Opinion Express View on PM Modi in Bhutan: India’s Bhutan model
Urgency of PM Modi’s visit, its many substantive outcomes, relate to China, the ghost in the room and in the neighbourhood
As External Affairs Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar puts it, India had long neglected the nature of China’s growing South Asian challenge in the name of building good relations with Beijing. 
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Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to Bhutan last week underlines the special importance of the Himalayan Kingdom for India’s foreign policy. The urgency of the visit, as well as its many substantive outcomes, relate to the ghost in the room during PM Modi’s talks with the leadership in Bhutan — China. The economic rise of China and its growing political assertiveness over the last few decades has allowed Beijing to contest India’s natural primacy in the Subcontinent.
With China’s economy now more than four times larger than India’s, Beijing’s capacity to deploy financial resources in South Asia has become much bigger. Even when China’s economy was weaker than India’s, Beijing focused on strategic economic cooperation with the Subcontinent. As the world’s second-largest economy and neighbour to the subcontinent, China’s economic salience in South Asia is now powerful and enduring.
China’s wealth has generated a variety of tools to enhance its political and diplomatic clout in other nations. Beijing’s influence and operations to capture critical elements of the elites and set favourable narratives have been visible all around the world. It is no surprise that India’s smaller neighbours find it hard to resist these pressures. Nowhere are they more consequential than in Bhutan, nestling in the sensitive eastern Himalayas, where the frontiers of Bangladesh, India and its north-eastern provinces, Nepal and Tibet converge around the sensitive Siliguri Corridor. China-controlled Tibet’s Chumbi Valley on the western flank of Bhutan is positioned like a dagger down the throat of the narrow Siliguri Corridor that connects India’s mainland with its north-eastern provinces.
China’s growing activity in this region led to serious military tensions between Delhi and Beijing in Bhutan’s disputed Doklam plateau during the summer of 2017. To be sure, Bhutan is India’s most steadfast South Asian partner in the subcontinent, and it has no formal diplomatic relations with China. Yet Beijing has been mounting relentless pressure on Thimphu for a favourable border settlement and demanding a bilateral relationship equal to that with Delhi.
As External Affairs Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar puts it, India had long neglected the nature of China’s growing South Asian challenge in the name of building good relations with Beijing. Delhi is now realistic enough to recognise that it can’t sustain its historic primacy over South Asia by mere fiat. It also knows it can’t keep China, the world’s second most powerful nation, out of the Subcontinent.
Delhi’s focus now is on offering deeper economic cooperation to its neighbours, treating them as sovereign equals, and developing mutually beneficial security cooperation. PM Modi’s visit to Bhutan is about translating that framework into concrete reality. The joint statement issued after the PM’s visit said, “Bharat for Bhutan and Bhutan for Bharat is an abiding reality of the region”.
Delhi and Thimphu backed up this claim with strong commitments to greater consultation and coordination on security issues and building transformative economic connectivity, both physical and digital. Although each of India’s relations with its neighbours has a unique complexity, getting Bhutan right could provide a productive template for the rejuvenation of India’s rocky relations with other neighbours.
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