbent Joe Biden has little choice, nor does he have an alternative to offer the American Big Business. But no one in America is talking about democracy, or absence / lack of it, in China — even as much as they talk about alleged human rights violations/concerns viz India.

All this is to say that there is no absolutism in evaluating democracy. It’s bad in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, but was good in Shah’s Iran and Marcos’ Philippines, not to leave out all those tin-pot dictators in the US’ backyard and ‘Banana Republics’ in post-colonial Africa. Coming closer in time, ‘la affaire Khashoggi killing’ could not be condoned in other times. But when Russia ‘invades’ Ukraine, and international oil prices need to be kept under control, if only to ensure maximum support for the West’s Ukrainian cause, President Biden would travel to Riyadh.

There is thus a need for India to draw a line between ‘supreme self-interest’ of the all-American kind that it displayed by importing Russian oil against the US’ wishes (which was not a diktat, thankfully), and America’s selective profession of democracy in third countries. Given the American street opinion of the state of democracy and religious freedom in India (more than in Pakistan?) just now, Washington could one distant day turn the tables on New Delhi, too… It may look far-fetched just now.

Different interpretations

Then, there is the other idea of an ‘Asian Century’, which again has undergone different interpretations under different circumstances in different times — all of it in the past 30 years or less. Until India ushered in economic reforms in the early nineties, and more so in the second half of that decade, to the US and less so to West Europe, ‘Asia’ used to mean only South-East Asia, as understood by their terminology of the times, ‘Asian Tigers’. They all have forgotten the term since.

The South-East Asian financial crisis (1997) meant that American news media first and their European counterparts not long after began carrying an outline map of India’s north/north-eastern parts while depicting the erstwhile ‘Asian Tigers’ in the maps and charts that they published alongside long-winding analyses. Very rarely did India or South Asia get a map of its own in the western media, for instance, until long afterwards. It was a perception problem, otherwise called a mindset problem, a legacy issue from the Cold War era.

The US has since rechristened the Asia-Pacific as the Indo-Pacific. In doing so, it added India to the existing Asia-Pacific construct which was in existence since the Cold War years. Earlier, the US used to take care of the security interests and concerns of South-East and East Asian nations, against China and North Korea in particular. So, what if those concerns were based on American perceptions, they did merge at some point. At Bangkok, like his American interlocutors before him, Jaishankar has talked about the ‘centrality’ of the ASEAN to the Indo-Pacific. If it’s so, what’s India’s role in the Indo-Pacific? An also-ran?

Strategic concerns

Today, the security concerns of India and the US coalesce in the Indo-Pacific region though not in the distant European /Eurasian theatre as their perceptions of and relationship with Russia are distinct and different. One difference between the Asia-Pacific and the Indo-Pacific is that the US bore most of the security expenditure of East and South-East Asia while India spends on its security in the Indo-Pacific, as always. Trump’s infamous letter to the South Korean counterpart, asking for a greater share on America’s security-spending on the former’s behalf, a letter he never got to sign (Bob Woodward, ‘Fear: Trump in the White House’), bespoke of it.

The US already has a strong military presence in Diego Garcia, as far as this part of the Indian Ocean is concerned. Hence, it is not known to be looking for a base in India. This is because New Delhi is securing itself from the common adversary, China, and is sworn to secure the expanded IOR neighbourhood, into which Mauritius and Seychelles have been included — rather, up to the mouth of the Indian Ocean.

India’s job, as former prime minister Manmohan Singh outlined, is to be the ‘net-provider of security’ in and for South Asia. This comes with its own share of security baggage, as the recent Chinese Yuan Wang 5 ‘spy-ship’ issue involving India’s Sri Lankan neighbour has shown. In ways, the US has ‘outsourced’ its post-War geo-strategic security concerns viz China, for India to share as it had done through NATO vis-à-vis the erstwhile Soviet Union.

Though not spoken openly, neighbours like Sri Lanka ‘follow’ an independent foreign and security policy by prioritising their own needs and concerns. Though not spelt out as such, they have repeatedly demonstrated their counterpoints, in the absence of frank consultations over America’s strategic ties with India, either before or after they had been tied up.

The Indian strategic community has to acknowledge that the Sri Lankan suspicions about India are deep-seated and have a contemporary history of its own. Their Sri Lankan counterparts feel uncomfortable when a non-regional player with the Diego Garcia base on the other side of the island-nation’s geography ends up ‘encircling’ it through strategic pacts with their big, northern neighbour, whatever the real purpose.

Over the Yuan Wang 5 issue, the Indian strategic community is peeved, upset or angered that Sri Lanka was hunting with the Chinese hound even while running with the Indian hare, which was the ‘lone nation’ to rush food, fuel and medicines, when the nation was in dire straits earlier this year. First and foremost, to get out of the Chinese dragon-hug, if at all it wanted the same, Sri Lanka would have to negotiate debt-rescheduling with China, among others, before it could go back to the IMF, even for diversifying its debt-portfolio. Beijing is a tough customer, and like the US, is not proximate to Sri Lanka as India is. Neither of the other can anticipate ‘economic refugees’ from the South Asian neighbourhood.

Indians also need to recall how in the forgotten past, India was tough on the US over the Vietnam war, when the nation was on ship-to-mouth food-existence from the PL-480 wheat-aid. Recall the infamous line of then US President Lyndon Johnson when told that even the Pope and the UN Secretary-General were saying the same things as India, “The Pope and the Secretary-General don’t need our wheat.” That should explain the contemporary nature of India-Sri Lanka relations vis-à-vis China, that too when India is in a much stronger position than any time in the post-Independence past, though building upon the same past.

Third angle

China has since welcomed Jaishankar’s reference to the ‘Asian Century’ and how the two nations together alone could shape it. It remains unachievable in the foreseeable future as Beijing too wants India only as a junior player in the region to subserve its global ambitions just as the US wants one in the Indo-Pacific to subserve its ‘global retention’.  In a way, China’s BRI was to be a vehicle for Chinese global ambitions a la Indo-Pacific, both hiding their strategic ambitions.

There is a third angle in Russia, whose India relations have become prominent once again, after a non-existing hiatus, in the aftermath of the Ukraine War. When External Affairs Minister Jaishankar was addressing university students in a capital in what used to be the ‘Asia-Pacific’, India’s National Security Advisor (NSA) Ajit K Doval was in Moscow, engaging in more serious talks with his Russian counterpart, Nikolai Patrushev.

In talks in Moscow, Doval reportedly asserted India’s ‘strategic autonomy’ and expressed concerns about Russia’s ‘no-limit’ towards China, which made New Delhi uncomfortable, to say the least. Around the time in Washington, reacting to Doval’s Moscow visit — or, was it (also) to the timing of the visit, US State Department spokesperson Ned Price said that ‘reorienting India’s foreign policy away from Russia’ was ‘not like flipping a light-switch’. Even while qualifying his observations by saying that nations decided on their foreign policy, clearly Nice was hoping to sow seeds of anti-India suspicions in the Russian mind — the way the US has handled friends and allies through ‘transition’.

Public mood, vote

After supposedly trying to woo India through Wen Jiabo’s talk that ‘Chinese hardware and Indian software together could rule the world’, China has since adopted the Doklam, Galwan and more recently Yuan Wang 5 kind of approach to India, as if anticipating New Delhi to be frightened into submission. In between, it had wantonly irritated New Delhi by including Indian territory in POK in its CPEC project in Pakistan and inviting New Delhi for the BRI’s inaugural.

Yes, to that extent, China does not understand what democracy means for India and Indians. Needless to point out that in democratic India, unlike in communist China, public mood and their vote guide, if not decide, foreign policy and deviations thereof. This could apply equally to India’s occasional muscle-flexing viz Europe on Russian oil and vis-à-vis the US-UN combo on human rights. In that case, after a point, the Indian voter, however much he may be illiterate and/or indifferent about geo-political and geo-strategic issues, could tick off his elected rulers if they display a weak knee behind a strong voice.

Sooner than later, China has to decide which side of its bread it wants buttered. In India relations, it cannot hope to have the cake and eat it too. For India, too, Indo-Pacific, Quad and China relations cannot go hand-in-hand. It depends on China’s willingness to settle the border dispute and stop backing Pakistan. Beijing cannot hope to equate border dispute with India, which is historic, to the India-Pakistan border issue, which is more political.

Time is running out and fast, on the ‘Asian Century’. The ball is in China’s court, which has to resolve the border dispute with India. Despite what China may say about improvement talks with India, post-Galwan, there cannot be any progress unless the PLA withdraws to pre-Galwan ground positions. Then, the two leaders, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and President Xi Jinping, have to meet and resolve the border dispute, and direct their negotiating teams about the modalities and concessions that can be given and taken. Else, they would continue to talk about talks and nothing more!

The writer is a Chennai-based policy analyst and commentator. Views expressed are personal.

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