Hissing Dragon-Squirming Tiger:

Comparisons, Negotiations

and Attitudes continues....

Both the Chinese Vice-Foreign Minister and the Indian National Security Adviser are bureaucrats. In the PRC system only professionals head their Foreign and Defence Ministries, the Ministers are high ranking products of their professional foreign service or of the PLA respectively. They are not professional politicians as in India. Thus on neither side are they either empowered to or capable of the  statesmanship that can ensure a breakthrough, or even a loosening of the logjam.

To be able to come up with a statesman’s solution, a mutually-satisfactory agreement can only be arrived at by the Poltibureau of the Chinese Communist Party on one side and the Indian Cabinet on the other, unless both these bodies appoint a Plenipotentiary with the authority to make bold suggestions and arrive at agreement. Anything less is a purely cosmetic exercise, as at present.

Gregory Clark (1967), came to the conclusion that Sino-Indian hostility in the 1959-62 period was ‘a case study in mutual misunderstanding’, adding that ‘In fact there is good reason to believe that the hostility shown by each side towards the other was reactive rather than active: that each side was reacting to the believed hostility of the other.’

He is probably right in respect of the moves and counter moves by both sides in the Aksai Chin area and later in the eastern sector as well. But V. K. Singh (2006), while advocating that history be

ignored to find other solutions ‘which do not hark back to the past’,

cautions: ‘However, even to ignore history one needs to understand the

genesis of the problem in order to understand why history needs to be

ignored.’ Unfortunately, the genesis of the problem is itself history, as

the Chinese statement of 10th November 2008, reminds India.

To be continued....