A Common man’s take on China vs India

Almost three years to the day, I wrote a piece in a daily underscoring how a noveau riche and noveau puissant China was treating India with disdain again and again and yet again, and how successive governments in India over the decades had been accepting it all abjectly – mute, deaf and blind – without even so much as a whimper. And that if we kept being deferential to China through their occupation of Aksai Chin, their stance on Arunachal Pradesh, their blind support of Pakistani terrorism, their frustrating our inclusion to the Nuclear Suppliers Group or the UN Security Council, their aggressive South China Sea policy, their building of the China-Pak Economic corridor through POK, their incitement of Nepal and Bhutan against India, their surrounding India with what could be construed as hostile activities in, Sri Lanka and Myanmar and much else besides, we should hardly be surprised if China has shown its derision vis-à-vis India yet again along the Line of Actual Control in the Ladakh region.

Just think about it. China objects to Dalai Lama or even the Indian President visiting Arunachal Pradesh. They regularly support Pakistani terrorist Masood Azhar cocking a snook at India. They assault our armed forces personnel with nailed bats, iron rods and rocks and when we respond by banning some of their Apps, give us a lecture on violation of international laws, even as they are violating our borders and abrogating the Hong Kong handover pact! The gall. And yes, no one may call Covid -19 the China Virus either.

We are understandably helpless against China. After all, the rules of bully nations are the same as those of the school bullies. When a big bully torments a weak schoolboy, what are the latter’s options? 1) Spend more time in the gym pumping muscles so he can stand up to the bully; unless of course it is already too late to start. 2) If the weakling has a rich daddy, he could have a couple of bodyguards escort him to the school. And 3) have plenty of friends backing him against the bully.

Now, even after seven decades of Independence, we are neither powerful enough to take on China, nor rich enough to match their resources, and nor can we boast of having friends enough to really count on. That’s why we are often constrained to take whatever it is that China heaps upon us again and again, silently.
But then again, imagine a country our size, pathetically scurrying about begging for ancient Russian technology (forty-year-old) for AK rifles – leave alone the S-400 missile system — at an affordable price, because China is sabre-rattling on our doorsteps! Are we so pathetic that we could not have reverse-engineered a decent mechanical rifle if not the missile system itself, in all these years and made them ourselves? Didn’t Japan, Korea and China build their entire economies based on reverse-engineering?

So yes, China is a bully who outweighs us by an order of magnitude in every sphere – military, economic and sheer size and reach. So yes, in a conventional war with China, we may not stand a chance, except bruising them a bit in return for heavy damage.

At last, we are initiating some retaliation through some tentative boycotts of Chinese products and Apps. But will that be sufficient to deter China from its wayward ways? No. China will forever be the Moe to our Calvin.

But does that mean we have to be defensive about Dalai Lama’s peaceful visit to Tawang, because China doesn’t like it? Does it mean we cannot support a case for recognizing the legality of Taiwan in multilateral fora? Does it mean we cannot move a goodly chunk of our trade from China to Taiwan, which produces virtually everything of interest to India that China does? Why leave our trade with China at around $ 95 billion (2019) while that with Taiwan is a woeful $ 7.5 billion? Does it mean we should not be preparing for a large scale digital war, if push comes to shove? (After all IT may be one area where the gap between India and China may be minimal). So why not remain a low-grade pin-prick at the side of China, until China learns to take notice of us, and use the intermittent time to put our house in order?

Our problem is that in times of crisis we make shrill noises, act victimised, try to find some jugaad solutions, and confuse smart talk for action. But once the crisis passes, we are back to business as usual and find that little has changed. We seldom develop a long-term strategy that we consistently work with. We can no longer afford that luxury.

If we do not initiate some urgent reforms in the way we function, the tiger we fancy ourselves to be vis-à-vis the Chinese dragon will never grow beyond a pussy cat. Some of the long term actions we need to work on urgently, apart from the boycott of Chinese Apps and products as much as possible, may be as follows (in no particular order):

1.Our large contracts, including defence contracts, remain unsustainable and bleed the nation to poverty largely due to our massive corruption. Absolutely at the apex of all the fixes we need is the electoral reform for the funding of political parties from which all corruption flows down like lava, and a functioning Lokpal. Without these two basic initiatives, we cannot ever hope to even make a start towards a ‘çlean’ India.

2.We need to practice reverse-engineering as a national mission, say in the DRDO factories and R&D facilities. We need to be entirely self-reliant on all military and even air-force hardware. A country the size of India cannot be dependent on imports when it comes to its defence requirements. We can’t be seen petitioning another country like we are petitioning Russia or France today, because the enemy is on our doors. If India needs to be self-reliant, this one area is non-negotiable.

3.Fix our judicial system and make our bureaucracy more accountable so that setting up businesses becomes easier and contracts are more easily and firmly enforced. That alone will ensure our industry to flourish and have other nations find us an attractive investment destination, to not only exploit the opportunity arising from the investments fleeing from China, but as a routine matter of competition with China.

4.Fix our education and basic health systems by making the existing infrastructure more functioning and accountable even as we add to more infrastructure in these two areas, so that we shall have increasingly skilled manpower for a truly modern and manufacturing India.

5.Undertake massive build up of general infrastructure across the nation ensuring corruption eliminated as much as practically possible. These may be good times for undertaking such large scale investments at relatively low cost, by floating really long term bonds.

These are definitely challenging tasks but then that’s what functioning governments do. These are the hard actions which make a nation wealthy and powerful. These are the actions that lie at the root of our patriotism.