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INDIA-CHINA TIES CAN CURB ANY HEGEMONY IN THE REGION

Nilotpal Basu

The Economic Times, December 20, 2009

With Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in close confabulation with his Chinese counterpart Wen Jia Bao over the Copenhagen summit on climate change quite a few eyebrows have been raised. As is wont with the mainstream, there is a mood swing. From the palpable atmosphere of confrontation, which was provoked by the diplomatic row over the Dalai Lama's visit to Arunachal Pradesh, there is new interest in China bordering on the early forecast of bonhomie.

This is despite the largely unfounded reports that had earlier found their way to the prime-time talk shows in Indian television channels and the screaming humongous column centimetres on front page of the print media over alleged Chinese incursions into the Indian territory, notwithstanding the unambiguous denials of these by the highest Indian political and security brass.

China has always remained an enigma to the outside world. Chroniclers had always maintained that China was a sleeping giant waiting to wake up and impact the world. The allusion was to the stupor, which a large Chinese population suffered during the days of the internecine opium wars.

China throughout her dynastic rules had inspired a sense of awe and wonder but perhaps never in the history had it been seen to have completely translated its true civilisational potential. In this historical context, it is also worth noting that India and China always had dared civilisational contacts with Chinese travellers like Fa Hein and Hu Yen Sang visiting India and chronicling their first hand experience of the subcontinent.

But never before as it is now China has really announced its arrival in the global arena. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the socialist governments of Eastern Europe had signalled the end of the cold war. The cataclysmic changes ushered in by the historic turn of events inspired the ideologues of the free market in the United States and its western allies to celebrate with a pronounced sense of triumphalism – ‘capitalism is the end of history’.

The collapse of the bipolar architecture of international relations should have signalled a multipolar course for global development. The collapse of the Warsaw Pact should have automatically led to the dissolution of NATO. But the promise of the peace dividend in a more humane world without the arms race never ever materialised. This was in the main denied because of an obsessive drive of unilateral political and security actions initiated to secure global hegemony by the only surviving super power.

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