Beijing as bada bhai?

From a historical perspective, the inauguration of a train service from mainland China to Lhasa over the weekend is as significant as the Francis Younghusband mission that opened up Tibet in 1904. There is one big difference though. The Younghusband mission was ordered by Lord Curzon from Kolkata and organised by the Indian Political Service, the precursor of Indian Foreign Service. The world8217;s highest and the most technologically sophisticated railway line has been the dream project of the Chinese Communist Party. As he flagged off the train on Saturday, Chinese President Hu Jintao called it a 8220;miracle8221;. Rail lines have always been about integrating markets and projecting political and military power. While China performs strategic miracles north of the Himalayas and relentlessly presses southward across the Indo-Tibetan border, New Delhi has gone to sleep.

The rail line into Tibet, the massive road networks that Beijing has built over the years in Xinjiang and Tibet and Yunnan, and its determination to control the headwaters of Tibet are part of a conscious Chinese grand strategy to extend its economic and political influence across the Himalayas into the Subcontinent. China has done the same in recent years in Central Asia, Myanmar and Indo-China. Besides integrating markets across the border into its own, Beijing has begun to reduce many of its neighbours into China8217;s political protectorates. India, however, remains paralysed. Obsessed a little too much with the far-away United States and hypnotised by the non-aligned clap-trap about Asian solidarity, India has had little inclination to consider the significance of the single most important geopolitical reality of our time 8212; the rise of China. Worse still, the UPA government is trapped between Communist allies who want India to become a junior partner to China in the name of anti-imperialism and a national security bureaucracy that is singularly unimaginative.

As China unveils a forward policy, India needs a grand strategy that avoids two traps. Left-wing sentimentalism on Sino-Indian brotherhood evokes little more than contempt from a Beijing that is acutely conscious of power. Right-wing defensiveness is doomed to failure in the age of globalisation. To cope with a rising China on India8217;s borders, New Delhi needs a forward policy that is as aggressive as Beijing8217;s. It must effectively combine commerce, border region development and trans-frontier infrastructure. Above all, India must discover the political will much like Curzon and Younghusband to play the game north of the Himalayas.