Contrast this with Beijing, where political freedom is unknown, leaders at all levels are handpicked from the top for their posts and political heresy is met with swift punishment, house arrest or worse. During the 2008 Olympics, under international pressure, China designated a few areas where protesters could, in theory, peacefully gather; but you had to apply for permission to protest, which was never granted, and most of those who applied were arrested and detained, which meant that the authorization of protest became an excellent method for the security police to identify potential troublemakers without having to actually look for them. India’s politics means its shock absorbers are built into the system; it has endured major road bumps without the vehicle ever breaking down. In China’s case, it is far from clear what would happen if the limousine of state actually encountered a serious pothole. The present system wasn’t designed to cope with fundamental challenges to it except through repression. But every autocratic state in history has come to a point where repression was no longer enough. If that point is reached in China, all bets are off. The dragon could stumble where the elephant can always trundle on.
But let us not be complacent. India’s problems are enormous and there is still a great deal we need to do internally. Our teeming cities overflow while two out of three Indians still scratch a living from the soil. We have been recognized, for all practical purposes, as a leading nuclear power, but 600 million Indians still have no access to electricity and there are daily power cuts even in the nation’s capital. Ours is a culture which elevated non-violence to an effective moral principle, but whose freedom was born in blood and whose independence still soaks in it. We are the world’s leading manufacturers of generic medication for illnesses such as AIDS, but we have 3 million of our own citizens without access to AIDS medication, another 2 million with TB, and tens of millions with no health centre or clinic within 10 kilometres of their places of residence. India holds the world record for the number of cellphones sold, but also for the number of farmer suicides (an estimated 17,000 in 2010, because when crops fail, farmers faced with a crippling mountain of debt see no other way out for their families than to take their own lives). We still have a great deal to do before we can meaningfully speak of ourselves in competition with China.
But if we can’t compete, can we cooperate?
As far back as 1947, even before India and several nations in Asia were yet to throw off the colonial yoke, when China was still in the throes of an uncertain civil war and when Asia got no more than a footnote in any chapter on global politics and economics, the fledgling Indian Council of World Affairs, under the inspiration of Jawaharlal Nehru, organized a visionary ‘Asian Relations Conference’. Many of the tenets of that endeavour are closer to being a reality today, since they prefigured the process of Asia’s economic integration and increasing interdependence. A hallmark of Nehru’s vision was his admiration for the ‘other great Asian civilization’, and his conviction that, together with India, China would lead the region in a new post-imperial Asian resurgence.
India and China are the most populous nations on the earth, with the arduous task of uplifting millions of our citizens and realizing social harmony and inclusive growth. Given the scale of our economies and the scale of the ‘catching-up’ required, this is likely to be a long-drawn-out process, in which China is clearly well ahead. Both of us, though, require sustained international cooperation and a peaceful security environment around us in order to fulfil this task. Currently, in a world faced with a rare economic and financial crisis and tenacious new threats and challenges, our job has become all the more difficult. Therefore, as responsible nations with a stake in peace, stability and prosperity of the world, both India and China must strive to tackle the new challenges together while helping the global economy out of a recession that had nothing to do with us. The continued growth of our two economies has proved vital to the health of the world economy, and that in itself is a most eloquent proof of the prospects for the world and Asia of an emerging China and, increasingly, an emerging India.
The Government of India does not view China or China’s development as a threat. Indian leaders have always unembarrassedly spoken of the need to develop a friendly and cooperative relationship with China, as a country with which we cannot afford to have a relationship of antagonism. Long before the India — China growth story attracted global attention, we drew upon our joint civilizational wisdom to enunciate the principles of Panchsheel that demonstrated our interest in building peace and friendship. Our relationship has since evolved to a point where we now have a Strategic and Cooperative Partnership for Peace and Prosperity and an agreed ‘Shared Vision for the 21st Century’ with China. Indeed, our relationships have become so multifaceted, strategic and intricate that the nature of stakeholders in our relations has changed and broadened to include the wider civil society in both nations.
To repeat a point I have made earlier: the basic task for countries like China and India in international affairs is to wield a foreign policy that enables and facilitates their own domestic transformation. By this, as an Indian, I mean that my country’s engagement with the world must make possible the transformation of India’s economy and society, while promoting our own national values (of pluralism, democracy, social justice and secularism). What I expect from my national leaders is that they work for a global environment that is supportive of these internal priorities, and therefore of a relationship with China that would permit us to concentrate on our domestic tasks. China and India are both engaged in the great adventure of bringing progress and prosperity to a billion people each, through a major economic transformation. At the broadest level, India’s foreign policy must seek to protect that process of transformation — to ensure security and bring in global support for our efforts to build and change our country for the better.
India and China have inevitably been directly affected by the global trends of the post — Cold War era. On the one hand, we are both far more globalized economies than most, and more so than we ever were in the days when we raised the protectionist barriers to shield us while we developed our autonomous national capabilities. We are today more connected through trade and travel — much more than ever before — with the international system, and trade and foreign investment accounts for a steadily increasing share of our GDP, China’s much more than India’s. Today we can admit that our links with the world are one reason for the highest-ever growth rates that our countries enjoyed.
Our two civilizations had centuries of contact in ancient times; thanks mainly to the export of Buddhism from India to China, Chinese travellers came to Indian universities, visited Indian courts, and wrote memorable accounts of their voyages. Nalanda University, which flourished in northern India for seven centuries from 427 CE and attracted students from across Asia, received hundreds of Chinese students in its time, and a few Indians went the other way. My wife and I had the great pleasure of visiting the famous Lingyin Si temple in Hangzhou, established by a Buddhist monk from India in 326 CE. As mentioned earlier, the great admiral Zheng He visited India less than a century later; on his way, in 41 °CE, he erected a tablet in Sri Lanka, written in Chinese, Persian and Tamil, calling on the Hindu deities to bless a world of free trade! Kerala’s coastline is dotted with Chinese fishing nets, and the favourite cooking-pot of the Malayali housewife is the wok, locally called cheena-chatti (‘Chinese vessel’). It’s been a while, though, since Indians and Chinese had much to do with each other. The heady days of ‘Hindi-Chini bhai-bhai’ (‘Indians and Chinese are brothers’), the slogan coined by Nehruvian India to welcome Chou En-Lai in 1955, gave way, as we all know, to a more difficult period in our relationship, with the humiliation of the 1962 border war, after which it was ‘Hindi-Chini bye-bye’ for decades. The bitter border dispute between the two countries remains unresolved, with periodic reports of incursions by Chinese troops on to Indian soil and new irritants over the anti-Chinese protests of Tibetan exiles who have been given asylum in India. To speak of a ‘trust deficit’ between the two countries is arguably an understatement.