In 2020, China’s stealth encroachments into India’s Himalayan borderlands triggered deadly clashes and a prolonged military standoff that nearly erupted into war. Five years on, the border crisis remains largely unresolved, yet Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is headed to China in an apparent effort to ease friction — just when India is facing punishing tariffs imposed by US President Donald Trump.
However, recent history offers a stark warning: Trusting China is a dangerous path.
Once can certainly understand Modi’s motivations for seeking a diplomatic thaw with China. The US-India relationship, once touted as a bedrock of Washington’s strategy for ensuring a “free and open Indo-Pacific,” has plunged to its lowest point this century. The decline has accelerated rapidly under Trump, who has now raised tariffs on US imports from India to 50 percent.
Trump’s actions are as ironic as they are absurd. The US long courted India as a vital counterweight to China across the vast Indo-Pacific region, yet it is India that is now being subjected to sky-high tariffs, while China is enjoying a reprieve.
Moreover, Trump claims he is punishing India for buying Russian oil, but India purchases less energy from Russia than China or Europe do. Trump’s real objective, it seems, is to strong-arm India into a lopsided trade deal.
Meanwhile, Trump is attempting to woo Russian President Vladimir Putin — to whom he has shown far more respect than he has to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy — so that Putin not only ends the Ukraine war, but also takes a step back from China.
While Trump recognizes that punishing and isolating Russia drove the country closer to China, creating considerable risks for the US, he is repeating this mistake with India.
However, Modi should beware of letting Trump push him into China’s arms. In traveling to China, given the pressure he is under, India’s prime minister might come across less like a confident leader shaping events than a wounded statesman courting his country’s chief security threat. Experience indicates that China is far more likely to exploit any hint of Indian weaknesses than act as a reliable partner.
Ever since China annexed Tibet in 1951, turning what had previously served as a buffer with India into a Chinese military stronghold, Sino-Indian relations have been marked by rivalry and mistrust. When Modi became prime minister in 2014, he made it his mission to change that. His initial hope of improving the relationship might not have been misguided; but his refusal to change course, even when China relentlessly exploited his goodwill to make quiet territorial advances on the ground, certainly was.
China took few pains to hide its intentions: Its troops encroached on an Indian borderland as Modi welcomed Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to India for the first time. While that initial 2014 summit was portrayed as a success, Chinese forces remained on Indian territory until India dismantled its defensive fortifications there.
The following year, Modi delisted China as a “country of concern” to attract Chinese investment. What India got instead was a flood of cheap Chinese imports. In effect, India is helping to finance China’s military buildup and thus its territorial revisionism.
From 2014 to 2019 — as China steadily tightened its strategic axis with Pakistan, erected militarized “border villages” along India’s frontier and expanded its high-altitude military infrastructure — Modi met with Xi 18 times. So committed was Modi to rapprochement that he continued to engage in “appeasement diplomacy,” even after China’s 2017 seizure of the strategic Himalayan plateau of Doklam. It was only after Chinese soldiers quietly surged across multiple frontier points in April 2020 — inexplicably catching India off guard — that Modi suspended his overtures to China.
Five years later, Modi is at risk of falling into the same trap. Modi traveled to China mainly to attend the Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit in Tianjin. But the summit is largely a Chinese initiative, and India has not treated it as a priority. Last year, Modi skipped its summit in Astana, Kazakhstan’s capital; and in 2023, when India held the rotating chair, he downgraded it to a virtual summit. Modi’s decision to show up this year was probably more about signaling conciliation toward China than about the event.
China gave India no reason to think this time would be different. On the contrary, when India conducted targeted strikes on Pakistani terrorist camps in May — a response to a brutal attack on tourists in an Indian-administered area in Kashmir — China lent Pakistan critical support, including real-time radar and satellite data. Furthermore, China recently confirmed plans to build the world’s largest dam adjacent to India’s border — an undertaking that will have grave ecological and national-security implications for India.
Appeasement has never tamed revisionist powers; more often, it has emboldened them. By allowing China to profit from Indian markets even as it chips away at India’s sovereignty and security, Modi has conveyed that India, despite its tremendous economic and strategic clout, is willing to be treated as a doormat. Only with a hardnosed strategy that meets Chinese coercion with Indian resolve can Modi safeguard India’s interests.
Brahma Chellaney is professor emeritus of strategic studies at the New Delhi-based Center for Policy Research and Fellow at the Robert Bosch Academy in Berlin.
Copyright: Project Syndicate
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