India-China ties need more than warm words in Tianjin

Narendra Modi and Xi Jinping may paper over border tensions, but without rebuilding trust and civil society links, bilateral progress will remain superficial.

With Prime Minister Narendra Modi scheduled to arrive in Tianjin, China, on August 31, there are more questions than answers about his first trip to China in more than seven years.

With a rapprochement with China clearly underway, these answers hold the key to the stability that the world’s two most populous nations are seeking in their bilateral ties in an emerging world order rocked by turbulence.

What, for instance, did India gain by stopping tourist visas to Chinese passport-holders since 2020, following a fatal military clash in the Galwan Valley in Ladakh? Most probably, nothing.

A commonsensical pointer to this is that China never halted issuing visas to Indian nationals during this entire period. An Indian could fly from, say, Tokyo or New York to China, as direct flights from India to China and vice versa were not operating during the years following the confrontation in Galwan.

The logical corollary to this question is, what does India expect to gain by having resumed, from July 24, the issue of tourist visas to Chinese nationals? Obviously, a slice of the whopping $ 255 billion — according to the World Tourism Organisation, a United Nations body — which Chinese tourists splurged worldwide the year before COVID-19 shut down travel. China’s outbound tourism is on the rebound now that the pandemic restrictions are gone. The World Tourism Forum Institute, a London-based think-tank, estimates that about 400 million Chinese could travel abroad by 2030. It is a jackpot in principle.

The keyword is ‘in principle’. For a long time, India has been a natural choice for Chinese tourists, especially the Buddhist Circuit, following in the footsteps of Buddha. After the Galwan clashes, India’s ruling politicians made a big mistake in not confining differences with China to its government. They erred in spreading animosity and hatred against the Chinese among the Indian people. A boneheaded boycott of Chinese goods was encouraged by Right-wing nationalists. It caught the imagination of the Indian masses, although it may not have had much economic impact.

The masses know very little about strategic relationships between countries, and are impervious to any damage caused to people-to-people engagement in cross-country friendships. So, an uncomfortable irrationality ruled India’s public approach to China. The baby was thrown out with the bathwater, as it were. India is belatedly trying to save the baby, but the baby may be beyond saving.

Only in a year or two after assessing the response to the resumption of tourist visas to Chinese nationals, will it be possible to conclude whether India has wrecked the jackpot of lucrative Chinese holidaymakers returning to the Buddhist Circuit and other tourist attractions in India. Bangladeshi medical tourists have recently been denied treatment in Indian hospitals, spurred by similar irrational dislike of political developments across the eastern border. Pakistanis have been denied hotel accommodation in Indian cities simply because they are Pakistanis, although they have arrived legally on visas granted by the Government of India. China is unlikely to let its citizens embark on tourist trips to India unless its government is certain that they will be treated hospitably and welcomed as friends, not viewed with suspicion as enemies.

So far, the thaw highlighted after Modi’s meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Kazan, Russia, in October, has mainly focused on matters of State, such as military patrol mechanics, and the larger, far from easily solvable border issue. Modi and Xi may once again paper over these substantive issues in Tianjin. But the bilateral relationship cannot proceed beyond seemingly warm handshakes unless a balance is created between duality in the relationship between co-operation and competition.

Extensive non-governmental mechanisms, which could have helped to facilitate such balance, have been irrevocably harmed by both sides in the aftermath of the Galwan clashes. Media presence in each other’s capitals is an example. For decades, resident correspondents in Beijing and New Delhi provided windows to one another’s societies, which governments can never provide and help shape public attitudes.

Similar damage was inflicted on think-tanks — more so in India than in China — and respectable organisations which engaged China were insidiously discredited as fifth columns within this country by Right-wing nationalists. A public initiative in the run-up to Modi’s visit to Tianjin on ‘Resetting India-China Ties’ by the Chintan Research Foundation (CRF) and the Centre for Global India Insights marked a much-needed return to such non-governmental efforts. Because the CRF is associated with the Adani conglomerate, its China initiative acquired credibility and shades of government approval.

This impression was enhanced by a keynote address at this event by China’s Ambassador in New Delhi, Xu Feihong, and on the Indian side, by D B Venkatesh Varma, member of the Prime Minister’s National Security Advisory Board. In words which have rarely been heard in India since the Galwan episode, Shishir Priyadarshi, CRF’s president, described India-China relations as “one of the most consequential bilateral dynamics in the region and indeed the world.” He must walk the talk after the Tianjin summit, and other think-tanks must do the same.

(K P Nayar has extensively covered West Asia and reported from Washington as a foreign correspondent for 15 years.)

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.