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Li peng to visit India: Frosty ties |
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The forthcoming visit to India of Mr Li Peng, Chairman of China's National People's Congress, is expected to give a significant boost to bilateral relations. The Chinese leader will be the highest official in May 1998, after India conducted a series of nuclear tests. Relations continue to be frosty for nearby a year until Mr Jaswant Singh, the minister for external affairs, visited China in 1999. Since then there has been the successful state visit of the Indian president, K.R.Narayanan this May, and the Chinese foreign minister, Mr Tang Jianxuan made an equally important visit to India in July this year. It is clear that both India and China have introspected and come to a common understanding that it is vital to forge stronger ties. The most significant factor accelerating bilateral tics is the desire for a multipolar world order. Both New Delhi and Beijing are deeply apprehensive about the manner in which American foreign policy is increasingly taking recourse to unilateral actions to deal with situations that are thought to be threatening international peace and security. For insistence, China and India were particularly incensed by the air strikes carried out by the Nonh Atlantic Treaty Organization, under the leadership of the United States, in former Yugoslavia. Similarly, both China and India face a common threat from international terrorism, especially of the kind being spread by radical Islamic groups that derive ideological and material support from forces in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Yet, the warming of bilateral ties cannot hide the differences over a number of critical issues and should not prevent a frank dialogue on these. New Delhi's most serious concern is with Beijing's disturbing record of transfer of nuclear and missile technology to Pakistan. There is growing evidence that despite routine assurances by China, cooperation between Beijing and Islamabad on the nuclear and missile front has been growing in clear violation of Chinese acceptance of the guidelines of the missile technology control regime and its legal commitment to the nuclear nonproliferation treaty. While Beijing has only recently assured the United States that nuclear and missile cooperation with Islamabad has stopped, it is vital that New Delhi too secures a clear commitment on this score.
India also wants a clear delineation of the line of actual control on the India-China border. This will not mean a settlement of the border dispute, which admittedly is more complex, but merely an agreement on actual positions occupied by the two sides on the ground. While the Chinese foreign minister, Mr Jiaxuan, during his last visit, assured India that the process would be accelerated to clarify the line of actual control, there was no commitment. The progress is being limited to the middle sector, rather than in the really contentious eastern and, especially, the western sector, where the bulk of the problems occur. China needs to be made aware of Indian sensitivities and concerns on these issues. New Delhi also wants a recognition and acceptance of India’s status as a state with nuclear weapons. However, China is the only nuclear weapons state that continues to adopt a hard line towards India's nuclear policy. While the other nuclear states have, more or less, come to terms with India's new nuclear status, following the nuclear tests of 1998, it is Beijing alone that keeps harping on the United Nations security council resolution 1172. A healthier and firmer Sino-Indian relationship, it is clear, can only be built if both countries do not shy away from addressing the issues that have derailed ties, time and again.
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