Karat146;s boomerang

As part of a consistent effort over the last decade to improve relations with China, India has been willing to forget and forgive Beijing8217;s unpardonable transfer of nuclear weapon designs and missile production technologies to Pakistan.

Thanks to Karat8217;s adventurism, India8217;s long accumulated nuclear grievances against China are surging back to the surface. As mainstream India concludes China is out to block India8217;s impending nuclear liberation, it is Beijing that will incur the political costs.

With friends like Karat, China does not need enemies in India. If the Chinese establishment does its India sums again, it would quickly distance itself from the CPM and support the resumption of international nuclear cooperation with New Delhi. If it doesn8217;t, Beijing will risk stoking the fury of Indian nationalism and pushing New Delhi closer to Washington and Tokyo.

Border talks

Karat8217;s threats will have the greatest negative impact on the sensitive Sino-Indian boundary negotiations. Atal Bihari Vajpayee ended India8217;s impractical approach to the boundary dispute and Manmohan Singh has continued down that road.

The boundary talks with China, however, are completely opaque. Unlike the nuclear negotiations with Washington, where every comma has been debated vigorously, there has not been a single parliamentary debate on the boundary talks with China that began in 2003.

There is only one public document 8212; the joint statement of the two governments in April 2005 on the guiding principles for the boundary settlement. It is no secret that India8217;s current boundary talks with China are in deliberate violation of the 1962 parliamentary resolution that demands New Delhi get back every square inch of territory occupied by Beijing.

India is ready to settle for the territorial status quo and prepared to give up claims to the Aksai Chin in Ladakh. Beijing, however, wants new territorial concessions from New Delhi, especially on the Tawang tract in Arunachal Pradesh.

Karat might fervently believe China8217;s attack against India in 1962 was a 8220;just war8221;, Jawaharlal Nehru was the 8220;aggressor8221;, and Beijing has legitimate claim to Indian territory. That, however, is not the national view.

If we accept Karat8217;s proposition that Parliament must have a say on all negotiations and put the talks with China to the same political scrutiny as the 123 agreement, the boundary talks will be dead in no time and Sino-Indian relations will stay in the same rut for another 60 years.

Playing politics

China has never been able to figure out the complexity of India8217;s domestic politics. It has tended to view them from the distorting prism of 8216;pro-China8217; and 8216;anti-China8217; forces. In 1998, Beijing was peeved with Vajpayee for citing the China threat in justifying the nuclear tests and was eager to see the NDA government go.

When Vajpayee8217;s ruling coalition was falling apart in 1999, the Chinese ambassador to New Delhi presented himself at the gathering of the then opposition leaders, Sonia Gandhi, Jayalalithaa and Subramaniam Swamy. Beijing might be making a similar mistake if it believes the CPM and the BJP could be used to stall India8217;s rise as a great power.

1962 and 2007

After humiliating Nehru in the 1962 war, Mao Zedong apparently exulted that China had bought itself 30 years from the Indian challenge. Beijing might hope that wrecking the Indo-US nuclear deal by pulling down the UPA government offers it a long breather. India of 2007, however, is very different from that of 1962, notwithstanding Prakash Karat.

The writer is professor at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore