India-China Reset

As India and China complete disengagement at the Line of Actual Control (LAC), it paves the way for the two Asian giants to normalise their relations. And that too at a time, when few people saw it coming in view of the recent trends in geopolitics and India’s role in it. Since the LAC stand-off broke out in 2020, the India and China have progressively drifted apart. At the same time, the US and China have also grown apart and become the leaders of the two largely antagonistic  geopolitical interests, a reprise, as it were, of the cold war. India’s role in this evolving geopolitical scenario hasn’t been neutral. Although exercising a degree of strategic autonomy in its foreign policy, India has displayed a conspicuous slant towards the US - a choice, in part, forced by China’s aggressive posture towards New Delhi.

The border agreement therefore changes the game. It has reopened the possibility of friendly relations between India and China. But as the foreign minister S Jaishankar mentioned recently, the trust between the two sides will take time to develop. Given India’s experience over the past four years, it is likely to keep a close watch on China’s behaviour in the weeks ahead.

This, however, doesn’t take away from the profound significance of the agreement between the two nations. Since 2020,  India and China have been at daggers drawn, sending tens of thousands of troops to the border. Not just that, the two countries diverged geopolitically. China got even closer to Pakistan, extending more military aid to it. India put up barriers against Chinese investment and became a closer US ally.

Will border agreement change this? It could, although not immediately. At the same time, the agreement could also create a new geopolitical quandary for India: the country will feel the need to be equally close to the US and China and also equidistant from them. Whether that will be possible in a world splitting along cold war lines remains to be seen. New Delhi will have to do a tough balancing act between its thickening relationship with the US and that with China, effectively the world’s No 2 power.

For the west, China's emergence as a global power is a fraught prospect with far reaching implications for the way international business is conducted. More so, when China brings to the table an alternative system: a communist capitalism versus west's corporate capitalism. What makes this global shift imminent is that Beijing is already rewriting the rules of the game and with each passing day advancing to seize what it sees as the Chinese century.

In South Asia which has been the fulcrum of the global power play for centuries, this emergence of a super power in the immediate neighbourhood has far reaching repercussions. China's widening strategic sphere of influence threatens to turn the region into a heady arena for yet another cold war: this time between the US and China.  There are also serious differences of opinion on this score. Many would rather  argue that China is not the only country that is taking on the global role, and that it is followed  by India - albeit still way behind in terms of economic and military clout. Russia, on the other hand, despite its dramatic exit as a global power in the early nineties, continues to be in the reckoning. More so, with its leftover huge stockpile of nuclear weapons.

But China, nevertheless,  with its frenetic economic growth is emerging as a global power with a potential to overtake even the US. The coming two decades will be crucial in this regard. However, the prospect of this great change has already put the world in a transition syndrome. One can already sense an incipient unraveling of the unipolar world which the US had begun to build after defeating its rival USSR over three decades ago. Now, Washington again faces the geopolitical  competition which looks set to get more intense in years to come.

In this evolving geopolitical tug of war, the US needs allies, more so the ones which can help in the containment of China. And in India it has found one such key ally with necessary economic and military heft to act as a countervailing force to China.  But India, being a rising power in its own right, doesn’t look at the world through the US lens.  Although New Delhi has maintained close ties to the US, it has stayed short of uncritically siding with the west's geopolitical goals. This has given New Delhi a larger manoeuvring space in regional and global affairs. The end of the LAC standoff with China has only further increased this space. It can seamlessly operate in the spheres of influence of both the power centres, enabling it to guard its interests better. But that India can do this - and it has been doing this for a while - and get away with this, proves that we are now effectively in a multilateral world.

By:  Ahmad Rizwan