WHILE Congress’s communication head Jairam Ramesh accused Prime Minister Narendra Modi of “cowardly kowtowing” to Beijing and being silent on what he called was the Pakistan-China “jugalbandi,” party leader Shashi Tharoor struck a more nuanced note saying Modi’s engagement with Chinese President Xi Jinping was a “necessary step” towards “restoring the balance” and he was confident the Government will “stand our ground.”
His party colleagues, former External Affairs minister Salman Khurshid and Lok Sabha MP Manish Tewari, cautioned the Government against adopting a “knee-jerk foreign policy” just because India is “facing unwarranted turbulence from the United States.”
While Tewari said “excessive reliance on China comes at its own cost”, Khurshid, now the head of the Congress’s foreign affairs department, said: “Strategic calculations cannot be just momentary. They cannot be instant and, therefore, they can’t be in a sense, what you call reactionary…Strategic must have a larger vision.”
Speaking to The Indian Express, Tharoor, chairman of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on External Affairs, said Modi’s engagement with Xi “seems to be a continuation of the thaw that had begun late last year, but which suffered a major setback during Operation Sindoor and the overt Chinese support for Pakistan, both militarily and diplomatically.” After that, he said the Chinese took some “punitive steps” like withholding important equipment, including rare earths and magnets.
“A lot of things that the Chinese stopped that were hurting us already and then after Operation Sindoor, they withdrew 300 engineers from the Foxconn plants, thereby stymying our Apple (iphone) production. So things were looking pretty bad, and I think it was a necessary step on the part of the government of India to try and restore some sort of balance, particularly in the wake of the American tariffs. With Donald Trump overturning 30 years of strategic orientation from Washington, it became imperative that we have to explore other options,” he said.
“With what Trump has done, it has become all the more imperative. We cannot afford to be victims of both the emerging superpowers, one superpower and one emerging superpower. We have to at least have some viable connection with both of them, and since the connections with the US are obviously going to go through a rather bad phase, we will have to do everything we can to strengthen the connections with the Chinese,” Tharoor said.
He added that the same applies to the continued strengthening of relations with Russia. “Putin is coming to India. That’s also something which is part of a broad pattern. If you look at the overall Indian strategy of multi-alignment, that is actually something that will continue. We will have certain areas of alignment with China. We will have certain areas of alignment with Russia. And one day, when Mr. Trump is ready, we’ll have, again, other areas of alignment with America. But right now, yes, it does look pretty grim with America, and we can’t afford it to continue to be equally grim with China,” he said.
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Tharoor’s party colleague Tewari, however, said “recalibration has to be a very, a very clinically thought through framework (and) it cannot be that the pendulum swings from one extreme to another.”
“Given the turbulence that President Trump is creating in the global trade and security architecture, every nation is trying to hedge their bets. However, what needs to be kept in mind is how reliable are these old and new allies going to be when push comes to shove. America has rediscovered Pakistan. Pakistan has an all-weather relationship with China…Russia, because of its involvement in the Ukraine war and its dependence on China, is not the Soviet Union of the erstwhile years. So therefore, the postulates of India’s foreign policy will have to be very, very carefully thought through.”
“Just because we are facing unwarranted turbulence from the United States does not mean that we have a knee-jerk foreign policy. There is a need to very, very carefully think through how India, in its best interest, can navigate this global churn,” he said.
Khurshid said it was time the Government explained the “drift” in relations with the US.
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“We have not been told the truth. And suddenly we have been served with a new counterfactual, which is that seven years of major concern with China has just been swept aside. Right now, we don’t know. Of course, we see from the SCO that terrorism has been mentioned, but terrorism has been mentioned by whom? By India. Terrorism has not been mentioned by China. And nor has China shown any indication of some form of regret for what happened in Galwan…You can’t just completely delete and wipe out a memory that is a very sorrowful, sad and pinching memory. Something needs to be said or to be done to go beyond this, to go beyond that troublesome memory,” he said.
Tharoor said China is aware that India is negotiating with it from a position of relative weakness. “(The) message from China, I think, was pretty clear to us…that we would need in any case to talk to them. The American developments have merely accentuated a position of weakness that was already apparent to Beijing…had China continued its policy, we would have, in any case, had to go and make some effort to at least…we may not have Hindi-Chini bhai bhai…but we can’t afford a Hindi-Chini bye bye. So we really need to have some sort of viable modus vivendi with China anyways. And that modus vivendi has become a little more urgent, or if you like, our position has certainly become worse after the American tariffs.”
He added: “But I’m confident that the government will still stand our ground when national interests are concerned and vital interests are concerned.”
However, Samajwadi Party president Akhilesh Yadav accused the BJP-led government “ruining” India’s foreign policy and “seeking shelter in China, a country whose track record has been of enmity with India”.
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In a statement, Yadav said, “Terrified by America’s 50 per cent tariff and threats of tougher economic sanctions, the BJP government has now gone to China’s shelter. But China has a track record of enmity with India.”
“During Operation Sindoor, even neighbouring countries did not stand with India. Then China was providing every kind of help to Pakistan. US – despite its so-called friendship – imposed heavy tariffs and threatened stricter measures,” Yadav said. On the economic front, he warned that Chinese goods would flood and “dominate” our markets.
The CPM, echoing its traditional line, welcomed the engagement with China and Russia. “Putting all the eggs in the US basket was a serious and grave aberration in Indian foreign policy. I am glad that Prime Minister Modi is treading on the right path,” said party MP John Brittas.
