In Conversation with Sumit Ganguly, Manjeet Pardesi, and William Thompson
7 September 2023
9DASHLINE recently sat down with Sumit Ganguly, Manjeet Pardesi, and William Thompson to discuss their highly relevant new book The Sino-Indian Rivalry: Implications for Global Order. Showing how the Sino-Indian rivalry has evolved from the late 1940s to the present day, the authors underscore its significance for global politics and highlight how the asymmetries between India and China have the potential to escalate conflict in the future.
Your book traces the evolution of the Sino-Indian rivalry since the late 1940s when both India and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) emerged as modern states. Could you explain how the Chinese leaders’ suspicion towards India came about in the 1940s and 1950s?
More than the historical legacies of the 1940s and 1950s, it was the role of the Indian colonial troops under British control and their use in China during the colonial era (e.g., to suppress the Boxer Rebellion) that rankled the Communist leaders of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). In their view, independent India had inherited the British mantle and despite Prime Minister Nehru’s multiple overtures toward the PRC, they remained convinced that Nehru harboured ill-will toward the nascent Communist state and that India had hegemonic aspirations in Asia.
Over the past decades, has Tibet’s importance stayed the same when it comes to the spatial and positional dimensions of the Sino-Indian rivalry?
Tibet’s role in the Sino-Indian rivalry has waxed and waned over the past decades. Initially, as we argue in the book, Tibet was critical in precipitating the rivalry. The PRC leadership was convinced that India had sinister designs against the PRC because of its inherited colonial privileges in Tibet. Even after India ceded these prerogatives in an attempt to accommodate the Communist leadership, they remained wary about India’s intentions. It is, of course, entirely possible that these misgivings again came to the fore as the PRC leadership under Mao and Zhou Enlai learnt of India’s tacit cooperation with the United States to aid the Tibetan Khampa rebels.
As China consolidated its political and military position in Tibet by the 1970s (and as US involvement with India on Tibetan issues declined after the Sino-American rapprochement), Tibet lost some of its salience in the Sino-Indian rivalry. However, the Dalai Lama and the so-called Tibetan government-in-exile’s presence in India continue to rankle the PRC. While India’s official position is that the Dalai Lama is an honoured guest and Tibetan exiles are not allowed to engage in political activities because India recognises Tibet as a part of China, New Delhi has implicitly allowed Tibetans to conduct some political activities. While an incipient process of democratisation of this community began in the 1960s, it attained significance in 2001 when almost half of the exiles directly elected the head of the government-in-exile (‘President’).
The government-in-exile’s role has become more significant since 2011 when the Dalai Lama gave up his political role as the head of this community to the democratically elected President (even though he remains the spiritual leader of the Tibetan movement). Since the Sino-Indian border dispute involves historical Tibetan territories, it continues to emphasise Tibet’s ambiguous historical status. Given the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan government-in-exile’s position on the Sino-Indian territorial dispute is supportive of the Indian position, all these issues are connected to each other. Finally, the issue of the Dalai Lama’s reincarnation may itself precipitate a crisis in Sino-Indian relations — especially if his reincarnation is born in exile in India.
Your book argues that “the United States’ promotion of the rise of India... point[s] towards heightened conflict” between India and China, and that “global wars tend to start ... as regional wars”. In debates over the risk of China-US international military conflict, is India's role overlooked?
Until very recently, India’s role in the US-China rivalry has been mostly overlooked. However, this is certainly changing. The change started with President Barack Obama’s “pivot to Asia”, followed by the creation of the Quadrilateral Security Initiative and then the Indo-Pacific Strategy under Donald Trump, and has continued into the Biden era. Furthermore, our larger argument is that global wars do not necessarily start as direct conflicts between two leading global powers. Instead, they tend to start as regional wars involving one leading global power which then escalates with the participation of the other global power.
Consequently, a Sino-Indian conflict (whether in the Himalayas or the Indian Ocean) has some potential to escalate following the participation of the United States. Therefore, the Sino-Indian rivalry has now joined the issues related to Taiwan, the Koreas, and the East and South China Seas as a potential pathway into a US-China conflict. So, in this respect, the problem is not so much one of overlooking Sino-Indian disagreements. Rather, it is one of fixating on the management of Sino-US hostility when the geopolitical problems have evolved into something that is more complex, involving multiple pairs of states, and therefore less easy to manage.
The Sino-Indian border issue has caused a significant number of crises and lost nothing of its crisis-inducing potential. What cross-border cooperation exists to resolve the issue peacefully? Is there a role for civil society/non-state actors to try and mediate the issue?
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his predecessor, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, had entertained hopes that growing economic interdependence coupled with periodic summits might enable the two actors to set aside the border dispute and avoid tensions in the Himalayas. In fact, ever since the meeting between Rajiv Gandhi and Deng Xiaoping in late 1988, the two sides decided to focus on economic cooperation while setting the border issue aside. This notion has been effectively dashed in the aftermath of the Galwan crisis of 2020. Furthermore, as we argue in our chapter on asymmetries, the lopsidedness of their economic interactions is exacerbating both the spatial and positional dimensions of their rivalry. Until these fundamental issues can be addressed, the role of civil society and other non-state actors will be minimal, despite their best efforts.
While India and China are rivals, they also work together in a number of multilateral formats, one of them being the Chinese-led Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO). How would you explain India’s interest in the regional organisation?
India entered the SCO mostly for two interconnected reasons. To ensure that it had a footprint in Central Asia and thereby, to the largest possible extent, counter the PRC’s role and influence in the region. For all the endless palaver at the SCO and the fond hopes on New Delhi’s part that it can moderate the PRC’s behaviour, there is no evidence of any such changes.
As opposed to rivalry, could there be any further prospects for Chinese-Indian friendship in the region?
The prospect of Sino-Indian friendship, at least in the foreseeable future, borders on chimerical. The two actors are locked in a strategic rivalry and neither side is willing or able to give ground. The fact that this is not just a territorial dispute but also a positional rivalry in Asia makes their relationship even more complex because these two issues also interact with each other in a myriad of ways. Furthermore, the PRC sees India as its most immediate rival in South Asia, while India also sees China as a far more important rival than Pakistan.
Once two states become locked into a rivalry relationship, they see each other as enemies. Hostility levels can certainly fluctuate up and down but genuine cooperation becomes more difficult to pull off.
Still, the two rivals also cooperate in some other formats such as the BRICS, whose recently concluded summit in Johannesburg received much international attention. Do you see any chance of such frameworks helping to improve China’s and India’s bilateral relations?
Platforms such as the BRICS do serve a useful purpose as they allow Chinese and Indian leaders to interact with each other at the highest levels. However, they do not directly address the fundamental issues dividing China and India — their territorial dispute and their positional rivalry. In fact, the issue of who leads such groupings may even exacerbate their positional rivalry.
DISCLAIMER: All views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent that of the 9DASHLINE.com platform.
Author biographies
Šumit Ganguly is a Distinguished Professor of Political Science and holds the Tagore Chair in Indian Cultures and Civilizations at Indiana University, Bloomington. Professor Ganguly is a specialist on the international and comparative politics of South Asia. Professor Ganguly is the Editor-in-Chief of the International Studies Review, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.
Manjeet S. Pardesi is an Associate Professor of International Relations in the Political Science and International Relations Programme and an Asia Research Fellow at the Centre for Strategic Studies at Victoria University of Wellington. His research interests include historical international relations, great power politics, Asian security, and the Sino-Indian rivalry. He is the Managing Editor of the journal Asian Security.
William R. Thompson is Distinguished Professor and Rogers Chair in Political Science Emeritus at Indiana University. He is a former President of the International Studies Association, twice former Editor-in-Chief of International Studies Quarterly and, currently, Editor-in-Chief of the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Political Science.