China issue needs Indians to study China

India now has a China problem more than the Pakistan problem on its hands. Beijing would want to keep India on tenterhooks by its activities, including military incursions, on the Line of Actual Control (LAC) in Ladakh and in Arunachal Pradesh.

A full-blown war on the China front is unlikely because it does not help Beijing in any way.

It is the episodic flare-ups that keeps the situation simmering, and distract India from its global economic and diplomatic forays.

The European and American support for India against China is evident, and it would appear that India would get full Western cooperation during its G20 presidency in 2023 as a diplomatic snub to China.

But India cannot allow itself to be misled by Western empathy because the economic ties between China and Europe and China and America remain crucial to the West as much as for China.

That makes the West’s support for India mere lip-service.

There is also the general diplomatic thrust to prop up India against China in the same way that during the Cold War the West propped up Pakistan against India on the assumption that India was in the Soviet bloc.

Americans are now proclaiming India to be a US ally and partner, a most-favoured status once enjoyed by Pakistan in south Asia.

Europe and America would love to provide military aid to India to fight a war against China in the same way that the West is supplying arms to Ukraine to fight Russia.

External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar had been driving home the point through the year that the Ukraine crisis is of little relevance to India and it is more concerned with the problems posed by China on its frontier.

The West may appear only too willing to stand by India’s side in its confrontation with China.

It is not surprising then that the United Kingdom is conceding that India should be a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC), without saying whether the Permanent Five would have to be reshuffled or expanded.

There might be a plan to push Russia out of the P5 club because Russia no more the major player that it was under Stalin at the end of the Second World War nor is it the nuclear powered rival superpower of the Cold War.

We know that China was kept out of the UNSC till the 1970s and tiny Taiwan represented China through the 1950s and 1960s.

The strategic games is all about sharing the spoils among the strong and the powerful. Logic would dictate that neither Great Britain nor France should be the permanent members of the Security Council because they are not what there were in 1945. Perhaps Germany and Japan, the losers in the war, should be inducted into the Top Five.

The Modi government has displayed sufficient nimbleness in placing itself in the club of liberal democracies of the West, while continuing with its trade with Russia despite the sanctions imposed by the US and the European Union (EU).

Though India would argue for a sanctions regime against Pakistan for allowing anti-India terrorist organisations, it is to be seen whether India would make such a demand from the West against China.

And whether the United States and European Union would oblige India.

New Delhi cannot derive any satisfaction from the display of Western solidarity for India against China.

It has to fight its own battle against China, through diplomacy, through trade and war, and it cannot depend on outsiders to fight this war or win this war.