by MADHU BHALLA
One is used to hearing the shock-and-awe of a Beijing experience from Indians who travel to China for the first time. China’s roads, airports, coastal cities and metropolitan centers broke down the stereotype of a drab, unstylish Maoist China years ago. The glitz and the glamour of new China seems light years ahead of India’s urban mess.
If one is on an official visit, the shock and awe is even greater, for the Chinese are great hosts. Every meal is a banquet and every banquet betters the previous one with calls to a spirit of accommodation to China’s interests. And who is to argue against that? China’s soft power works to create a haze of wellbeing in the face of which many have succumbed to the lure of being anointed by Beijing as “friends of China”.
As long as this is the state of those who are not directly involved in policy making it can be viewed as a way to overcome the trust deficit that affects India-China people-to-people relations. But when the foreign minister of India makes a visit to Beijing after a tense three-week military confrontation and quips that he would like to live in Beijing it should set us thinking.
Even more, when an opposition MP in Arunachal suggests that India accept China’s stapled visa regime (with visas issued on a separate piece of paper rather than being stamped on passports) for residents from Indian territories claimed by China since this is the only way Arunachal residents can visit China, we need to think how we got to this position.
The notion of China as a new-age El Dorado seems to permeate our political and policy making elite and, no less, some portion of our academic elite. This despite evidence that China’s shock-and-awe has a hard-power element to it as well which upsets our security calculations and the strategic balance in South Asia.
China’s maritime neighbors have been at the receiving end of it in the last year alone and the recent Debsang episode in the Himalayas has brought it home to New Delhi more starkly than any of the other aspects of China’s policy of attrition on the border and elsewhere these last few years.
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