chellaney126_Arvind YadavHindustan Times via Getty Images_modixijinping

India’s Appeasement Policy Toward China Unravels

Jun 5, 2020 Brahma Chellaney

Last month’s swift and well-coordinated incursions by People’s Liberation Army troops into the icy borderlands of India’s Ladakh region were likely the product of months of preparation. The aggression – and the fact that Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi didn't see it coming – shows just how miserably his China policy has failed.

NEW DELHI – Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is “not in a good mood,” US President Donald Trump recently declared, as he offered to mediate India’s resurgent border conflict with China. After years of bending over backward to appease China, Modi has received yet another Chinese encroachment on Indian territory. Will this be enough to persuade him to change his approach?

While India was preoccupied with the COVID-19 crisis, China was apparently planning its next attempt to change the region’s territorial status quo by force. Last month’s swift and well-coordinated incursions by People’s Liberation Army troops into the icy borderlands of India’s Ladakh region 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 weapons on its side of the Line of Actual Control (LAC), within striking distance of Indian deployments.

China’s “unexpected” maneuver should not have been unexpected at all. Last August, China’s government vigorously condemned India’s establishment of Ladakh – including the Chinese-held Aksai Chin Plateau – as 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 near the Indian border this year.

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0 Comments on this paragraph, 8 in all 8 Comments on this article

Ankur Sharma Jun 23, 2020

Modi did focus on Pakistan when he landed in there on the birthday of Nawaz shariff, the so called " birthday diplomacy" but there too he got a cold shoulder in the form of Uri Attack and Vajpayee too tried to appease China by recognising Tibet as part of China (with Dalai Lama in our backyard) but failed to break the C-P axis.Crux being, this appeasement of both the nations have always been the fulcrum of our foreign policy. We dwindle b/w both the nations and have failed miserably all the time.
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Gene Gene Jun 9, 2020

India is not naive. With their continuous human rights abuses and illegal occupation of Kashmir to meddling Afghanistan by supporting terrorism in Pakistan. To bullying smaller south Asian nations like Nepal, Bhutan to Bangladesh and lets not forget the Tamil Tigers support in Sri Lanka. India is getting the taste of its own medicine from someone that is more powerful and can give a good fitting response to Indian bullying in the region.
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Sambit Datta Jun 7, 2020

From the Nehru- Zhou Enlai period to the current Modi-Xi arrangement there has been a mismatch between Indian perceptions and ground realities in the India-PRC relationship. As Chellany elegantly points out, India must redefine the strategic position away from moving pillars and posts along a non existent border ( a game it is losing ) to a more tenable, moral, historical and defensible Pancha Shila. India must
1. Acknowledge that the border, wherever it is demarcated, is between Tibet and India and any changes made by the PLA cannot be recognised. Historically there has never been a solid border between Tibet and India. This has only arisen after the Chinese takeover of Tibet. There is no Indo China border, only one between Tibet and India. This is the long view and since we blame Nehru for most our ills today, we may as well pin this mistake on him as a historic blunder. Immediate and massive assistance to Tibetans in exile including preserving their culture religion and holy places (Tawang) from sinicization.

2. Continue to strengthen our democratic, free and open society credentials as an example in standing upto a totalitarian regime led by a leader for life. India's abhorrence and rejection of totalitarianism must extend to the modern Chinese state under the control of the CPC. The long view must be regime change so that democracy and freedom can flourish in the Middle Kingdom. This means supporting the murmurs of dissent that brave Chinese are putting up everyday against their oppressive regime. There are detractors internally in any dictatorial one man regime. This one is no exception.

3. Decouple from the economic tentacles of the PRC through stringent policy in all aspects and strengthen economic ties with complementary East Asian economies such as Jaoan, South Korea, Taiwan. Yes there is an economic price to pay for freedom and democracy.

4. Coordinate with countries facing boundary issues with a totalitarian hegemon. Vietnam, Japan, Phillipines, Malaysia to ensure that every time a strategic change is triggered, there is a mechanism for highlighting the pattern of infringement.

5. Engaging with the US and western powers to ensure that the theatre of engagement is not the into Tibetan "border" but the militarised islands in the South China Sea. India can neither afford nor match the PLA in direct confrontation but must weeken the ability of the PRC through military alliances and ensuring that the flash points in confronting the PLA militarily remains the Western Alliance.
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ctvvs chowdary Jun 7, 2020

Modi must have realized now it will be utterly foolish trying to appease China.
Modi learned lesson after sudden visit to Pakistan Nawaz Shreif's house and later terrorist attack.
Indian govt's learn personal lessons after bitter experiences only.
Indian govts do not learn lessons from the past behavior of neighboring inimical countries, or previous govts failed efforts.
Every Indian PM wants to have personal stamp on foreign policy.
Imagine if Rahul Gandhi becomes next PM , again Pakistan and China send platitudes of good neighborliness and again new PM fall for the cunning overtures of our crooked neighbors.
Because new PM will choose new staff and they also want to experiment with latest initiatives from neighbors. Each nation go by national interests and will not change foreign policy. BUT HAS ONLY REACTIVE FOREIGN POLICY. BECAUSE WE DO NOT KNOW WHAT OUR NATIONAL INTERESTS EXCEPT PEACEFUL COEXISTENCE. We never go back past playbooks and will not think about how to change our strategy based on past failures, but keep on trying.
EXAMPLES: Hanging on to SAARC for decades
Without building infrastructure on LAC, but try to improve relations through diplomatic engagement
Big country ego syndrome, our economy is very weak
Multi vectored foreign policy , with hedging
Neighborhood first policy, a total fiasco Nepal, Sri Lanka veering towards China
What happened to generous loan given to those countries, China outbid India
No Spine to take forward QUAD,

This is india's bane. And it should change.

Now Modi sent diplomatic messaging
He should sent technological , trade related messaging
1. Start discussion D-10 grouping 5g proposal by UK PM
2. Start discussion with Australia about rare earths imports and setting up joint collaboration
3. Start discussion with Samsung, Microsoft, Google to set up an mobile ecosystem , supply chains and mobile low cost manufacturing hubs in India , to out compete and crush Chinese mobile brands
4. Start strategic planning for one million Indo-pacific maritime lightly armed dual purpose amphibious fishing boats. These militia boats should be maned by ex naval employees, manpower from private contractors , from US, India , Japan, UK, France, Vietnam , Philippines. These boats will be used for fishing, surveillance and counter coercion from China. These boats will have logistics, shelter facilities or floating shelters in South China Sea from coastal countries.This will create employment , and put a break on Chinese maritime militia.
5. Form an international mining group to out compete China in Africa.
India should take active lead in all of these initiatives.
Let China go to war, they may get chunk of Indian land , Asia should witness new order which is presages beginning of end of bully China .
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Akhtar Syed Jun 6, 2020

Taking into consideration the 2015 summit of Shanghai Cooperation Organization's Ufa declaration is India not bound to agree to border talks? Both India and Pakistan are now bound to that pact which requires all border issues being solved in order to be to get full membership benefits. Also as per joining of the SCO, India has implicitly accepted China's hegemony. So, China is just poking India to follow through with that agreement albeit with extreme brinkmanship.
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Balasubramaniam Muthusamy Jun 6, 2020

A comprehensive and candid writeup. Foreign policy esp with a power like China given the past history, is complex. Hope, status quo ante is achieved
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j. von Hettlingen Jun 5, 2020

Brahma Chellaney is lambasting his prime minister, Narendra Modi for appeasisng China, calling him “a kind of Indian Neville Chamberlain.” In power between 1937-1940, the British prime minister, who had lived through World War I, was determined to avert another war. Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement towards Adolf Hitler culminated in the 1938 Munich Agreement in which Britain and France accepted that the Czech region of the Sudetenland be ceded to Nazi Germany.
The author accuses Modi of cosying up to Xi Jinping like Chamberlain did to Adolf Hitler. Despite repeated incidents of Chinese incursion in the past, Modi seemed weak and reluctant to raise the issue about violation of Indian boundaries with Xi when the two leaders met at international summits like BRICS and G20. Last November at the BRICS summit in Brazil, Modi told Xi: “It is such a significant thing that within the five years, there has been so much trust and friendly relations.”
India said last month the Chinese People’s Liberation Army brought a large number of troops to three locations on its border including two in Ladakh, a region of strategic importance nestled between western Tibet and Pakistan-occupied Kashmir that was recently brought under Indian control — a move that angered China. The stand-off in the Himalayas has escalated tensions in a disputed section of the border shared by the two neigbhours.
According to the author, Modi “did not see” the incursions coming, which “were likely the product of months of preparation.” The prime minister naively hoped that, “by appeasing China, he could reset the bilateral relationship and weaken China’s ties with Pakistan, another revisionist state that lays claims to sizable swaths of Indian territory.” Chamberlain also believed that by appeasing Hitler he had assured “peace for our time”. However, in March 1939 Hitler annexed the rest of the Czech lands of Bohemia and Moravia, with Slovakia becoming a puppet state of Germany. Later in September Hitler's forces invaded Poland. Chamberlain responded with a British declaration of war on Germany.
The Modi government conceded the recent tensions in the Himalayas may have been triggered by completion of a road and bridge in the Galwan sector of Ladakh, part of a border infrastructure programme launched by India seeking to develop remote areas. But China sees India’s infrastructure building along the Line of Actual Control, of which both sides have different interpretations, as a threat, challenging the status quo, and therefore cannot be tolerated.
India and China – the two most populous countries on earth, accounting for over 2.7 billion people – are no strangers to animosity, and fought a war in 1962. But both giants have sought to put history behind them, as economic and commercial realities took precedence. This year marks seven decades of India’s diplomatic ties with China, its second-biggest trading partner after the US. Yet every now and then the two neighbours face a stand-off in the Himalayas. While they both try to ease tensions, Pakistan often emerges as the laughing third.
India is embroiled in border disputes with China and Pakistan. While India does not treat China as its bitter enemy like it treats Pakistan, it believes traditional mistrust and lack of trade reciprocity from China has hindered progress with Beijing. The border dispute has often led to a backlash against China with Indians calling for a ban on Chinese imports. Given China’s trade surplus of $60 billion a year, it may explain why Xi can be pragmatic and ease tensions.
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Harsh Ray Jun 5, 2020

China is openly on the path of aggression, as its actions from Hong Kong and South China Sea to the Indian border underscore. Had Manmohan Singh still been India's prime minister, China's aggression against India wouldn't have been less. It probably would have been greater, given that Singh was a weakling.

Modi, however, must acknowledge that his China policy has been a disaster. Course correction has become imperative.
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