{"id":56518,"date":"2020-06-10T11:00:54","date_gmt":"2020-06-10T01:00:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/?p=56518"},"modified":"2020-06-10T10:52:59","modified_gmt":"2020-06-10T00:52:59","slug":"indias-appeasement-policy-towards-china-unravels","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/indias-appeasement-policy-towards-china-unravels\/","title":{"rendered":"India\u2019s appeasement policy towards China unravels"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/figure>\n

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is \u2018not in a good mood\u2019, US President Donald Trump recently declared<\/a>, as he offered to mediate India\u2019s resurgent border conflict with China. After years of bending over backwards to appease China, Modi has received yet another Chinese encroachment on Indian territory. Will this be enough to persuade him to change his approach?<\/p>\n

While India was preoccupied with the Covid-19 crisis, China was apparently planning its next attempt to change the region\u2019s territorial status quo by force. The swift and well-coordinated incursions<\/a> by People\u2019s Liberation Army troops into the icy borderlands of India\u2019s Ladakh region in May were likely the product of months of preparation. The PLA has now established heavily fortified camps in the areas it infiltrated, in addition to deploying<\/a> weapons on its side of the Line of Actual Control, within striking distance of Indian deployments.<\/p>\n

China\u2019s \u2018unexpected\u2019 manoeuvre shouldn\u2019t have been unexpected at all. Last August, China\u2019s government vigorously condemned<\/a> India\u2019s establishment of Ladakh\u2014including the Chinese-held Aksai Chin Plateau\u2014as a new federal territory. (China seized Aksai Chin in the 1950s, after gobbling up Tibet, which had previously served as a buffer with India.) And the PLA had been conducting regular combat exercises<\/a> near the Indian border this year.<\/p>\n

Deception, concealment and surprise often accompany China\u2019s use of force, and Chinese leaders have repeatedly claimed<\/a> that military pre-emption was a defensive measure. Its latest assault on India\u2014which China claims is the actual aggressor\u2014was taken straight from this playbook.<\/p>\n

Yet Modi didn\u2019t see the Chinese incursions coming. His vision seems to have been clouded by the naive hope that, by appeasing China, he could reset the bilateral relationship and weaken China\u2019s ties with Pakistan, another revisionist state<\/a> that lays claims to sizeable swaths of Indian territory.<\/p>\n

The China\u2013Pakistan axis has long generated high security costs for India and raised the spectre of a two-front war. That\u2019s why some Indian leaders have pursued a \u2018defensive wedge strategy\u2019, in which the status quo power seeks to drive a wedge between two allied revisionist states, so that it can focus its capabilities on the more threatening challenger.<\/p>\n

In 1999, the first prime minister from Modi\u2019s Bharatiya Janata Party, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, sought to win over Pakistan by visiting the country on the inaugural trip of a new bus service from Delhi to Lahore. Vajpayee was rewarded for his \u2018bus diplomacy\u2019 with a stealth invasion by Pakistan\u2019s powerful military of the Indian border zone of Kargil. This triggered a localised war, in which both sides lost<\/a> several hundred soldiers before the status quo ante was restored.<\/p>\n

Unlike Vajpayee, Modi has focused his attention on China\u2014with similarly disastrous results. In fact, soon after becoming prime minister in 2014\u2014and just hours before hosting Chinese President Xi Jinping for a summit meeting\u2014he learned that PLA troops had elbowed<\/a> their way into southern Ladakh\u2019s Chumar area, which lies along the Line of Actual Control, and built a temporary road there.<\/p>\n

The summit was portrayed<\/a> as a success, even though the Chinese didn\u2019t withdraw until weeks later, after India agreed to demolish local defensive fortifications. This was the beginning of a policy not of reconciliation but of appeasement, the costs of which continue to mount.<\/p>\n

On a trip to Beijing the next year, Modi surprised<\/a> his own administration by announcing a decision to issue electronic tourist visas to Chinese nationals upon their arrival in India. He also delisted<\/a> China as a \u2018country of concern\u2019, in an effort to court Chinese investment. Instead, the move opened India up to even more dumping by Chinese firms. On Modi\u2019s watch, China has more than doubled its trade surplus with India to US$60 billion per year\u2014nearly equal to India\u2019s annual defence spending.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, the PLA has continued to encroach<\/a> on disputed territories. In mid-2017, Indian troops were pushed into another standoff with the PLA\u2014this time at Doklam, a small and desolate Himalayan plateau where Chinese-ruled Tibet meets the northeastern Indian state of Sikkim and the Kingdom of Bhutan. Indian troops stood up to the Chinese, as the PLA attempted to build a road to the India border through the uninhabited plateau that Bhutan, an Indian ally, regards as its own territory. The standoff lasted 73 days, before China and India agreed to disengage.<\/p>\n

India declared<\/a> the Doklam disengagement a tactical victory. But over the next several months, China steadily expanded its troop deployments by building permanent military structures, thereby gaining control of much of Doklam. Despite being the de facto guarantor of Bhutan\u2019s security, India failed to defend the tiny country\u2019s territorial sovereignty.<\/p>\n

Yet Modi maintained India\u2019s appeasement policy. In 2018, his government backed away<\/a> from official contact with the Dalai Lama and Tibet\u2019s India-based government-in-exile. At the same time, as Xi later revealed<\/a>, Modi proposed an annual \u2018informal\u2019 bilateral summit\u2014a proposal Xi gladly accepted, because high-level meetings aid China\u2019s \u2018engagement with containment\u2019 strategy towards India<\/a>. Two such summits have now been held, as well as 14 other meetings between the two leaders.<\/p>\n

And what has Modi gotten for his troubles? China has stepped up its territorial revisionism, while raking in growing profits from the bilateral economic relationship (though, to be sure, India did recently tighten<\/a> its policy on foreign direct investment, so that any flows from China must be preapproved).<\/p>\n

Modi has himself to blame for this state of affairs. With his excessive personalisation of policy and stubborn strategic naivety, he has shown himself not as the diplomatically deft strongman he purports to be, but as a kind of Indian Neville Chamberlain. Unless he learns from his mistakes and changes his policy towards China, India\u2019s people\u2014and territorial sovereignty\u2014will pay the price.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is \u2018not in a good mood\u2019, US President Donald Trump recently declared, as he offered to mediate India\u2019s resurgent border conflict with China. After years of bending over backwards to …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":482,"featured_media":56520,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1163,52,69,1055],"class_list":["post-56518","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general","tag-borders","tag-china","tag-india","tag-narendra-modi"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nIndia\u2019s appeasement policy towards China unravels | The Strategist<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/indias-appeasement-policy-towards-china-unravels\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"India\u2019s appeasement policy towards China unravels | The Strategist\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is \u2018not in a good mood\u2019, US President Donald Trump recently declared, as he offered to mediate India\u2019s resurgent border conflict with China. 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