India, Bhutan’s big question: China in SAARC

At the Dhaka summit, which will mark the 20th anniversary of the founding of SAARC, Pakistan and Bangladesh are likely to intensify the demand for getting China into the sub-continent’s institutions.

Despite the growing engagement with Beijing, there is considerable ambivalence in New Delhi about letting China into SAARC.

South Block sceptics ask why India should complicate matters by drawing China into an organisation that has enough problems on its own. Others, emphasising reciprocity, are quick to point out that China has not been enthusiastic about India joining the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) that brings China, Russia and the Central Asian states together. For the declining but persistent tribe of Sinophobes in New Delhi, any talk of letting China gain a formal role south of the Himalayas is sacrilege.

The problem for Bhutan is much bigger. It does not even have diplomatic relations with China. Although Beijing and Thimpu have annual consultations on their boundary dispute, the relationship has not been tension-free.

At the end of last year, Bhutan had protested against Beijing’s road construction on its disputed northern frontier. Bhutan is concerned about the trans-border political consequences of the rapidly expanding Chinese infrastructure in Tibet. That probably is the reason why New Delhi and Thimpu have rushed to initiate rail connectivity for the first time across Bhutan’s southern borders.

Despite reservations in New Delhi and Thimpu, SAARC appears headed inexorably towards a debate on associating China with the economic and political evolution of the sub-continent.

Beijing itself has stepped up the campaign to join SAARC as an associate. In a little-noticed development at the last SAARC summit, held in Islamabad during January 2004, the Prime Minister of Pakistan read out greetings from the Chinese leadership at the opening session.

The final declaration of the summit endorsed, in principle, the idea of exploring possible association with interested countries and organisations.

In developments since then, the SAARC secretary-general travelled to China after receiving a formal invitation from Beijing. The SAARC secretariat has drafted a set of procedures for associating other countries. These will come up for discussion and approval at Dhaka.

In any event, India must expect that diplomatic pressure from some of the members will mount at Dhaka for an early decision, for they would at once have the pleasure of seeing New Delhi squirm while scoring diplomatic points with Beijing. It will be tempting for New Delhi to adopt the usual delaying tactics at Dhaka on China’s association with SAARC. Instead Prime Minister Manmohan Singh must take a political view.

Singh should ask whether it is worth delaying Chinese association with SAARC. He should recall that a similar effort by India to keep Pakistan out of the ASEAN Regional Forum could not be sustained. As India and China expand their economic interaction at the national level, can it be prevented on their frontiers and neighbouring regions?

In the end, Singh has two choices in Dhaka. One is to unilaterally promote India’s own integration with its neighbours and leverage the weight of China and other Asian powers to quickly fold South Asian economies into the Indian one.

The other is to stay with the present glacial course on regional trade that squanders India’s natural geographic advantage and tries, unsuccessfully, to prevent other powers from joining South Asia in a globalising world.