India, China pirouette for 'super-power' position
India, China pirouette for 'super-power' position
By M.G. Srinath
NEW DELHI (DPA): Asian giants and neighbors India and China have begun a bout of shadow-play in a bid to assume the mantle of power supremacy in the region.
Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee left on Sunday for a week-long official visit to Vietnam and Indonesia as part of Delhi's renewed "look East policy". He is also scheduled to visit Japan next month. But no dates have been announced yet.
On Tuesday, senior Chinese leader and former premier Li Peng arrives in India on a eight-day visit as part of a "goodwill trip".
Reports from Hanoi suggest that Vajpayee will discuss during his three-day visit issues like China and security issues with Vietnamese President Tran Duc Luong, Prime Minister Phan Van Khai and Defense Minister Pham Van Tra.
Vajpayee's visit is the first by an Indian premier since 1994, the year before Vietnam joined the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).
Vietnam currently holds the chair of the 10-member regional body, which India has wooed in recent efforts to present a united front in relation to China, which borders both Vietnam and India. India and China are dialogue members in the ASEAN Regional Forum, a broader 37-nation security grouping.
Last month Hanoi and Beijing signed agreements settling an age-old border dispute in the Tonkin Gulf. A year earlier the two countries signed a historic land border treaty.
Yet Vietnam as well as several other ASEAN members, particularly the Philippines, routinely express concern over hegemonic Chinese claims of disputed islands in the South China Sea.
India has been inwards to reduce the Chinese influence in the ASEAN region during the recent past months.
Last November, India along with five Southeast Asian nations signed an agreement in the Laos' capital of Vientiane to promote multifaceted cooperation in the areas of tourism, culture, education and communication.
In addition to India, the other signatories of the Vientiane Declaration of Mekong-Ganga Cooperation were Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam and Myanmar.
Although Indian Foreign Minister Jaswant Singh says the regional grouping was not a snub to China, it is clear that Delhi's effort is to contain Beijing through direct dealing with the economic bloc countries via Myanmar.
India's relations with China has been a roller-coaster ride over the decades. Delhi was one of the first countries to recognize the new government of the communist People's Republic of China in 1949.
China's invasion of eastern Tibet upset the balance of power the following year. It soon deteriorated when the Tibetan spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, fled to India along with a large number of followers.
This was followed by a brief but bitter border war in 1962, with the two Asian giants still claiming vast swathes of each other's territory along their 2,010 kilometer border.
The war led to a 14-year break in diplomatic relations.
Both sides are also wary of each other's nuclear capabilities. Delhi and Beijing traded insults soon after India conducted a series of underground nuclear tests at Pokhran in May 1998.
To add to the problem, Indian businessmen during the past months have began to complain bitterly at the Chinese dumping of goods, which has began to hit the domestic market.
Li Peng, number two in the Chinese hierarchy, is also the chairman of the National Peoples' Congress, euphemistically regarded as Communist China's equivalent of Parliament.
He comes to India as a guest of Indian parliamentary Speaker Ganti Balayogi. The Chinese leader will meet Vajpayee, Indian federal President K.R. Narayanan and others during his Delhi visit.
Li Peng has been Beijing's "pointman" in improving ties with Delhi over the last decade. He was the Chinese premier when the first break-through in India-China relations took place during former Indian premier Rajiv Gandhi's visit to China in 1988.
He was also in charge in 1993, when the two neighbors signed the agreement on maintaining peace and tranquility along the international Line of Control (LoC).
Li Peng comes to India when the bilateral ties between Delhi and Washington is blooming in its full glory. Beijing is wary of this for it feels threatened that its power of influence in the Asian region will go down.
Sujit Datta, senior fellow at the Institute of Defense Studies and Analyses (IDSA), an Indian think-tank, feels although India- China bilateral relations are improving, there are still many points of differences.
These include: Beijing asking India to sign the Nuclear Non- Proliferation Treaty (NPT), Chinese supply of nuclear and missile technology to Pakistan and refusal to condemn Islamabad's support to Muslims' rebellion in Indian Kashmir.
China has said that it will not sacrifice its "all-weather" relations with Pakistan while attempting to improve and develop relations with India.