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Hissing Dragon-Squirming Tiger:
Comparisons, Negotiations
and Attitudes
continues....
After Rajiv Gandhi, and till the Vajpayee China visit of 2003, the
basic approach of the Indian Government had been to leave the subject
of a boundary settlement with China for some indefinite future, since
the question of ‘giving away’ any territory as part of a ‘give-and-take’
was politically unpalatable. China rightly came to believe that India was
not interested in settling the issue. The era of new realism, and of
American influence on the Indo-Pakistan-China nuclear relationship,
began in 1999 when Foreign Minster Jaswant Singh visited China
during the Kargil border war with Pakistan, specifically to reassure the
Chinese Government that India did not consider China a threat.
The visit of Indian President Narayanan to China in 2000 signalled the
change to India’s new attitude, that India was now serious about
resolving the problem, and wanted to move forward quickly. Narayanan
had been India’s first ambassador to China after the resumption of
diplomatic relations in 1976 and was warmly received.
Serious negotiations on the subject, debating the substantive issues
at the political level, needed to be preceded by a delineation of the
interim de facto border as it stands since the end of the 1962 border war,
in other words, the Line of Actual Control, or LAC. India’s ‘Political
Representative’, in his capacity as National Security Adviser, had already
been pursuing the progress of the case independently of the Ministry of
External Affairs, to indicate to the skeptical Chinese the Indian political interest in moving forward towards a resolution. The Chinese point of view seemed to be that if India was only interested in finalizing the alignment of the LAC, and not in proceeding beyond towards settlement of the substantive issues, then the finalization of the LAC was a meaningless exercise.
To be continued....