By Harsh V. Pant
In China, Narendra Modi broke a longstanding trend of Indian leaders telling the Chinese what they want to hear.
For all the pomp and circumstance, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s recent visit to China will likely only be remembered for his plain-speaking. And it is by no means a small achievement. For years, Indian political leaders have gone to China and said what the Chinese wanted to hear. Modi changed all that when he openly “stressed the need for China to reconsider its approach on some of the issues that hold us back from realizing full potential of our partnership” and “suggested that China should take a strategic and long-term view of our relations.” In his speech at Tsinghua University too, Modi went beyond the rhetorical flourishes of Sino-Indian cooperation and pointed out the need to resolve the border dispute and in the interim, clarify the Line of Actual Control to “ensure that our relationships with other countries do not become a source of concern for each other.” This is a significant shift in Indian traditional defensiveness vis-à-vis China and should put the relationship on a firmer footing.
The Chinese are masters at beguiling their interlocutors. So even as Modi was being given a red-carpet welcome on his high-profile visit to China and Chinese leaders were expressing hopes that Sino-Indian ties can be taken to a new level, China’s state-owned television network CCTV was showing a map of India that did not include Jammu and Kashmir and Arunachal Pradesh — the two territories disputed between the two countries — while reporting on the prime minister’s visit. There is a method to this Chinese madness, of course.
Chinese President Xi Jinping became the first Chinese head of state to visit India in eight years in September 2014 and was warmly welcomed in India by Modi. But the visit was overshadowed by a border crisis when PLA troops entered Indian territory in Chumar, Ladakh. Given this reality, it is vital for Indian leadership to move beyond rhetoric and insist on tackling the really thorny issues that have been bedeviling this relationship for years now, making it difficult for the bilateral relationship to achieve its full potential.
Read the full story at The Diplomat