Lord Palmerston, 19th century British prime minister had famously said in a speech at the House of Commons in 1848, “We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow.”
This aphorism has held ground whatever be the nature of the regime, and was best exemplified by the strategic partnership between the Islamic state of Pakistan and Communist China in their ongoing anti-India strategy for over six decades. However, in an interesting turn of events, the applecart may now be tilted with Trump’s new found obsession with Field Marshal Asif Munir of Pakistan, juxtaposed with his weaponisation of tariffs against India and China.
The ongoing visit of the Chinese foreign minister Foreign Minister Wang Yi, and his frank conversations with NSA Ajit Doval have to be seen in this context. Meanwhile, PM Modi has accepted the invitation to visit China for the next Shanghai Co-operation Organization (SCO) summit, which may give a fillip to the ongoing border talks with China. Slowly, but surely, India has been building fences with China, even though Modi’s overtures in the first term were not fully reciprocated. But now there is an increasing realisation that there is much more fun ln the India China relationship than border disputes – both on the Ladakh and the Arunachal frontiers , as well as the Aksai Chin area which was illegally ‘gifted’ by Pakistan in 1962.
India and China are significant trading partners, and members of two very important multilateral bodies – the BRICS and the SCO. The BRICS now includes, in addition to the founding members Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, from which the acronym is derived, countries like Indonesia, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) adding to the political and economic heft of the organisation. Likewise, China which had taken the first steps in establishing the SCO as a Eurasian political, economic and security co-operation organisation in 2001 with Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan as members has added both India and Pakistan from 2017 – thereby making it ‘the largest contiguous landmass, as well as the highest concentration of global population’. The point to note is that both the US and Western Europe are excluded from these increasingly important forums and security policy initiatives, making it obvious that the centre of gravity of global geopolitics has shifted from the trans- Atlantic partnership to Asia.
When Modi will meet Xi Jinping in Tianjin at the end of the month, they will, in all probability carry forward their dialogue on Disengagement, De-escalation and (re) Deployment on the border, which they had initiated at Kazan on the sidelines of the BRICS summit. The ongoing meeting between Wang Yi and Ajit Doval is, in all probability, the necessary groundwork for yet another announcement towards the resolution of the border issue between the two great Asian powers.
