Which is why that inaugural flight between Beijing and New Delhi will be such an important development, a bridge over troubled mountains. Relations between India and China have been rocky ever since the latter consolidated its control over Tibet in 1954. A treaty the same year, the Agreement for Trade and Cultural Intercourse, did nothing to prevent the first military clashes five years later -- and the war that went some way to breaking Nehru's nonaligned heart in 1962.
Now look. As of this week, Beijing and New Delhi have established a procedure for revitalizing negotiations on the long-disputed LAC, the line of actual control -- the practical but informal meeting point of each nation's forces. Then it's on to the fixing of formal boundaries. Maps are to be exchanged by the end of the year, by which time Vajpayee will make a state visit to Beijing -- and by which time both nations will have begun to revitalize bilateral trade.
Are India and China about to give their intercourse, as they primly put it 48 years ago, a substantial injection of dynamism? Consider this in the context of the almost frenetic, multi-directional diplomacy of the two giants and it's hard to conclude otherwise. These are nations reaching out. These are nations crawling out of the Cold War's shadow, as Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee says, into the sunlight of tomorrow.
Vajpayee, incidentally, made that remark on a state visit to Singapore this week. The theme was the same as Singh's in China: put the old security concerns in the past in favor of more trade, freer trade, easier movement of people -- this is the way into the future.
Footnote: Not even a week after the announcement of the new China Eastern flights, India announced that it signed a bilateral agreement with Taiwan for three flights a week -- China Airlines (
There's some cooperation in this, and some competition. And it's all to the good. I can't help putting these events next to the drumbeat of military fundamentalism one hears from the capital of the world these days. No agility, no imagination, no lightness of step.
I can't help thinking, too, how marvelous it is that, amid all our grimness, the outline of a new era is emerging, if only you look carefully enough. And I can't help marveling, in turn, at who's constructing it -- and who's stuck in an age that is passing more swiftly than anyone might have guessed even a few years ago.
This an authentic passenger statement.
RSS