‘Beijing may have concluded India is tilting towards the U.S., losing relative neutrality’

China may have concluded that India is tilting towards the U.S. “rather than maintaining relative neutrality” on China-U.S. rivalry, according to Vijay Gokhale, former Foreign Secretary, Ambassador to China, and author of the new book Crosswinds: Nehru, Zhou and the Anglo-American Competition over China which examines various aspects of India’s relations with the U.S., Britain and China in the 1950s. The book was released on Tuesday. In a recent interview with The Hindu , Mr. Gokhale said there are many lessons from history as India confronts geopolitical challenges including its currently difficult relations with China amid growing Sino-U.S. competition. Excerpts, edited for clarity.

What lessons can we draw from how India managed relations with great powers in the 1950s?

I wrote this book because I wanted to know the answers to a few questions which were in my mind for many years. One, of course, was why India did not seek any quid pro quo or guarantees on issues of our national interest from the People’s Republic of China (PRC), in the process of recognising it. Another was, how did our relationship with China impact another very important relationship of ours, and that is the relationship with the United States of America. The U.S. was the world’s most powerful country in the late 1940s. The third question, which has always intrigued me is, was Indian foreign policy at any time truly non-aligned? Is it the case that non-alignment was more slogan than practice?

On Nehru’s decision to recognise the PRC, and more broadly his initial China policy, you write that he was sound on strategic instinct, but less so when it came to planning and the actual conduct of diplomacy.

If you look at Nehru’s speeches right from the end of the Second World War, he continually refers to the necessity of shaping a post-war Asian order, in which he is of the view that it is Asian countries that must have a say in the shaping of that order. That was a very fundamental sense that Prime Minister Nehru had, that if India was to really exercise influence and to emerge out of the century of colonialism, then it had to not only gain independence from the British, but it also had to create an environment around it which would allow India to exercise independent policy, whether it was domestic or foreign.

We have to give Nehru credit for the fact that well over a year before the Communist government was established, as I show in my book with a lot of archival material, Nehru was quite clear in his mind that the Communists were going to prevail, and that India would have to deal with them, one way or another. That again was foresight, because at that stage, the Americans were still betting on Chiang Kai-shek…

One of the main conclusions I would reach in my book is that while on the strategic plane, Nehru had great vision [but] when it came to actual diplomacy and tactics, he fell short. There is more than one reason for this.

One of the reasons is because he had differences of opinion with the West, particularly the U.S., about the nature of the Communist regime in China.

Added to that was the fact that India itself had just come out of a great struggle against a colonial power. I add a third element in this, and this is the element which has not really been explored. This is the extent to which continuing contacts and relations between senior officials of the government of India and officials of the British Empire led to the influence of the British over India’s foreign policy, not only towards China, but also towards the U.S. This is the most intriguing part, because even though these were our foes because they had colonised us, we gave greater weightage to what they said about international relations than we gave to U.S.

Coming to the present stalemate in India-China relations, what do you see as the way forward?

So far as China is concerned, we should walk on two legs, those being dialogue and deterrence. I think both are equally important for maintaining peace and stability in the broadest sense between the two countries…If I were to put it very succinctly, we have moved from a position of peaceful coexistence before the incidents in eastern Ladakh in 2020 to what I now characterise as the phase of armed coexistence.

What this means is that there is a strong military buildup on both sides of the border region, which is likely to continue for a certain period of time until both countries work out a new modus vivendi or a new framework for the relationship. When that can be worked out is something which I cannot predict. That is part of government policy, and I have no doubt that people in New Delhi are thinking about this. When that happens, the strategy should still be talking and deterring.

There is no substitute to deterrence. The history of the past several decades has shown that China understands the language of strength. Therefore, building a credible deterrence along the India-China border region must be a part of national policy.

Discussion is taking place at the military level, but it would be helpful if this was also complemented by a dialogue at a political level. There are plenty of mechanisms already in place for that.

It’s not as if there is a want of mechanisms. When dialogue will resume is a matter of timing and that’s for the government to decide. But I feel that it will resume. The question is how and when.

How does the intensifying China-U.S. competition impact India’s relations with china?

The fact remains that China increasingly not only sees the U.S. as its existential threat, but is becoming more open in articulating this point of view….There’s no doubt that there has been in the last 10 years a very significant change in [the India-U.S.] relationship. It has become a truly strategic partnership, where the common elements outweigh the differences.

Of course, there are still differences….But the congruence of interests and values now outweighs the differences, and I think it is this aspect that China is most focused upon.

In my personal view, Beijing may have concluded that India is tilting towards the U.S. rather than maintaining relative neutrality on the Sino-U.S. question.

If that assumption is correct, and only China can validate that assumption, then we need to understand that certain actions which China takes against us diplomatically, as well as in terms of grey zone warfare, might be intended to nudge us or even coerce us towards correcting that tilt or rebalancing. This is just my view and a hypothesis, but if you will look at the broader set of developments, it is a hypothesis which has some amount of credibility.