By Brahma Chellaney
At first glance, the Indian prime minister seems endowed with an internationally unmatched ability to fundamentally transform a relationship with an adversarial state by paying one visit.
Just as Atal Bihari Vajpayee returned from Lahore in 1999 with a shared ‘vision of peace’ with Pakistan that he swore constituted “a defining moment” in Indo-Pak relations, he came back from China recently vowing that Beijing now “fully reciprocates our desire for mutual goodwill”.
A closer look, however, reveals that in the absence of realistic, result-oriented statecraft, India just subsists on the remarkable fantasies of its unremarkable decision-makers, with George Santayana’s saying particularly applicable: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” With a personalised and unpredictable approach founded on four ‘s’s — simplistic, schmaltzy, short-range and shifting — Indian diplomacy is guided neither by the past nor by the three cardinal principles of reciprocity, leverage and pragmatism.
Vajpayee’s extraordinary roller- coaster on Pakistan — from Lahore to Srinagar via Kargil, Kandahar, Agra and Parliament House — rattles along, with Islamabad its next destination. And his U-turn on China — from prime foe to ‘positive force’ — occurred not because Beijing has changed in any way but because he self-admittedly decided to sideline its direct and surrogate activities against India.
The China visit was a classic exemplar of Indian diplomacy in practice. While all the effusive statements and concessions came from the Indian side, the Chinese spoke in measured terms on Sino-Indian relations and gave no ground but yet dominated the outcome. Gushy Indian commentaries, echoing Vajpayee’s belief that he has prodigiously set in motion an Asian understanding across the Himalayas, were strikingly unlike the staid assessments in the Chinese press.
While India gave up its Tibet card gratis, China — unwilling to surrender any of its bargaining chips — did not yield even on Sikkim despite the Indians accepting its long-standing proposal to reopen the ancient silk route from there. For Beijing, the still-undefined line of control remains a powerful lever in its hands against India, as does its claim on Arunachal Pradesh and its stand on J&K. It accepted the McMahon Line with Burma but not with India.
The visit’s low point was the way India made a hash of the Sikkim matter, turning it into a public issue for the first time ever and building up false expectations that Beijing would positively respond to the visit by formally recognising the 28-year-old reality on the territory’s merger with India. In the end, Vajpayee not only returned empty-handed, but his visit also contributed to an unflattering international linkage being drawn between troubled Tibet and peaceful Sikkim, a non-issue, with the Sikkimese (and the rest of the world) having accepted the union with India. Vajpayee’s aides first claimed and then (when controversy flared) disclaimed a Sikkim-Tibet trade-off.
Yet this very failure on Sikkim was spun as the high spot of the visit, with the Indians first claimed to have won de facto Chinese recognition and then (when twice rebuked by China over that claim) Vajpayee himself fed the nation the illusion that he had succeeded in starting “the process by which Sikkim will cease to be an issue in India-China relations”. Having surrendered India’s sole bargaining chip on Sikkim — the trade card — Vajpayee has been tellingly silent on how long that process would be or what leverage New Delhi could now exercise to ensure a successful outcome.
His statement also begs the question as to why a non-issue was first turned into a public issue, necessitating the “start of a process” to make it again a non-issue.
The Indian public had not heard of Sikkim as an issue between India and China until Vajpayee’s hangers-on, seeking to hype their leader’s impending visit as a ‘turning point’, dispensed to the media their phantasm of an expected Chinese recognition. This created a pre-visit media frenzy in India over the likely ‘breakthrough’, with the Chinese gladly contributing to the making of Sikkim as an issue with wily statements about their “readiness” to discuss this “outstanding” subject.
Having first handed China a card by building up Sikkim as an issue, Vajpayee’s visit ended on an ignominious anti-climax for the Indians, with China not only declining to grant formal recognition but also going to the extent of publicly repudiating the still-touring Indian side’s claim to have secured tacit Chinese recognition. The first public reproach came even before Vajpayee and Co. left Beijing and the second came as they prepared to depart for home from Shanghai.
No previous Indian government had showed up Sikkim as a problem. Sikkim is not only a tiny state but, more importantly, China neither lays claim to it nor disputes its 19th-century boundary with Tibet. So China’s insistence on ploughing a lonely furrow on Sikkim makes little strategic difference to India but puts Beijing at odds with the rest of the international community.
If China’s persistence in showing Sikkim as independent is germane to any issue, it is to its own sporadic claim of wanting a “package settlement” of its territorial disputes with India. It is to show that this claim is just a rhetorical bait, with no substance or specificity, that
India since the very first round of border talks in December 1981 has sought to quietly probe the Chinese view on Sikkim because it does not fall in any of the three Chinese-identified frontier sectors — eastern, middle and western. The Chinese, however, have steadfastly declined to deal with the specifics or gaps such as on Sikkim in their self-touted package offer, even as they have now used the same bait to sell a diversionary mechanism on border talks to Vajpayee.
From being a small, discreet matter in private negotiations, Sikkim was turned into a high-status, prestige issue in public by Vajpayee. Worse was the rationale he and his aides employed to claim de facto Chinese recognition of the Sikkim reality. Their professed reasoning undergirds the way India relives history. The following shows how New Delhi is reliving the very mistakes of the 1954 accord on trade with the “Tibet region of China” that brought it to grief:
* Exactly the way Nehru touted the 1954 accord as de facto Chinese recognition of the Indo-Tibetan frontier — a blunder that brought war — Vajpayee has marketed the Sikkim-Tibet trade memorandum as tacit Chinese recognition of Sikkim as part of India.
* Just as Nehru misconstrued the reference to border-trade mountain passes and posts in the 1954 accord as Chinese acknowledgement of where the frontier lay, Vajpayee has interpreted in the same naïve fashion the nebulous mention in the latest accord “of opening another pass on the India-China border”. But no sooner the 1954 agreement had been signed than China laid claim to Uttaranchal’s Barahoti and then intruded south of Niti and Shipki passes — all specified border points in that accord.
* The way Nehru traded an explicit concession for a self-perceived implicit gain — sacrificing Tibet so that “our northern frontier should be considered a firm and definite one” — Vajpayee has done likewise on Sikkim, adding as a sweetener a gratuitous new Indian formulation on Tibet that outdoes Nehru.
* Like Nehru took no notice of Beijing’s statements that it had signed a border-trade and not a border accord in 1954, Vajpayee refuses to pay heed to Chinese disclaimers on the new trade memorandum.
* Emulating Nehru’s rush to judgment, Vajpayee has disregarded the obvious on the trade memorandum: that, far from signifying any Chinese shift, its language conforms to China’s stance of not disputing Sikkim’s pre-1975 status as an Indian protectorate, with New Delhi in charge of its external relations, including trade pacts.
* While Nehru came to rue the Chinese-defiled five principles of peaceful coexistence incorporated in the 1954 accord, whose eight-year term ended the year China invaded India, Vajpayee has agreed to jointly “celebrate the 50th anniversary” of the long-expired principles with their prime mover and desecrator — China. This decision mocks the 1962 Parliament resolution affirming “China has betrayed… the principles of Panchsheel”. The unimaginable is unfolding: a party to celebrate an anniversary of rape with the violator.
The strident Chinese negation of any tacit recognition confirms that Beijing has upped the ante on Sikkim since the 1996 I.K. Gujral-Qian Qichen discussion when the Chinese vice-premier espoused a trade-for-recognition deal. Having got the trade pact on the house, Beijing would now want more before it deigns to stop playing the India-gifted Sikkim card. A gawky India has ended up with two disputes on Sikkim with China: one, whether the trade accord contains implicit Chinese recognition or not; and two, how the Vajpayee-made public issue can “cease to be an issue”. If Vajpayee goes still further and allows the Chinese-sponsored Karmapa Lama to be installed at the Rumtek monastery, his legacy on Sikkim would become ineffaceable.
