With high level talks taking place between India and China, this is a great time to tap into our network of scholars and policy experts on India and China. Here is another take on the India China policy issues from CUNY Professor Tansen Sen, recently published in the Times of India.
Policy hawks in India have already declared that Chinese President Xi Jinping’s recent visit to the country was a failure. Reports of border incursions by Chinese troops that overshadowed Xi’s visit and the fact that the Chinese committed to substantially less investment in India than the much-hyped $100 billion were enough for the hawks to reach this conclusion.
One could also note, if one wanted to quibble, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s slip-ups about the historical relations between India and China. He is clearly unaware of the fact that the seventh-century Chinese monk Xuanzang called some ancient Gujaratis “stingy by custom and deceitful in disposition”. Modi also mistakenly credited the Chinese with transmitting sugar-making technology to India, when it was actually India that introduced the technique to China.
All of these aspects — apprehension over the border issue, overhyped business prospects and even seemingly trivial unawareness of past relations — are symptoms of serious structural problems in India-China relations. If these symptoms are not treated expeditiously, the long-term prognosis of bilateral relations could indeed be as grim as policy hawks have always predicted.
To read the rest of Professor Sen’s article, just click here.