Roots
Of Sino-Indian Conflict: How They Emerged From Their Cocoons
Saeed Naqvi
A clue to the future of Sino-Indian
relations lies in the different ways the two ancient civilizations came out of their
respective cocoons into the modern world in 1947 and 1948.
Indifference to the debates in British
Parliament preceding the Indian Independence Act in July 1947 may lead to
faulty conclusions. Prime Minister Clement Atlee’s was an elaborate exposition,
on why Independence was being bestowed on India. The plan of June 3 is, after
all, known as the Mountbatten plan. At the request of Indian leaders, he stayed
on as the first Governor of Independent India. It was all very chummy to the very
end. The friendship with Mountbatten was so deep that the Nehrus, particularly,
Vijaylaxmi Pandit, were regular visitors to Broadlands, his family Estate in
Hampshire. India’s first Prime Minister, nursed the friendship with great care:
he was even averse to observing the centenary of 1857 because “Dickie” was
still alive.
Mao Zedong, meanwhile, was going through
the rigours of the Long March across China recorded in Red Star over China by
Edgar Snow in 1937. In 1942 when Generalissimo Chiang Kai Shek (and Madame
Chiang Kai Shek) visited India as the Supreme Commander of the Allies during
World War II, Mao Zedong’s Communist army was laying plans to chase him out towards
Taiwan. China had come through the purgatory of a revolution, heavy US support
to the Generalissimo notwithstanding.
It followed that the two countries would
embark on different development routes too. Friends have helped me refresh my
mind on that dry theme by furnishing two classic, period movies on India’s first
decade and Breaking with Old Ideas on China during Mao’s Great Leap Forward.
In the Chinese film, the regional
committee of the party appoints one of its energetic non-academic cadres, with
experience of land, as principal of an Agricultural College. The traditional
teachers, most of them veterans of one of the many stretches of the Long March,
resent the new principal’s mobilization of students and peasants to shift the Agricultural
College from an urban to a rural location. The principal believes this would
provide greater synergy between knowledge and its application in agriculture
and animal husbandry. The new college is actually built by students and
peasants.
There is a delicious exchange between
the principal and faculty: should a chapter on Mongolian horses be replaced by
a study of buffaloes who were falling ill in the area. Buffaloes win the day. We
would be justified in screwing up our noses at frequent references to “Mao’s
thoughts” if they had been in the way of a $10 trillion edifice which is what China
eventually is today. I would invent Gods to bow before if our economy were even
a fraction of that sum, with one proviso: can we honestly claim that we have shown
fidelity to our constitution – Justice, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity – with a
sense of achievement.
Reverting to the movies: transition from
Chetan Anand’s debut movie with haunting melodies by Ravi Shankar, Neecha Nagar
(Shanty Town) in 1946 to Bimal Roy’s Do Bigha Zameen (small land holding),
1953, only amplifies rural distress, aggravated by exploitation in the name of
development. The ruling classes dispossess the peasants of their meagre holdings,
with promises of an elusive housing project here and an industrial unit there, forcing
rural folk (as in Do Bigha Zameen) to turn to cities to eke out an existence.
Not only is the dream of hope in Neecha Nagar,
at the cusp of independence, shattered but it leads consistently to
disappointments as post-independence decades pass. Raj Kapoor, ofcourse,
deserves salutations: in Awara and Shree 420 he inaugurates a trend in popular cinema
to look at “Inequality”, straight in the eye. In this he is 50 years ahead of Thomas
Piketty’s “Capital in the Twenty-First Century”.
A popular song dwells on all the houses
cornered by the rich while “we sleep on footpaths”. It is graphically summed up
by Sahir Ludhianwi in “Phir Subah Hogi” (The Dawn will break).
Cheen o Arab hamara
Hindostaan hamara
Rehne ko ghar naheen hai
Saara Jahaan hamara.
(The Arab world, China are all ours; Hindustan
belongs to us.
Never mind if we don’t have a roof over our
heads,
The whole world is ours)
The song taunts Nehru’s “Hindi Chini” bhai
bhai, non-alignment, Afro Asian solidarity as much as it does “Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam”.
Summon a procession of these images in
the mind’s eye and note the stunning continuity in the march of the
dispossessed millions beginning with the lockdown of March 24 upto, say, mid-May
when a sort of fatigue set in – human kind cannot take too much tragedy.
The country has, in the meantime, accumulated
138 billionaires and millions upon millions below the poverty line – in the 73
years of independence. Confronting us is a neighbour, China, with a comparable
population and depth of Civilization but which built itself into a great power status
on “Atmnirbharta” or self-sufficiency, which Prime Minister Modi dreams for India.
Give me an egalitarian system guaranteed by the Rule of Law, and my comparisons
stand withdrawn.
The hawkishness which informs the current
chorus, “India of 2021 is not the India of 1962”, ignores the accompanying
truth: China of 2021 is not the China of 1962. It is challenging the United States.
Author of the much discussed, “Destined for War”, Graham Allison, Professor of Government
at Harvard, has used “Thucydides Trap” to describe the Sino-US jockeying. The truth
to be distilled from the great Greek historian’s analysis and record of the 30 years’
war between Sparta and Athens (Peloponnesian wars) yields an abiding truth:
when an established power is challenged by a rising power, conflict occurs.
Supposing the established power is
preoccupied and is craftily inclined to downgrade the game and shift it notionally
to another ballpark? It projects the Thucydides logic to operate on the two Asian
giants. This would give the US an elevation, a notional perch above the Asian
combatants. But it takes two to clap: where is the rising challenger?
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