From Business World of 15 April 2005.
A memorable smile
Chief minister Dharam Singh of Karnataka is getting quite
used to waiting around on the tarmac of Yelahanka airport. By his calculation,
Wen Jiabao was the seventh head of state he had received. And it is noteworthy
that the Prime Minister of China flew first to Bangalore before going on to
Delhi. There he visited the TCS campus, Indian Institute of Science and Indian
Space Research Organization amongst others – the peaks of Indian technological
achievement. They have raised India’s profile in the world, and Wen Jiabao has
shown that China is no longer unaware of it.
It is not only China’s perception of India that is
changing. If the visit of Prime Minister Wen Jiabao makes a decisive
difference, it will be in the way Indians look upon China. For almost five
decades we were fixated on that defining event, the swift and crushing defeat
of the Indian army by the Chinese in Tawang. Since then, the Indian perception
of China has been coloured by the progress on the border dispute – and for most
of the time, by the lack of it.
This issue was not absent this time; on the contrary, it
was the centerpiece; the two Prime Ministers signed an agreement laying down
the principles on the basis of which the dispute will be settled. And when
Manmohan Singh said that India had the political will to settle the dispute, he
implicitly hinted at what, in the Chinese view, had held up a settlement.
Whenever we went to talk about it, the Chinese pointed out, with some justice,
that our government would never be able to get any agreement approved by
Parliament and the people. Such was the Chinese view of democracy: that it
prevented decisive action in national interest – which is why India could never
catch up with China.
However, the sourness and
suspicion began to dissolve under Premier Wen’s charm offensive. He attacked
another Indian preconception – that unlike Indians, who are warm, emotional and
open, the Chinese are cold, calculating and unscrutable. Wherever he went, he
mixed easily, talked spontaneously, and even threw away the text and spoke
impromptu a couple of times. Strangely, although India is an Asian country,
many Indians have made a home in, and many more feel at home in the west. China
and India have for too long been strangers; the earlier this feeling of
strangeness disappears, the better.
It is in this context that the
agreement to increase air flights should be viewed. Hordes of Chinese today go
on tours of Europe and of other Asian countries; India is a natural destination
for Chinese tourism. But even more than flights, it is necessary to open up
roads. Much of Tibet is closer to India than to the rest of China; India would
be a much cheaper source for it. Equally, the province of Xinkiang, which
perches at the northeastern tip of India, is a manufacturing hub today; its
products could move to Calcutta and beyond with equal ease.
A Sino-Indian free trade
agreement would help in opening up trade by land as well as by sea. Chinese
tariffs are not high; but customs procedures are often opaque and oppressive.
Negotiations over an FTA may open up these and other areas of concern to Indian
businessmen. FTAs are not in themselves powerful creators of trade; but at the
present time, when the WTO seems to be stuck in a time warp and global trade
liberalization is at a standstill, an FTA between Asia’s two big economies may
make a difference if it is designed intelligently to generate trade and not
simply to divert it.
Sino-Indian relations are a part
of a wider set of relationships, in which the US and Pakistan are important
players. India resents the military and other support given by China to
Pakistan; China may equally at some stage be concerned about India’s growing
closeness to the US. But economic prosperity is good for all. Instead of
getting bogged down in such narrow issues, India should broaden and deepen its
economic relationship with China. Cooperation, not competition, should be the
goal, for the two economies are already developing in different directions, and
will diverge even more. The stronger their common interests become, the more
will they be able to coordinate their policies towards the rest of the world.
Before long, China and India are going to become the second and third largest
economies in the world. If they work together, their influence in the world can
only multiply. The days of blocs are over, now we have entered an age of
indiscriminate miscegenation.
