Leap over the Great Wall

By stating that there is need to build trust between New Delhi and Beijing, China’s National Peoples Congress chairman Li Peng has identified the fundamental issue. Both China and India need to build bridges in the future over the great wall of silence and suspicion that separated them in the recent past and this can only be built on the basis of mutual trust. For too long the two Asian neighbours have been prisoners of history, and that too of recent history. It is high time to shape the future uncluttered by vexatious issues like nuclear proliferation, security build-ups, even dumping and boundary disputes. The reason for such irritants was precisely because the interaction between the two nations were left in the hands of myopic mandarins and unimaginative bureaucrats. Now that the two sleeping giants are wide awake, and perhaps roaring with confidence, it is time that enterprising businessmen from the two largest countries of the world are given a chance to rebuild the relationship. A good beginning couldbe made, as some entrepreneurs have suggested, in the area of tourism. At present out of 27 million tourists visiting China in 1999, only 8,000 were Indians while out of 2.48 million tourists touring India, only 6,500 were Chinese. Given the fact that a 4,000 km long border exists between the two countries, both with a million strong population, the potential is indeed Himalayan.

In an attempt to bury the past, Li, the most important politician in China after President Jiang Zemin, has categorically asserted that "China has never taken India as a threat and neither did it intend to pose a threat to it". That Li recognises the new business possibilities is evident from his tour itinerary during this visit. He has already visited Bangalore and Mumbai and now heads for Hyderabad from New Delhi. As far as recorded history goes, India and China had just one boundary dispute in 1962 and, yet, the legacy of that encounter persists to this day. Although the boundary dispute is destined to be the proverbial long march, yet it should be negotiated in the spirit of give and take and not hold the new partnership hostage to the old mindset. The meeting between Vajpayee and Li, the confabulations of expert groups and the exchange of boundary maps should help. A security dialogue, scheduled for next month, and Chinese Prime Minister Zhu Rongji’s visit later this year would take the processfurther.

The negotiating teams must remember that they have had a much more intimate past than they would like to believe. If it were not for the ancient trinity of Chinese travellers like Fa Hsien, Hiuen Tsang and It Sing, we would not have known the glories of our Magadhan past, and if Lord Buddha were not born in India, perhaps China would never had experienced Buddhism. It is to shed the baggage of recent history and put the relationship in a futuristic perspective that Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee remarked: "As two great civilisations and neighbours, India and China are engaged in the process of rejoicing and putting behind past differences and forging a new and dynamic relationship for the 21st century."