After the Beijing summit

It is not Pokhran-II as much as the Indian Government's failure to be responsible that ensured that nuclear South Asia would be the lead item on the Sino-U.S. summit agenda.

MIRA SINHA BHATTACHARJEA

THE Government of India has reacted with an embarrassing degree of gripe to the Joint Statement on South Asia that was issued at the end of the U.S.-China presidential summit. The Indian Government's statement said: "India categorically rejects the notion of these two countries abrogating to themselves joint or individual responsibility for the maintenance of peace, stability and security in the region." It also described the "approach" as reflecting the hegemonistic mentality of a bygone era in international relations, which, it added, is not only "unacceptable" but also "out of place in the present day world."

This reaction is out of sync with the seriousness of the whole issue. The unfortunate decision to resort to nuclear tests was the most critical decision ever to be taken by any government in the 50 years of India's Independence. That our world would never be the same again should have been anticipated. How the nuclear powers, especially the U.S. and China (that was foolishly made the principal reason for going nuclear), would react could also have been anticipated. A political, diplomatic and economic strategy should have been carefully crafted - and adopted - to pre-empt the kind of joint U.S.-China initiatives that the Joint Statement seems to foreshadow. Instead, this truly gargantuan decision has been trivialised by the nature of the initial supporting arguments and now by the tone of the Indian response. No foreign power or powers can demand that India accept whatever 'notions' it/they may have, provided India behaves as a mature, self-confident and responsible power. That is what national sovereignty is all about. And that is how the Bharatiya Janata Party-led Government sought to legitimise the Pokhran-II decision - as a necessary exercise of national sovereignty to ensure national security. But it did so without taking full responsibility for the decision and its fallout, and without communicating this to the world through its political and diplomatic handling of the decision. It is not Pokhran-II as much as the failure to be responsible that ensured that nuclear South Asia would be the lead item on a summit agenda which, as it transpires, had no other significant issue to justify the Clinton jamboree.

GREG BAKER / AP
Talks between the national delegations led by Jiang Zemin and Bill Clinton in Beijing's Great Hall of the People on June 27.

India will now have to deal with all the intended and unintended consequences of a mishandled decision, including what the Government of India statement calls a "hegemonistic mentality". The hard fact, however, is that sovereign India is unfortunately a weak player in the ruthless game of international power politics. The ability to cope with the consequences of its dual challenge, to the non-proliferation regime and to the prevailing balance of power, requires careful analysis of the policies and positions of the key players - the U.S. and China. It is axiomatic that Indian security and its diplomatic leverage are enhanced only when these key players do not collude with one another. Many people will be tempted to read the Joint Statement as proof of a condominium, an agreement to divide the world into spheres of influence, as a late-20th century version of the infamous Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, Germany's non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union signed in 1939. Such a U.S.-China arrangement is not yet a fact of international life. Too many fundamental issues still divide these powers that are in any case natural rivals. The U.S.-China Joint Statement on South Asia should therefore be analysed as much for what has been stated and what smacks of collusion as for what has not been stated and shared, and for significant differences between them.

THE most obvious feature of the Joint Statement is the manifestation of a new sense of "togetherness" between the U.S. and China. The document is replete with the the collective pronouns "we" and "our". This is a far cry from the Nixon-Zhou communique (1972) which, by contrast, took pride in presenting their different positions - including on Kashmir - in separate paragraphs. At that time, the only commonality between the two countries - opposition to hegemony - was a Chinese demand which the U.S. reluctantly accepted. An expression of "togetherness" was also not a feature of the first Jiang-Clinton communique of 1997. Its manifestation in this Joint Statement can be seen more as an announcement to the world that China has arrived as a great power and is so recognised by the U.S., that a certain degree of equality between the U.S. and China has been achieved. President Clinton on his part can use this to justify to his many critics at home his policy of engagement with China.

While its acceptance by the U.S. as an equal power has been one of China's principal diplomatic objectives since 1989 when the Tiananmen Square events brought the relationship to its lowest point, it cannot but be a matter of deep concern to India. Moreover, the only other major agreement of the summit - on not targeting the other with missiles and nuclear weapons - was presented as a counterpoise to the nuclear stand-off between India and Pakistan in South Asia, instead of as a strategic breakthrough and a first step in establishing Confidence Building Measures between these two countries. This can only add to Indian concerns. Yet, the agreement is similar to the India-China agreement of 1996 and to that between China and Russia, and can contribute to the needed security structures in Asia. As such it should be welcomed.

THERE are several other features of the Joint Statement that need to be noted. For one, there is no suggestion or hint of an anti-Indian, pro-Pakistan 'tilt'. There is, for instance, no mention of greater Indian culpability for the rising tensions in South Asia because it was the first to conduct nuclear tests. Instead, it is even-handed in calling upon both India and Pakistan to roll back their respective nuclear programmes. Missing also is any reference to India's 'expansionist' or 'hegemonistic' designs in South Asia. These were bitter accusations made by China in the early post Pokhran-II days, but which have not since been repeated. Most significant of all is the lack of specific reference to Kashmir and to the U.N. resolutions on Kashmir. The statement, instead, calls for a peaceful resolution of 'differences' between India and Pakistan. This position cannot satisfy Pakistan's strident call for an internationalisation of the Kashmir issue, and can be put to India's advantage provided India plays its cards well.

India can also draw some comfort, however cold, from the absence in the statement of a Chinese national concern about a potential nuclear rival in the Asian neighbourhood. It would be naive to believe that this concern does not exist, or that it does not influence Chinese reactions. It does and it must. However, the Joint Statement sets the nuclear issue in the context of nuclear war and nuclear peace, and the future of global non-proliferation.

These are large human concerns which both India and Pakistan also share and on which they can collaborate. It has been made somewhat easier for India to do so since its perception of China as a potential threat and as the trigger for its nulearisation programme has not been made the overt driving force behind the statement. In brief, China has not reacted to the Indian arguments in like fashion. It has not made Pokhran-II primarily an India-China issue, affecting its national security. Instead, Chinese diplomacy has managed quite effectively to efface its 'threat' to India as well as its supply of nuclear technology to Pakistan from both the national and international handling of the South Asian nuclear crisis. It has done so by putting the focus only on India-Pakistan tensions and differences (while advocating a bilateral resolution of their problems, especially Kashmir) and on the possibility of an arms race in the region, as well as on the future of global non-proliferation. India-China relations have been kept distinctly apart from these core concerns. And the door to a parallel, continuing bilateral dialogue has been kept open and, more important, separate.

THIS leads into another feature of the Joint Statement which can be read as ruling out a notionally joint handling of the South Asian nuclear issue by just the U.S. (despite the Glenn Amendment) and China. The statement makes not these countries but the U.N. the principal handling agent under Security Council Resolution No.1172 which endorsed the P-5 communique of June 4, 1998. The P-5 countries, it would seem, have been somewhat constrained, and emplaced within the U.N. structure and objectives. Similarly, the U.S. and China have agreed to work closely with these bodies, not as states acting only in their own narrow interests, but as Security Council members. This is a subtle difference, the significance of which becomes clearer when parallels are drawn with the recent Iraq developments. In the past few months Russia, France and China working together managed to return the handling of the Iraq issue to the U.N. and avert Desert Storm-II. They did so because their strategic and economic interests do not always coincide with those of the U.S. In effect, they did constrain the U.S.

This approach has left small diplomatic spaces within which India can manoeuvre. It can, for instance, regain the lost initiative vis-a-vis Pakistan and on South Asian issues. It can resume the dialogue with China on the outstanding territorial issue and on strengthening the Confidence Building Measures already agreed upon. India can also reiterate its commitment to non-proliferation and to a non-nuclear world as well as its willingness to make the necessary contribution of both idea and action. India could even find common cause with China which chose to criticise the U.S. for its nuclear policy, on the eve of President Clinton's arrival in China. The official China Daily called U.S. nuclear policies "dishonest", arguing that U.S. policy "makes nuclear proliferation unavoidable" because the U.S. maintains a stockpile of 8,000 nuclear weapons. The refusal to cut back its arsenal, the paper argues, does not "promote nuclear disarmament". This position has long been held by China, which has also urged the U.S. to sign a no-first-use agreement, but to no avail. These are grave differences in the positions of the U.S. and China on non-proliferation and nuclear disarmament. India, on the other hand, would find no difficulty in supporting the Chinese position and in cooperating with China on these vital issues.

Taken as a whole, there is nothing in the Joint Statement that was not known long before the summit was held. The positions taken by the U.S. and China and confirmed in the P-5 resolution of June 4 remain unchanged as does their commitment to the P-5 'action plan'. The new 'togetherness' between them stems mainly, as discussed earlier, from their separate domestic needs than from shared interests. It is in any case inherently fragile as it masks highly sensitive differences and cannot but be a temporary phenomenon. If this is so, it would be a mistake to predicate India's post-Pokhran diplomacy and policy on the assumption of a U.S.-China convergence of interests. And if the Government of India continues to do so, it will only compound its Pokhran-II mistakes and further enmesh India in a trap of its own making.

Mira Sinha Bhattacharjea is a former director of the Institute of Chinese Studies, Delhi.

Table of Contents

Home | The Hindu | Business Line | Sportstar