Predictable stability a must for better India-China ties

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping during a BRICS summit (FIle Photo)

Predictability is a significant contributor to stable relationships between countries — and nothing defines predictability more than frequent actions.

The deliberations during the less-than one day-visit to India by Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi on March 25 shows how and why New Delhi is looking for minimum predictability to overcome the strains caused by consistent unilateral actions along the border by the Chinese to put the ties back on track.

In the optics-dominated and protocol-dictated world of diplomacy, how a visit is announced and conducted tells its own story.

The Chinese didn’t want to make the visit officially public before it took place. Though the foreign ministers of India and China met thrice in between in a third country, it was Wang’s first visit to India since December 2019, and especially after China’s actions along the border made the ties uneasy.

There was a perceptible uptick in the bilateral ties when Wang came to Delhi in 2019 for holding the boundary talks.

There were two successful informal summits between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and China’s President Xi Jinping.

The two countries were placing themselves as factors of stability in the fast-changing international landscape, and looking at ways to ensure that their differences didn’t become intractable problems. All this was happening soon after a standoff in Doklam tri-junction in perhaps the clearest indication since 2003 that they longer go by the agreed upon understanding on the boundary issues, and can alter the status quo through unilateral measures.

Once the Doklam standoff was defused, the ties looked ready for a predictable take-off. But they were not to be as the very foundational principle of India-China ties growing strong — peace and tranquillity along the border — became shaky, this time yet again by China’s unilateral actions at the Galwan valley in June 2020, the deadliest in 45 years.

Since then both sides have been engaged in talks, and though there has been considerable progress, building mutual trust remains a Himalayan task.

The importance of peace along the border for the overall development of ties is something both countries have come around to through a series of high-level meetings. But since 2012, the Chinese attitude on issues of sovereignty has become less predictable and consistently more aggressive.

The last four border crises — namely Depsang in 2013, Chumar in 2014, and Doklam tri-junction in 2017, and Galwan valley in 2020 — progressively weakened the difficultly-achieved semblance of predictability that New Delhi could look forward to in Beijing playing its part in maintaining peace at the border.

When border transgressions become frequent, it erodes the prospects of predictability, and stability in the ties. China and India are two of the most populous countries in the world, both are nuclear-armed, with the world’s biggest armies, and both growing economies with vastly different political systems trying to expand their spheres of influence.

At the same the reality of their neighbourly existence looms large with each other.

“I attach great importance and priority to our relations with China. We are two ancient civilisations with a long history of engagement. China is our largest neighbour, and India’s neighbourhood occupies a special place in my national development plans and foreign policy,” Prime Minister Narendra Modi said while welcoming Xi in Delhi in September 2014, four months after Modi was sworn in as Prime Minister.

Wang’s visit and the events (or the lack of it) surrounding it show that India-China bilateral ties to get back to normal the restoration of peace and tranquillity along the border is required, not to mention a certain amount of predictability.

Jayanth Jacob is a foreign policy commentator who covered the ministry of external affairs for more than two decades. Twitter: @jayanthjacob.

Views are personal and do not represent the stand of this publication.