Biggest external challenges come from China

As India looks 25 years ahead towards the centenary of its independence, its biggest external challenges will come from China, and these will not be confined to this country’s security in the conventional sense. These challenges will be broader and encompass economic, technological, civilisational, demographic, and of course, military activities. The nature and dimension of the Chinese challenges will depend very much on how those in India who make decisions on China and others who shape public opinion on the People’s Republic project the causes and effects of the gauntlets extending from across the northern borders.

India’s policy-making establishment is deeply influenced by two vastly divergent attitudes towards Beijing. One of these approaches is conditioned by a desire to repay for the humiliation of the Indian Army in the 1962 border war with China. Howsoever unrealistic this desire to pay back China for the 1962 defeat is, it is a sentiment that runs deep in India’s security system. What is disturbing about this attitude is that it is backed by an appalling ignorance about China, its capabilities and the progress it has made in recent decades. I say this from experience in conversations over the years with those Indians who ought to know better.

A recent Army notification to scale up Mandarin language training within the defence establishment is, therefore, a very welcome step towards overcoming a serious tactical handicap. In addition to recruiting civilian Chinese language experts as officers, the Army has signed memoranda of understanding with three domestic universities which already impart advanced instruction in Mandarin. Those in charge of public outreach in the defence sector have downplayed this development as a sequel to tensions along the Line of Actual Control and the need to equip soldiers for better exchanges with the People’s Liberation Army on the ground. But it is much more than that and will have positive results which can be far-reaching.

My exposure to the second attitude to China among Indian policymakers came in 1995 from none other than the then Prime Minister PV Narasimha Rao in a conversation on the rise of a unipolar world. Rao took the curious view that the Cold War had not ended. Only one phase of the Cold War was over with the collapse of the Berlin Wall, he insisted. The next phase of the Cold War would be between China and the United States. It was like uncannily looking into today’s circumstances more than a quarter of a century ago. Rao was emphatic that in this phase, India should stand with China and not with the US, just as it was closer to the Soviet Union, not the US, during the first Cold War.

This is a foreign policy position which few in New Delhi would back in public today, although many strategic experts share this view in private. Like the Army’s plans to enhance Mandarin skills, Rao, India’s first Minister for Human Resource Development, introduced the Chinese language in Indian schools. His short-sighted successors as Prime Minister killed this visionary initiative.

Between these two attitudes on China, is a large body of Indian Sinologists, who are very knowledgeable about China, but have mostly learned about the northern neighbour, like today’s young civil service aspirants who prepare for Union Public Service Commission examinations do.

Desperate for new insights on China and an out-of-the-box thinking, Manmohan Singh embarked on a course which broke with convention: he took a personal interest in sending to Beijing diplomats who had absolutely no previous training in Sinology. At the end of 2006, Singh received a suggestion to send S Jaishankar as High Commissioner to Colombo. “No,” he told an aide. “I want Jaishankar to go to Singapore. From this reliable outpost, he will watch China for two years and then go to Beijing as Ambassador.” Jaishankar had no previous China experience when he reached Beijing in mid-2009. A year later, Rahul Chhabra, a French-speaking officer, was sent as Deputy Chief of Mission to Beijing.

After scrapping the experiment for 23 months, Prime Minister Narendra Modi embraced this policy once again by sending Vikram Misri as Ambassador in January 2019. Misri, too, had not dealt with China when he went to Beijing.

It will be a make-or-break effort in the next decade and a half for India to catch up with China while India still has the potential for demographic dividend. China grew rapidly when it had the same advantage in the decades just past. So, out-of-the-box thinking is vital or else the present, all-round asymmetry with China will become permanent. This will drive India into the arms of the US, a declining global power, and New Delhi’s strategic autonomy will be lost.

Juxtaposed against external challenges at 75, India’s biggest external opportunities are in the Gulf. If there was a diplomatic version of Ripley’s Believe it or Not, an item which could suitably fit there is the bizarre truth that no Indian Prime Minister visited the near neighbour, the United Arab Emirates, for three decades until Modi prioritised the Gulf in his foreign policy calculations. India’s relations with the UAE are well on course as a “comprehensive strategic partner”, but New Delhi needs to catch up with other Gulf states, especially Kuwait, where Atal Bihari Vajpayee launched his party’s first outreach in the Islamic world in 1997, when he was the Chairman of the Parliament’s Standing Committee on External Affairs.

There is inadequate appreciation in the strategic community that Saudi Arabia is the next frontier for Indian entrepreneurship, infrastructure companies and manpower export under its reform-minded Crown Prince, Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud.

India has less than 10,000 cinema theatres, according to the government’s Directorate of Advertising and Visual Publicity. With the ban of public cinemas lifted, it is projected that Saudi Arabia will have 20,000 cinema halls by 2030. Who else is best suited to construct these cinemas than Bollywood’s ancillary industry, which is in the neighbourhood! Especially since most of these theatres will show Indian films.

This is just one example of the opportunities for India in the Gulf which must be tapped. These opportunities were notoriously missed in the past and there was complacency that remittances from Indian workers were all that mattered. The Gulf is a mission for India and its potential must be realised in full.