India's Heavy Hedge Against China, and Its New Look to the United

29 India’s Heavy Hedge Against China, and its New Look to the United States to Help Daniel Twining 30 | Joint U.S.-Korea Academic Studies China and India together account for one-third of humanity. Both were advanced civilizations when Europe was in the Dark Ages. Until the 19th century, they constituted the world’s largest economies. Today they are, in terms of purchasing power, the world’s largest and third-largest national economies, and the fastest-growing major economies. Were they to form an alliance, they would dominate mainland Eurasia and the sea lanes of the Indian Ocean and Western Pacific that carry a preponderance of the world’s maritime energy trade. Yet these civilization-states seem destined to compete in the 21st century. India is engaged in a heavy hedge against China—although its history of non-alignment, traditional rhetoric of anti-Americanism, the dominance until recently of analysts’ tendency to view India’s security mainly in terms of its subcontinental competition with Pakistan, and the tendency for emerging market analysts to hyphenate India and China as rising economies can obscure this reality. Tactical cooperation in climate change talks and BRICS summits should not confuse us into seeing any kind of emerging India-China alignment in global affairs. Strategic rivalry of a quiet but steady nature characterizes their ties, to the point where it affects their relations with third countries: India’s relations with Russia have cooled substantially since President Putin’s tilt toward Beijing in the wake of Russia’s isolation from the West over Ukraine. India-China relations will be determined in part by how the United States navigates between them in pursuit of its national interests. The United States has a key role to play in India’s heavy hedge. Historically, India has sought to balance China alone and, when necessary, in combination with the Soviet Union during the Cold War. India has little history of participating in the kind of alliances the United States has constructed in the Asia-Pacific, but tightening Indo-U.S. alignment tests that history and enables India to hedge more readily against daunting strategic competition from China, which many Indians believe to be pursuing a conscious strategy of encircling India on land and at sea while working to diplomatically contain its influence in leading international clubs. U.S. strategic partnership with India should be a stabilizing factor in this equation as a hedge against Chinese hegemony in Asia, the emerging order’s pivot of wealth and power. Every Asia-Pacific state is hedging against the uncertainty and latent threat posed by China’s extraordinary rise. India is doing so in a particularistic way on account of its lack of formal external alliances, its inheritance as a non-aligned state, its relative developmental backwardness, its unique scale (relative to every country except China), and the geographical reality of sharing a contested 2500-mile border with China. At the same time, like other Asia- Pacific powers, India seeks to engage China economically to share in the fruits of Chinese growth through higher levels of trade and investment. A key question is whether growing tensions over security between the two Asian giants will constrain economic interdependence between them, or whether India and China—like China and the United States—can manage to qualitatively expand economic ties in the midst of an intensifying security dilemma. This chapter examines how India has managed its relations with China, using a quick historical survey to set the stage for a more focused consideration of India-China relations in recent years. It also assesses the role of the United States and closer Indo-U.S. ties in influencing relations between New Delhi and Beijing. The chapter argues that India and China both have an interest in focusing on their domestic development, but that China’s military assertiveness Twining: India’s Heavy Hedge Against China | 31 as well as the contestation for influence in key regions of shared interest—like the South China Sea and Western Pacific, the Indian Ocean, mainland Southeast Asia, and the Persian Gulf —could propel India and China into a heightened state of geopolitical competition. India’s heavy hedge could transform into overt balancing. The United States has an important role to play in working with India to structure an Asian balance of power that is resilient to any Chinese bid for hegemony, but also to help mitigate the security dilemma between New Delhi and Beijing. In this sense, it is the pivotal power in determining the future of an Asian security system otherwise dominated by these two states. The U.S.-India-China Triangle It is a little naïve to think that the trouble with China was essentially due to a dispute over some territories. It had deeper reasons. Two of the largest countries in Asia confronted each other over a vast border. They differed in many ways. And the test was whether any one of them would have a more dominating position than the other on the border and in Asia itself. – Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, 1962, emphasis added1 India fought a war with China in 1962 over their contested border, but the continuing competition between them since that time has always been about more than their largely uninhabited and resource-poor border regions. India formed its quasi-alliance with the Soviet Union in the early 1970s partly in response to several factors, all of which related to its northern neighbor: China’s nuclear weapons test and the Sino-Indian war in the 1960s, China’s alliance with Indian adversary Pakistan, U.S. military pressure on New Delhi during the Bangladesh crisis in 1971 as China threatened to intervene on behalf of Pakistan, and the U.S. opening to China. The adverse impact of these developments on India’s security was compounded by the U.S.-led international sanctions regime imposed on India following its 1974 nuclear tests, which created an effective Western embargo on advanced technologies to India, handicapping not only its military power but its economic development. From New Delhi’s perspective, India’s primary strategic competitors, Pakistan and China, had both formed alliances with the United States, which itself was squeezing India through military, diplomatic, and economic pressure; it was only natural, in the days of Cold War bipolarity, for India to look to Moscow for military guarantees, economic assistance, and defense hardware. It was somewhat ironic, therefore, when in 1998 India openly tested nuclear weapons and Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee justified this new posture in secret correspondence to President Bill Clinton as a response to China’s military buildup and Beijing’s arming of India’s enemy Pakistan.2 In a striking turnaround, Vajpayee called India and the United States “natural allies” who shared interests in managing Chinese power and defeating terrorism, and who should cooperate more closely after decades of geopolitical alienation.3 This led to the forging of a U.S.-India strategic partnership in the 2000s centered on military cooperation and acceptance of India’s status as a nuclear-weapons state through U.S. support for normalizing civilian-nuclear trade with India in the International Atomic Energy Agency and the Nuclear Suppliers Group. 32 | Joint U.S.-Korea Academic Studies India was now reaching out to the United States to help balance against China—even as India in the 1970s had reached out to the Soviet Union to help balance against the United States. Officials in the Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations grasped India’s importance to the future Asian balance of power, understanding that strengthening the U.S.-India leg of the U.S.- India-China strategic triangle would tilt the balance in the direction of the democracies—just as the U.S. tilt to China in the 1970s had strategically isolated the Soviet Union in Asia. This led one perceptive Indian diplomat to declare that, in building a new strategic relationship with New Delhi in the 2000s, Washington was “doing a China on China.”4 Growing Tensions in India-China Bilateral Relations As the Cold War thawed in the late 1980s, New Delhi and Beijing launched what was hoped to be a new era in diplomatic relations with a breakthrough visit to Beijing by Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, the first high-level summit between leaders of the two nations in decades. As India Today put it at the time, “For 26 years, relations between the two Asian giants have been deep-frozen, activated only by hostility and armed tension.”5 Hopes were high that the geopolitical transformation created by the winding down of the Cold War would inaugurate a cooperative period in India-China relations. During the 1990s, however, they struggled to put in place a robust framework to resolve their border dispute, although 2003 did yield the dividend of Chinese recognition of Indian sovereignty in Sikkim (in return for official Indian recognition of China’s sovereignty over Tibet). Meanwhile, China provided advanced nuclear and missile technologies to Pakistan, leading to its nuclear weapons tests of 1998 and its more threatening posture towards India that produced the 1999 Kargil War between the two countries and another near-war following the attack by Pakistani terrorists on the Indian parliament in 2001. In the 2000s, Beijing and China launched framework talks over principles to guide resolution of their border dispute, with both countries appointing special envoys who made progress in private negotiations. Yet in 2006, China reasserted its claim to India’s state of Arunachal Pradesh, and in the late 2000s China began offering “stapled visas” to Indians from Jammu and Kashmir—implying that Beijing did not recognize India’s sovereignty over Indian Kashmir.

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