Hissing Dragon-Squirming Tiger:

Comparisons, Negotiations

and Attitudes continues....

In the 1996 General Elections, the right-wing Bhartiya Janta Party (Bhajpa)’s election manifesto included for the time ‘settlement of the border issue with China’, a surprising departure for the party whose forbears had been most insistent on the government’s ‘throwing the intruders out’ in 1962, and which till then was consistently insistent on ‘China’s vacation of Indian territory illegally occupied by it’, i.e., Aksai Chin.

The nuclear blasts at Pokharan in 1998 sent Sino-Indian relations to a new low, as China, a nuclear ‘status quo’ power, viewed this development with concern. However, the concern was not so much due to the blasts themselves as to the umbrage that China took at being cited as the reason for the nuclear tests, in particular in PM Vajpayee’s letter to the US President Bill Clinton.

Till Pokharan-II in 1998, in spite of all the things it had learnt, India had not learnt that it was in India’s own interest to settle the boundary dispute with China as quickly as possible, instead of leaving it as a convenient stick in China’s hand, to use at any time of its own choosing.

Many cosmetic ‘border negotiation’ meetings later, by ‘Committees of Experts’ and ‘Joint Working Groups’, after a number of ‘successful’ visits to China by Indian Prime Ministers, the substantive position on the dispute remains basically the same as in 1959-1960.

To be continued.....