01 July 2024 – The Indian Express

QUAD Grouping

What are the differences between China and India’s QUAD partners now?

• Following a protracted period of conflict, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has visited China in recent weeks.
• Xi Jinping, the leader of China, and US President Joe Biden met last week in San Francisco for the APEC meeting.
• In San Francisco, President Xi also had a seat behind Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida.

The refusal of India to have a seat with China

• India, for its side, is not ready to start up political and economic talks with China again until the military conflict that started in the spring of 2020 on the Ladakh boundary is settled to its satisfaction.
• Senior army officers and officials from India have met multiple times to discuss their shared concerns.
• Even while China has reluctantly allowed some development, there are still a lot of unresolved difficulties.
• China desires that India set aside the border dispute and return to regular diplomatic and commercial relations.
• The “state of the relationship will depend on the state of the border,” asserts India, and it will not budge.

Since China views India as the odd man out in the Quad group, India needs to interact with China:

• The first is that India shouldn’t be the only Quad country or major power that isn’t having a conversation with China.
• It is predicated on the claim that the Quad is all about China and that its participants will direct their diplomatic efforts in Beijing’s direction.
• Despite the fact that the Quad’s goals strategically depend on balancing China, none of its members are willing to give up the ability to pursue diplomacy that best fits a given set of circumstances.
• India does not always agree with its quad partners’ positions regarding China.
• Delhi, for instance, is not a part of the Quad’s western Pacific freedom of navigation activities.
• India’s China policy is driven by independent geopolitical reasons.
• Australia and the United States are physically separated from China; they do not have any territorial disputes with Beijing.
• Beijing’s territorial challenge to Delhi is much larger and more intense than Japan’s maritime territorial issues with China.
• This brings us full circle to the reasoning for India’s decision to halt diplomatic and commercial exchanges with China in response to the latter’s heinous dismantling of the accords that had guaranteed over thirty years of calm along the disputed frontier.
• Beijing is essentially being reminded by Delhi of the Chinese proverb “he who tied the knot must untie it.”
• Resuming political and economic ties does not address India’s challenge of restoring calm and peace to the disputed border. Only military agreements with legitimacy can.
• In any event, if India and China start political and economic communication, China does not guarantee a speedy return of border calm.
• Beijing only asks that the border conflict be kept apart from the other aspects of the relationship by putting it on hold while maintaining economic cooperation.
• India has to interact with China since the reestablished US-China relationship would be bad for India.
• The second justification for reconsidering the China policy appears to be strategic in nature, although it might have its origins in India’s ongoing unease with Beijing’s interactions with the United States.
• The argument says that Washington’s relations with Beijing have significantly changed as a result of the US and China’s renewed engagement.
• Moreover, Washington would view India as less strategically significant and Delhi’s standing with Beijing would deteriorate as a result of the US-China discussion.
• The argument’s conclusion is that India and China need to resume their political and economic communication.
• Resuming political and economic ties with China in an attempt to manage the anticipated change in great power relations without addressing India’s boundary disputes will only serve to normalise the consequences of Beijing’s aggression along our borders.
• The customary anxieties in Delhi oscillate between two well-known extremes: that India will either find itself “abandoned” or “entrapped” in the US’s dealings with China.
• These worries ignore a very important detail: India’s overall national power has increased to its absolute maximum.

India misinterprets the summit-level discussions between China and the United States:

• The current dynamic between China and the US is widely misunderstood in India. Leaders’ summits hardly ever result in important breakthroughs.
• Remember the highly publicised summits that President Xi and Prime Minister Narendra Modi held in Wuhan in 2018 and Chennai in 2019? The Dokalam and Ladakh crises followed, respectively.
• The nature of the growing US-China conflict has not changed despite Biden and Xi’s two encounters in San Francisco and Bali last year.
• Rather than resolving the present differences, these summits aim to stop a conflict from getting worse.
• Even while Biden and Xi aim to restore goodwill between the US and China, it will take years of consistent work to reverse the many actions that each side has done against the other. We haven’t arrived yet.

The future of New Delhi:

• India is more confident when interacting with the major nations as a result of the relative improvement of the international system.
• Delhi should concentrate on grabbing the current opportunities with the US and the West to accelerate India’s rise in the global power structure, close the strategic gap with China, and strengthen military deterrence against Beijing rather than wringing its hands over potential changes in US-China relations.
• Beijing is a master of realpolitik and has a far better understanding of power dynamics than most.
• Two things underpin Xi’s ongoing approach to India’s Quad partners. The first is China’s pause in its ascent, and the second is the obvious price of his overreach in geopolitics.
• In conclusion, India should continue its current strategy of dealing with China at this time. Delhi would have a greater chance of persuading Beijing to reconsider its stance towards India via firm patience than through hastily changing the rules of interaction with China.