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Journalism of Courage
The first ever joint military exercises between the Indian army and China’s People’s Liberation Army over the weekend are a small but important step towards greater cooperation between Asia’s rising giants. Absence of contact between the military establishments has been a gaping hole in the otherwise expanding Sino-Indian ties. For nearly two decades, the emphasis was on avoiding provocative military activities on the long and contested border. What India and China have had so far might be called negative confidence-building measures. The Yunnan exercises mark the shift towards positive military CBMs. It was entirely apt that they were named ‘Hand in Hand’. Their focus was on combating “separatism, terrorism and extremism”, which has emerged as an important concern for both countries.
For all the significance of these exercises, India must resist the temptation of wrapping them in expansive rhetoric. For one, such exercises are now commonplace among most major powers of the world;
India and China have just begun to catch up with the international trend. Second, there is no denying that the Yunnan engagement pales in comparison with the counter-terrorism exercises that the PLA has conducted with either Pakistan or Russia and the Central Asian Republics. Nor do they measure up to the scale of some of India’s exercises with the US.
Most important, however, are differing perspectives in New Delhi and Beijing towards the tentative military interaction. For China the purpose is essentially diplomatic. Beijing is quite happy to put in place a limited military engagement that makes political headlines, without in any way addressing the boundary dispute. India’s priorities are the other way round. India cannot ignore the disconcerting truth that the earlier military CBMs with China have remained on paper thanks to China’s reluctance to even exchange maps — which depict their respective perceptions on where the line of actual control is — beyond the least contentious middle sector. For India, then, military CBMs with China cannot ever be a substitute for an early, reasonable settlement of the boundary dispute.
