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Opinion
Why the China Threat Story Sells in India
by Manish Chand
It's the season of China-bashing in India. In bad old socialist
days, the ruling party in India was quick to conjure up the "foreign
hand" to distract public attention from a host of domestic crises. Now,
it's the turn of market-driven media to manufacture "external threats"
to spike their TRP ratings.
But blaming the "testosterone-driven"
media for sexing up the specter of China threat, as top officials and
the army chief have done, is only part of the story. It's easy to scoff
at "conspiracy theorists," but paranoia is sometimes an act of good
citizenship. Instead of discrediting the media, it's important to
understand why the China threat story sells in the overheated media
marketplace in India.
First, recent incursions, dismissed by
India's external affairs ministry as routine incidents that occur due to
differences in perception about the Line of Actual Control (LAC), are by
themselves not alarming. But they have gained credence due to a string
of much-reported hostile posturing by Beijing against Indian interests
over the last year.
It started with China trying to block
India's quest for global nuclear trade in the Nuclear Suppliers Group
(NSG) in September last year despite a pledge at the highest level that
Beijing won't stand in the way of India's journey to nuclear liberation.
In the end, China did not stand in the way of the deal it perceived as
Washington's strategy to contain its rise. However, its calculated
vacillation had exposed chinks in the 2.0 version of Hindi-Chini
bhai bhai. It also unveiled China's anxieties about India emerging
as a rival power in the Asian hemisphere with US support.
India,
however, chose to put China's negative NSG role behind in the interests
of keeping relations on an even keel, but the message was not lost on
India's opinion-making class and news-consuming middle class.
A
few months later, China again tried to play the spoiler by trying to
block India's $2.9 billion development loan proposal at the
Manila-headquartered Asian Development Bank. China put its foot down on
the grounds that a part of the package included $60 million for
Arunachal Pradesh over which Beijing claims sovereignty. The move was
seen by many in India as a devious maneuver by Beijing to
internationalize Arunachal Pradesh in multilateral forums where its
clout is steadily growing.
China's double standards came to the
fore when it signed an MoU with its client state Pakistan in August to
construct 7,000 MW Bunji dam in Northern Areas of Pakistan-controlled
Kashmir, which is claimed by India in its entirety.
Amid all
these negative signals, the two emerging Asian powers have kept their
diplomatic engagement on course by downplaying irritants and
broadcasting aloud the latest bilateral trade figure, which is said to
have surpassed $50 billion. The leaders of both countries never tire of
ruling out rivalry and repeating the ritualistic talk of enough space
for both India and China to grow, but such platitudes have not entirely
obliterated the trust deficit that dates back to the bruising 1962 war.
More recently, an article attributed to a Chinese strategist -
subsequently disowned by the powerful Chinese strategic establishment -
exhorted China to balkanize 'Hindu India' into 20-30 independent states,
eliciting a sharp reaction from India's external affairs ministry.
Coupled with these discordant notes is the growing unease India is
feeling with Beijing's calibrated string of pearls strategy of extending
its influence among India's neighbors like Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka
and Myanmar.
The resonance of the China threat has another
deeper source in the collective Indian middle class psyche that has
nothing to do with Beijing's perceived hostility. It is the appeal and
power of the China Rising story. China, with its double digit rate of
economic growth over last three decades except for this recession-ridden
year, has outstripped India in virtually every sphere, be it
infrastructure development, poverty eradication, energy security,
Olympic golds or cutting-edge areas of science and innovation.
More Indians are travelling abroad now and are familiar with the
shining, world-class cities Beijing and Shanghai have morphed into and
they can't find a parallel nearer home. One has only to compare the
ruthless efficiency and panache with which Beijing hosted the 2008
Olympics with the kind of panic that has gripped India months before the
Commonwealth Games 2010 to understand why the China threat stirs the
great Indian middle class.
But the threat, as the Chinese
character for that word suggests, also represents an opportunity.
Instead of being intimidated, India should seize the hour and seize the
day (in Chairman Mao's famous words) to revive and sustain its economic
growth, bolster its woefully inadequate infrastructure and transform
this country with over five hundred million poor into a developed
country in the next decade or so.
The deadline for China threat
is 2020, the defining year Beijing has set to mark its entry into the
developed world. If India's rulers are still posturing by that time and
not addressing all too real issues of development and equity, then the
threat has a potential to turn real, albeit not necessarily in the sense
of a military confrontation.
(Manish Chand is a writer on diplomatic affairs. He can be contacted at
manish.c@ians.in)
IANS |
September 22, 2009
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