By  Vice Admiral (retd) Vijay Shankar.

Published in the IPCS Web journal in the author’s Column The Strategist  and may be accessed at: http://ipcs.org/comm_select.php?articleNo=5629

The Peloponnesian War (431- 404 BCE), was a significant event of the ancients as it reshaped the Hellenic world. A hegemonistic Athens and its trading vassals, on one side was challenged by Sparta backed by the xenophobic Peloponnesian League. In the end, the Spartan side came on top. But the central question that emerged was, what made like peoples (civilizationally) fight a long and debilitating war?…explanations rarely go beyond Graham Allison’s “what made war inevitable was the growth of Athenian power and the fear which this caused in Sparta”; and yet what remains unexplored is the ‘invidiousness of civilizational hook ups’.

Through history, as many wars have been fought as there have been civilizationally connected peoples. The Mauryan campaigns of the 4^th century BC began with war and conquest of the Nanda Empire; interestingly the protagonists shared a common progenitor. . The Crusades (1096-1291 AD) began with Pope Urban II’s for a war to recover the holy land from Muslim rule. It degenerated to a riot of pillage ending in the fall of Jerusalem and victory to the Muslims. The war ironically was fought between peoples of the “Word”. The interminable wars in Europe waged between 12^th and 17^th centuries AD were largely fought over family rivalries, prestige and succession. The Colonial Wars that found roots in piracy before expanding into a world-wide feuding network of discriminatory trade practices, was a confrontation between practitioners of ‘western civilization’ that culminated in the World Wars of the 20^th century, fought for domination and imperial glory.

The farther back we look the more we note that despite there being civilizational ties nations went to bloody wars, rather than find alternatives. Was it because they knew each other too well? Or were causes due to the nature of nation-states involved, their creation, development and quest for self-sufficiency? What is clear is that no modern nation can lean on a unique history that is in itself self-explanatory. Because a civilization in its life span is faced by a succession of challenges that often fragment the whole resulting in each element providing solutions as best as they may. It brings about self-sustaining divisions that live, work and fight to the dictates of traditions common to them to the exclusion and often in conflict with the other elements. Against this backdrop how relevant and to what effect is the current government in India backing its civilizational ties with China to build a mutually beneficial relationship?

Colonial exhaustion and defeat of imperial powers in the 20^th century gave rise to Communism in China and its evolution to a “centrally controlled market economy that tolerated political activity only by the Party”; it is the antithesis of development of a parliamentary democracy in India. Ironically, history attributes the entry of Mahayana Buddhism in 3 BCE from its home in India for the part it played in developing Chinese civilization and it’s implanting amongst the Sinic people. These civilizational bonds over the millennia grew as human interaction and trade flourished, first over land and then by sea.

Imperial competition in the 18^th and 19th centuries spurred by search for resources, increasing demand and lure of easy wealth marked the advent of colonial empires and the breakdown of traditional linkages. Awkwardly, trade networks now were routed through the parent colonist. An unintended fallout of this disruption was nationalistic fervour that neither had the experience of managing affairs of the state nor could they see beyond the coloniser and his reviled formula of trade-settlement-conquest. The artificially stretched geography had effectively fragmented civilizational bonds and replaced it by concepts that came unstuck rather than coalesce.

In this milieu it must come as no surprise that China and India opted for self-government so profoundly different and with such a varied interpretation of what and who was the ‘self’ to be governed. While the former claimed exclusive authority of people freed of feudal and capitalistic exploitation and holding membership of the Chinese communist party, the latter derived its authority from a more abstract interpretation of what represented the will of the nation under one constitution. There are inconvenient anomalies to both concepts. That being as it may the reality is that China and India share borders that extends over 3500 kilometres ridden by “cartographic incongruities”. Concurrently historical events such as the invasion of Tibet, flight of the Dalai-lama to India, stoking of Maoist insurgencies in India, the lack of a consensual basis for boundary resolution be it the ‘Johnson, MacDonald or McMahon’ lines, a border war and the underlying looming strategic competition; have all served to stress relations.

Even the approach taken by the two nations to development and growth cannot be at greater odds. China since the mid-seventies has become the manufacturing hub of the world; while India since the mid-nineties has become the favoured destination for outsourcing of a range of services from software development and call centres to “back-room” services and sophisticated research reports for analysts and decision makers. India’s primary aim is of being a dominant knowledge power. But tensions remain, not just caused by legacy. For China it is the inability to reconcile a free market economy with a repressive authoritarian regime. She has chosen to distract her people through whipping up nationalistic passions and implementing aggressive revisionist policies; while for India it is her very population and the nature of its polity that tends to retard. Both have a common quest, to achieve and sustain great power status. China’s striving for dominance in the political arena is backed by a first-rate military power; challenged by the international system, it has turned a competitive face to relations with other powers. While India would appear to have chosen a cooperative slant, its exertion of power is through international bodies, its success at the Financial Action Task Force and to win support at the UN on its stand on climate change, renewable energy and terrorism are issues that have not gone unnoticed.

Given this state of play and the harsh fact that the principle of nationalism is almost always intimately linked to the idea of war it will take an act of great statesmanship between the two diverse Asian giants to bury their differences and build upon their hoary civilizational bonds. But even if this were to be so, the question that begs to be answered is: to whose benefit and to what end?