It's been one year since India and China came to blows in the Galwan Valley that ended in scores of casualties on both sides. Milan brings on Kanti Bajpai to unpack the India-China relationship and discuss possible scenarios for a future conflict between the two global powers.
One year ago, Chinese and Indian forces traded blows in the remote Galwan Valley—resulting in the first deaths along the Line of Actual Control since 1975. Months later, India would be hit by the coronavirus, whose precise origin story in China we still do not fully understand. Indian public opinion towards China has soured and Beijing has nervously watched India double-down on its engagement with the so-called “Quad.”
It’s against this backdrop that the scholar Kanti Bajpai has released a timely new book, India Versus China: Why They Are Not Friends. Kanti is the Director of the Centre on Asia and Globalisation and Wilmar Professor of Asian Studies at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy in Singapore and he joins Milan on the podcast this week.
The two discuss the untold pre-history of the Chinese-Indian rivalry, the sources of the trust deficit between the two countries, and China’s surprising soft power advantage. Plus, the two discuss possible scenarios for China-India conflict and India’s pressing domestic reforms agenda.
Milan 00:11
Welcome to Grand Tamasha, a co-production of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the Hindustan Times. I'm your host, Milan Vaishnav.
A quick programming note for Grand Tamasha listeners: we have come to the very last episode of season five of the show. This has been our longest season to date with 22 episodes between February 1 and July 9. As we've done in years past, we're going to take a short break to recharge our batteries. Huge thanks to our audio engineer, Tim Martin; executive producer Cliff Djajapranata; and my Carnegie South Asia colleague Jonathan Kay for helping put the show together each week. We'll be back in September with all-new episodes of the podcast. Until then, take care and stay safe.
One year ago, Chinese and Indian forces traded blows in the remote Galwan Valley, resulting in the first deaths along the Line of Actual Control since 1975. Months later, India would be hit by the coronavirus, whose precise origin story in China we still do not fully understand. Indian public opinion toward China has soured, and Beijing has nervously watched India double down on its engagement with the so-called Quad.
It's against this backdrop that the scholar Kanti Bajpai has released a timely new book, India Versus China: Why They Are Not Friends. Kanti is the director of the Center on Asia and Globalization and Wilmar Professor of Asian Studies at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy in Singapore. I'm pleased to welcome him to the show for the very first time. Kanti, good to talk to you.
Kanti 01:28
Great to be here. Thanks very much for doing this.
Milan 01:30
So, congratulations on the book. Before we get into the nitty gritty, let me start with how this book came to be. Since last year's flare-up between China and India in Galwan, there has been a flurry of expert commentary trying to unpack the evolving and changing nature of the relationship between China and India. At what point did you have that moment where you decided that you had to sit down and write this particular book? Was there something missing, you felt, from the larger commentary and discussion?
Kanti 02:02
Yeah, thanks very much. I think the prosaic answer is that Juggernaut Press came to me and asked me to write this book in July of last year, and I got down to work pretty much immediately and banged it out in three months and finished it in October. It took a little longer to hit the market because of COVID restrictions, and we didn't get an ISBN number in India for several months. Who would have thought? But Juggernaut thought there was a place for a book that would provide an overview with a bit of attitude. I'm not sure they got exactly what they wanted. I think they probably wanted something shorter and punchier. But that's the book that I wrote.
I think in terms of literature, there were three kinds that I was kind of working off or relating to and trying to somewhat differentiate myself from. The first is a huge literature, which has historically related to the 1962 War, on the border conflict, and then there's a second set of analyses which take the story from 1962 onwards” but, again, it's mostly largely focused on the border and military-security affairs. And then, rather similar in substance – again, military-strategic – is [a group of] “breaking news” sorts of books that tell you what's happening just over the last few months or couple of years and then finally look forward to choices for India, particularly more policy-oriented [choices].
So, this book certainly is not the third – it doesn't really do breaking news. It does look at the '62 border war, but it tries to go beyond it. It goes beyond, of course, the events of '62 and thereafter, but it tries to go beyond the border war to the “four Ps” which organize the books. So, perceptions and a longer durée of history between the two; then, secondly, the perimeters, which is the issue of the border itself; partnerships, which relates to how India and China relate to the two other big powers, the United States and the Soviet Union and Russia; and then finally, the issue of power between them.
And so the book tried to combine culture, history, geopolitics, and strategy. I think there are books that are exclusively one or the other, or maybe a couple of those topics, but we felt there was a need for a book that combined all four and that would appeal to a general readership but might still appeal to a specialist. So, I think that's the kind of place that I hope the book is situated in.
Milan 04:37
So, Kanti, as you alluded to, you argue in the book that India and China are not friends for four key reasons: there's the issue of perceptions; there's the question of their territorial perimeters; there are differing strategic partnerships with the big powers, and those have changed over time; and then of course there's the asymmetry of power. The “four Ps,” as you put it.
Let's start with perception. I mean, one of the things that was so interesting to me as a reader is that you went all the way back to pre-modern times in assessing how citizens of China and India viewed each other. I think our listeners would be much more familiar with the kind of arc of perception, say, post-'62 war, but could you tell us a little bit about how things appeared in China and in India in the sort of earlier prehistory?
Kanti 05:23
I think it was a learning experience for me as well. Like so many people – so many of your listeners, probably – I was really focused on the period from about 1949 onwards. But I just thought the long-duration, big reach back into history was really pretty vital, particularly if I wanted to help deal with some of the cultural issues, and so I decided to educate myself as much as I hope to educate readers. And I went back to the introduction of Buddhism to China, and then took the story forward to about the year 1000 in the Christian era.
So, from the introduction of Buddhism to that time, it's fair to say that China really looked up to India because of the religious link, particularly. Chinese monks came to India; there was a flourishing trade, particularly in Buddhist relics. There was other trade as well, more secular trade, but certainly Buddhism and stuff around it became very important. And I think the broad point that I developed there is that, in terms of a kind of cultural respect, Chinese society came to look up to India.
Now, that's not true for all Chinese people. Some segments of the elite did; some did not. Eventually, Buddhism did make its way to the Chinese court as well and quite substantially to the elites, but at the same time, there was a reaction against it – there was an effort to synthesize Buddhism and even in some quarters to claim that it was originally a Chinese faith, that it was somehow linked to Taoism. But nonetheless, I think for hundreds of years, until 1000, the Christian era, China looked up to India.
By about 1000, though, partly because of Buddhism's decline in India, the links to India really began to decline, and the regard became a thing of the past. There was still trade and contact, especially through third places – such as Southeast Asia, most prominently – but the links with India began to decline, especially the religious links. And then we come to the period from the 15th century onwards – actually, it is somewhat before that when already, parts of India were beginning to look up to China, but I would say it peaked in the 15th century when the famous Chinese voyager Admiral Zheng He sailed into the Indian Ocean with his armada. At that point, certain kingdoms in the Malabar in southern India and the Bay of Bengal area began to look up to China. So, roles were reversed. There were tributes sent to the Chinese Emperor fairly regularly, and the Chinese from time to time intervened diplomatically and politically in the affairs of some of these kingdoms, bestowing legitimacy and granting them trading rights.
And the third phase brings us up to a much more contemporary period – but it's very important for the contemporary period – and that's the late 19th century, where Chinese reformist intellectuals began to worry about increasing European influence and domination of China, and they looked west to India and asked themselves, why had such a flourishing and great civilization and such a large country fallen to the British? I mean, a mere handful of white people. They concluded that India was disunited and weak, that this was somehow almost intrinsic to an India divided by caste and religion and language and region and culture, and this had simply not allowed Indians to come together and fight back. Then there was a kind of a lament. And essentially, the lesson was, don't be like India. It was a negative lesson. And so I think we come to a period here of Chinese disdain, really, for India, which in many ways has endured right up to now.
Milan 09:35
I mean, it's a fascinating history when you try to trace the roots of the disdain. Speaking of the roots, I want to come to the issue of perimeters, which also has quite lengthy roots, and in this current moment, Kanti, there's a lot of litigating and relitigating of the past, particularly what happened in the 1950s and 1960s under Prime Minister Nehru. You note in the book that there is a commonly held notion – it's a sort of piece of received wisdom – that Nehru and his contemporaries were “dreamy-eyed idealists” when it came to international affairs generally, and the border situation with China more specifically. But you conclude something very different – that they in fact knew very well that from the start, post-1947, China would be a major kind of thorn in their side, or a major challenge, a major problem. What evidence do we have to support this alternative interpretation?
Kanti 10:32
I think the most telling thing I refer to is a debate that broke out in 1948 initiated by K.M. Panikkar, the Indian ambassador. He was also a historian, of course, a famous geopolitician and thinker and historian, but he was ambassador in Beijing, and in 1948, had already warned Nehru that, with the communists coming to power, most likely, China was likely to make territorial claims against India. The Kuomintang had done so as well and so had Tibetans, but he was obviously worried now about Mao and the communists.
At the head of the Foreign Office was a man called Girija Shankar Bajpai – who is my grandfather, as it happens – and he was secretary general of the Ministry of External Affairs and arguably India's most seasoned diplomat along with K.P.S. Menon. And Bajpai was strongly anti-communist. He was very worried about China, much more so than Nehru or Panikkar, and when Chinese troops entered Tibet, he saw the border problem would soon affect the relationship. He wrote to Sardar Patel – because he couldn't get through to Nehru – to get Patel to side with him, and Patel wrote a famous letter to Nehru in November of 1950, which is substantially a letter that Bajpai had written to Patel. Unfortunately, Patel died soon after.
But this debate was, in effect, a debate between those like Panikkar – who wanted to confront China later about the territorial issue, hoping to postpone the day, hoping that India would begin to exert more control of its own territory, particularly in what is now Arunachal Pradesh, where India was rather thin on the ground administratively and militarily – and Bajpai and K.P.S. Menon on the other side, who were part of what I call the “sooner is better” school. They argued that it's better to confront China when China was weak and distracted after the events of 1949, when Mao was still establishing control, and to tie a deal on the border to progress on Tibet. The Chinese wanted to integrate Tibet, and Bajpai saw an opportunity along with Menon – to make that a condition for a border settlement. Nehru vacillated between the two but eventually came down on the side of Panikkar, agreeing that it wasn't a propitious time to confront the Chinese or raise the issue of the border.
Interestingly, just as a sidebar, China had exactly the same debate between a “sooner” school and a “later” school, and this explains some of the hesitation in the early years on both sides to deal with the issue. Of course, Nehru is a bit of an ambivalent figure, or he had ambivalent attitudes. There were times when he thought China was very dangerous and arrogant, even at this juncture, especially under the communists, but he did think that on the whole, it was worth risking the postponement of the border issue so that the Chinese could be enticed into a partnership in Asia. And in any case, his own estimation was that the Chinese were very powerful militarily. So, for Nehru, to be fair to him, it wasn't idealism – it was more that he wanted to lay low against a superior opponent and perhaps enlist that opponent in a common front.
Milan 13:55
Your narrative about the perimeters follows all of the twists and turns of this relationship over many, many decades, and at the end, you sort of come back to this idea that, look – after seven decades or more of independence, India and China still can't agree on anything vital related to their borders. And you point out that a big part of the answer is that there is a gaping trust deficit between the two. The two sides don't trust what the other is saying; they don't trust what the other is doing. We have had so many decades of confidence-building measures, of high-level dialogues, of track twos, track 1.5s, of other formal and informal discussions. Why do you think it is that this chasm between the two when it comes to the fundamental issue of trust hasn't been reduced, hasn't been whittled away?
Kanti 14:52
I think this is an important issue. I mean, obviously, when we say that trust is the problem, it all becomes a bit tautological. You don't trust, so you can't cooperate, and if you don't have a history of cooperation, you don't trust each other. In the book, I was lazy intellectually there, and I just threw out the trust issue more or less.
On further reflection, I think we can sort of reconstruct the reasons that go into the lack of trust to give it a bit more richness and to get away from tautology. I think one reason is – and this one does appear in the book – is that the two didn't have a rich diplomatic history between the two heartlands. I mean, there was Buddhism and there was trade going back hundreds of years, obviously, but between the emperor in China and empires in India and regional kingdoms, there were very spotty kinds of diplomatic contacts. So, they don't have a rich diplomatic history as a guidepost to expectations between them and a sense that both sides would deliver on their commitments. I think that's the first answer.
The second one is that in the negotiations leading up to the 1962 War, three things happen that are to me quite clear. First of all, as I said, they both hesitated to raise the issue of the border. [Second,] when they did raise it by about 1954 or 1955, both often had very contradictory stances and actions, and they were hard to interpret. And thirdly, both made military moves that seemed to be aggressive to the other side – what IR scholars call the security dilemma. They would add all these up, looking at it from Delhi and seeing these three things, and then if you sat in Beijing and you saw the same, you might doubt the other side. What one side thought was caution and waiting to negotiate, the other side might think of as being kind of duplicitous and trying to cook up something. When they took somewhat contradictory stances and actions – one side may have been scrambling to access maps and records and settle internal bureaucratic wrangling, and the other side might have seen, again, an effort to mislead, an effort to fool the other side and to be duplicitous. And military moves that were made out of a desire to take a certain amount of understandable defensive actions and to assert control over territories that, frankly, they really hadn't historically had much control over – I mean, they were so far from the main centers of power – these moves might have been seen, on the other hand, as the first moves in more aggressive kind of control, and perhaps even as preparations for an attack. So, if you add up all those, it made them doubt each other.
The next point I point to in the book is that they were never strategic partners against anyone, at least in the modern period. I mean, they were allies in the war against Japan, but that was between the Kuomintang and the Congress Party, essentially, and mediated by the British and the Americans. But after that, they've never been partners. The Chinese were on one side with the Russians, with the Soviets, against the Americans; the Indians were with the Soviets against the Americans and against the Chinese; the Chinese were with the Americans against the Indians and the Soviets; and so on. And right up to this day, you have now a kind of tacit partnership between the Chinese and the Russians and the Indians and the Americans. And so at the highest levels of strategic decisionmaking, both civilian and military, they do not have a history of intense interaction and cooperation where they learn to trust each other and interact with each other.
The next couple of reasons have to do with domestic politics, and let me just say them quickly. What is domestic political capacity? I pointed to the fact that they were all over the place in terms of their records and access to them and maps and so on, maybe coming out of the Civil War and their own lack of diplomatic experience. And then there was the noise of their political systems. India's [system], as we know, is open and noisy at the best of times; China is closed and enigmatic, but there was certainly wrangling internally, even during Mao's time. And so I think when they looked at each other, they found either silence because of this domestic incapacity, or when China looked at India it was noisy and they didn't know what to make of the Indian debate. I think India, looking at China, couldn't probe the system beyond the point and interpret the actions of the Chinese, either. And the other telling point, domestically, is almost a personality issue, but maybe a political culture issue. Nehru, in India, was very legalistic, formalistic, and conservative about borders, building on a kind of European tradition of dealing with these kinds of matters. Mao and Zhou Enlai, they were revolutionaries, and they were very strategic about decisions that they make. They saw legal issues and former boundaries to a large extent as sort of bourgeois concerns, ones that could be done away with and bargained against and compromised if strategic needs necessitated that.
And so I think these are some very telling reasons, probably. I mean, they need to be probed more historically, but... And add to this that, finally, two big powers bordering each other, both seeing themselves as putative great powers and great civilizations – there will be a tendency to be suspicious of each other anyway, I think, and be competitive.
So, I think we can put some flesh and bones on the tautology of trust, at least along the lines that I've tried to do.
Milan 20:51
So, a few minutes ago, you alluded to the ways in which China and India interacted with other great powers. That's a nice segue to the part of your book which looks at these relationships. There's this kind of complex tangle of relationships between India, China, the United States, and the former Soviet Union (now Russia). At the end of that particular chapter, you conclude that it seems like the present partnerships of the U.S. and India on the one hand and China and Russia on the other, they seem durable, but there are certain endogenous and exogenous developments that could alter that strategic landscape. I'm wondering if you could elaborate on what those might be. Because I think, sitting in Washington, D.C. as I do, these sort of things appear – I mean, yes, there's a trajectory, but [these things appear] kind of set in stone, like we've been locked into this path dependency, but clearly, there are things that could shake us out of that.
Kanti 21:45
I see your point. I think that's kind of the conventional view increasingly, especially in the United States – and that's a point I'll come back to in a minute – and increasingly in India as well. But I mean, let's deal with the endogenous factors first. What are the things between these four powers over the last sixty or seventy years that have tended to affect how they see each other? Let me just tick off a few points there.
I think, first of all, one thing that could change the India-U.S. convergence is if a rapprochement broke out between Washington and Beijing. It's not the first time it would have happened, and it's not probably going to be the last time – it's plausible. Certainly, a rapprochement between the U.S. and China would alter things for India and China. I mean, as early as 1960-1963, when Kennedy was around, the Americans were already looking – they had just been in partnership with India during the war against China, but within a year, they were already looking at the possibility of an opening to Beijing. It didn't go through because Kennedy was assassinated, but Johnson picked it up thereafter, and then I think we know the rest of the story under Nixon and Kissinger. So, these rapprochements can come quite suddenly and unexpectedly from either side.
Milan 22:43
And just to interject on that – it is very clear to me that, in the run-up to the current president in the United States taking office, there were a lot of commentators in Delhi who openly worried about the prospect of a “G2” – that Biden would come in and try to establish some kind of connection with Xi that would lead to some rapprochement which would then potentially leave India out in the cold. Now, that doesn't seem to be what has happened in the past couple of months, but as you say, these things have a history of surprising us.
Kanti 23:52
Yeah, exactly. My point simply is that if one had to do a thought experiment on, what are the circumstances in which it might happen? I think the first one is possible: sudden, U.S.-China rapprochement. They do a deal on trade and a few other strategic things. Who knows? So, that's the first one I would think of. The second one is, very importantly – and I think we have a sense of this – if there was a change in India on how far it wants to go in leaving behind its insistence on strategic autonomy.
Now, at the moment, India seems to be edging away from very publicly talking about nonalignment. I mean, those words never pass Modi's lips anyway, but even strategic autonomy – at the moment India doesn't utter those words very publicly, but that could change. There's a tendency for India to want to stand up for itself, to be seen as an autonomous center of power, a pole in the international system, but certainly to be an autonomous player in Asia. And that could come back. I mean, it's not beyond possibility at all. Again, I want to come back to that point – I'd like to say a couple more things on it.
The third is, Russia is worth watching. If it pulls away from China – India is certainly trying to invest in keeping Moscow's partnership with Beijing limited by maintaining the defense relationship and a diplomatic relationship with Moscow, and now, of course, Biden has reached out to Putin as well. Again, one would have to think quite rigorously about exactly how a Russia that pulls away from Beijing would affect the relationship between India and the U.S. and then China, but I think things might be set in motion from that in this quadrilateral of powers. One could see a change in the India-U.S. relationship. I'll just leave it there for now.
Lastly, domestic politics – a lot of change comes from domestic politics. Now, there is some unease in the West about changes in Indian politics. If India gets more authoritarian, less tolerant of pluralism within India, these critical voices in the West might begin to be uncomfortable with a closer relationship to India, including the United States. Mr. Modi, we've seen he has a penchant for dramatic moves: demonetization; the GST; suddenly reaching out to China to meet Xi Jinping in Wuhan and then inviting him to Mahabalipuram about a year later; making a speech in Singapore in 2018 where he talks about a “free and open Indo-Pacific” and then adds inclusive gesturing towards China being a possible member of a free and open Indo-Pacific. So, Modi, out of his own domestic politics and his own personality and political style, has a penchant for dramatic moves, and who knows if he suddenly sees it's in his interest to go back to a softer relationship with China and downplay the American relationship? And likewise, in the United States, distractions out of the sort of political polarization that's still very much in existence in America despite Trump's loss, and maybe increasingly because of his loss – I mean, if that leads to a retrenchment of the United States from Asia, then, again, the India-U.S. relationship may flounder.
Lastly, there's domestic politics in China, and that's a bit impenetrable. But who knows – is Xi Jinping necessarily without contention back home? If there were moves in China, perhaps the game between India and China could change as well.
Milan 27:43
This raises the question of – as you look out, how do you assess the power balance between China and India? And that is one of the pieces that you look at. I found it, at first glance, rather counterintuitive that you argue that it is China, not India, that has the soft power advantage. I think a lot of us would look at India and say, “Okay, this is a democracy – maybe a flawed one, but a democracy – a relatively open society, purveyor of things like Bollywood, Indian food, and the like, and India clearly has the upper hand on that score.” But then you actually go through this quite compelling argument to say the opposite, actually – that there are a lot of soft power advantages that China retains. It would be interesting if you could elaborate on what some of those might be.
Kanti 28:35
Yeah. So first of all, of course, we know what soft power is – it's a bit of a slippery construct, but essentially, it means the power of getting others to do what you want by means of attraction and persuasion. So, people are attracted to you; they're more likely to be persuaded to do what you want them to do. Joseph Nye, who originated the idea of soft power in IR, really focuses on three dimensions: foreign policy influence, cultural projection, and one's political values. Those are the three things that, in a sense, can attract countries to you and [convince them to] do your bidding. There's a larger view of soft power – there are things [in classical and] popular culture, the movies, the arts and letters, cuisine, that kind of stuff. I don't really deal with those. I take a narrower view – a very Joseph Nye kind of view, I suppose.
And I looked around for measures of it because Nye's three elements or dimensions are kind of difficult to put your hand on very palpably. So, luckily, the Australian Lowy Institute has done, amongst other things, the study of elements that relate to these three dimensions of soft power. And what those show – and I just kind of played around with them – they show that on foreign policy influence – there are several measures, but the basic measure is of how others look at your foreign policy leadership or your international leadership. And those measures show China – pretty consistently, its leaders are shown to be more efficacious at showing global leadership or regional leadership in Asia. So, that's the first. On cultural projection, they look at a whole bunch of things, but just to name a few: how many World Heritage Sites do you have that people know about? How many tourists do you get? Because obviously, if you're getting people coming into your country, inbound tourists, they're getting to know you, they are attracted to you; they might maintain those impressions and be persuaded by you on other issues. And then they also look at the numbers of inbound foreign students that countries receive. And again, if they study in your universities and your schools, they might be more persuaded of your point of view.
And in all those measures, India comes well behind. I mean, on tourism, it's not even close – I think China bests India by a factor of something like 10. And on inbound students, likewise. So, China has enormous leads there. It's on the third one, on political values, where it's a bit more even, but even this is surprising, because as you said, you might expect that India, as the democracy, as the open society, as a more pluralistic political culture, would be more attractive and would get the respect of other Asians. Now, I should underline that the Lowy measures are for what Asians think of other Asians – including the United States, by the way. But Asians – I mean, they're not all in love with democracy and openness, necessarily, and so it's not surprising that India and China actually score pretty evenly here. I think in part, there is an argument that Asians value not so much democracy and openness but governance, competence, getting things done, and I think they may fear China, but Asians see China as a country that gets things done, and I don't think they see India as a country that gets things done.
Milan 32:08
I don't want to dismiss concerns of hard power, because obviously that's something that you devote a lot of time to in addition to this question of soft power, but if I could just ask you one thing as it relates to hard power: toward the end of that section, I think you ultimately conclude that the hard power differentials are perhaps not as stark as one might expect, particularly given the complications of technology, geography, and nuclear weapons. There's quite a complicated equation, if you were to try to think about this quantitatively. But nevertheless, there are certain scenarios in which China and India might come to blows. Leaving aside, as you put it, the prospect of that kind of Chinese outright war to take back Ladakh or something, I'm wondering if you could walk us through, as you see it, what some of the most likely scenarios might be in how a kind of cold war could turn hot.
Kanti 33:12
So, I do discount, as you say, the prospect of a kind of war of conquest of Ladakh, but I think there are three scenarios that are short of that. The first is what I call an attack along a broad front, as in 1962. So, there are three sectors of the India-China border: the western sector in Ladakh; the middle sector, which is a small one; and then the eastern sector, which is so-called Arunachal Pradesh. So, in '62, there was an attack across the broad front. That's scenario one. Scenario two is an attack in key sectors – just in parts of either the western sector or the eastern sector, where the Chinese can concentrate and achieve local superiority toward certain kinds of tactical games. And scenario three is to go behind India's front lines to infiltrate on the ground or via airdrop special forces and exert a double attack on India: a frontal attack, which serves to distract and pin down Indian forces at the border, and then special forces that collect in the back and attack India from the rear as well and maybe fan out of it. So, those are the three scenarios.
The first one, the broad front – what will be the objective? I mean, I think this will be essentially a kind of punitive or bargaining war to get India to accept economic or political conditions that China wants – perhaps to lower India's standing internationally, but maybe most of all, to use territorial gains as a final set of bargaining chips towards a border settlement.
The attack in key sectors would really be with the objective of protecting Chinese infrastructure, so more defensive, and to put Indian infrastructure at a disadvantage. And we know in Ladakh, in 2020, the Chinese incursions seem to have been directed against the extension of a road from Leh northwards up to the Karakoram Pass. So, that's the objective if they were to attack in a key sector: to gain control of or to threaten Indian infrastructure.
In both these cases, as you said, quite rightly, I pointed out the terrain and the geography and India's ability to counterattack are difficulties for China. So, even though China, in terms of numbers of tanks and planes and artillery pieces and so on, has a distinct edge – some orders of magnitude bigger than India – actually, these are mediated or moderated by terrain and the possibility of counterattacks. I mean, just take a few examples – terrain. These forces would be fighting at a height of between 4000 and 6000 meters. Air is rare; you can't get oxygen in your lungs; it's freezing cold, even in the summer. It's horrible. It takes [time for] troops to get acclimatized, and even when they're acclimatized, they can hardly breathe and fight for very long. I notice that we generally think of the 1962 War as being a month long. In fact, in terms of actual fighting days, it was 11 days long. It's the shortest war that India has ever fought in the modern period after 1947. So, that gives you an idea of how difficult it is to fight that.
And in those geographical reaches, there's a logistics problem. The very things that make it difficult for India to supply their troops, because the Indians have to go up the sharp twisting and turning roads to the heights – the Chinese are sitting on a Tibetan Plateau looking down for the most part, but if they were to penetrate through Indian defenses, they would have to come down those very same difficult Indian roads. And they would be, frankly, very vulnerable to Indian counterattacks by air artillery or missile fire.
And then you have the possibility of Indian counterattacks on the ground. So, India may be locally superior in certain places where they could make ingress into areas of Tibet, where they have the numbers in the heights, and put pressure on China with the possibility of trading that, finally, against territories that they've lost. Also note that Tibet is a flat landscape, which means that Chinese forces on the plateau are very visible to Indian reconnaissance and air attack both by airplanes and by missiles. So, reinforcements from China are very visible and very prone to being interdicted by Indian attack. I mean, India will certainly be under pressure, but it's not a foregone conclusion that the Chinese will win.
Finally, on the special forces attack, very quickly – that's the third scenario – here again, the objective is very local, some tactical gains in the sector, not to lop off huge amounts of territory or to punish India beyond that point. But it's the riskiest operation. Are these special forces good if the Indians react quickly and the Indians are waiting for them? If they isolate them, they'll destroy them and decimate them, and the Chinese will have not only a small military disaster, but a public relations disaster on their hands, to know that the special force that was parachuted in there so adventurously has now been decimated and taken prisoner. And for sure the Indians will play it up. So, it just seems to me that it's not an open and shut case for Chinese victory here even though China is miles ahead in economic power, has an edge in software.
But having said that, we need to look to the future. And this is a picture, just sketched in, of what's called a linear battlefield: two antagonists fighting each other face-to-face, more or less. But there's technology, and you may have a nonlinear battlefield, where things are going on simultaneously in three-space or four-space, which is to say, artificial intelligence, robots, drones, pinpoint-accurate hits coming at you from all kinds of directions thanks to satellite reconnaissance and anti-aircraft and anti-missile systems that have great capabilities that could knock Indian retaliation over the sky. In these areas, India has fallen behind.
Milan 39:44
You write that India has yet to develop the soft and hard capabilities necessary to catch up with China, but also that they're missing a key part of this “social infrastructure.” I'm wondering if you could say more about what you see as India's shortcomings when it comes to the social infrastructure. What do you think needs to change, in your view?
Kanti 40:04
So, first of all, there's soft infrastructure, and by this I mean policy capacity. This just refers to how much of a strong bureaucracy you have. Does it have access to high-quality data and information? Does your government make good laws in real time? Does it, in other words, have, in sum, political-administrative structures that can mobilize the larger public for collective goals? I mean, if you want to catch up with China, the main collective goal is catching up on power, and so you've got to mobilize people for the responsible pursuit of power over a long period of time. Do you have the political, bureaucratic, and administrative structures for that?
The second is hard infrastructure, and I think we all know what that is. But including not just military capabilities – science and tech and bridges and transport and energy and all of that – but also mass education, affordable health care, having a skilled and healthy population. Do you have sustainable agriculture? So, that's hard infrastructure – a key element, I think, of national power.
But what I end with is this idea of social infrastructure, which really refers to the emancipation of the vast majority of your people. Are you still a feudal or a semi-feudal society with types of servitude that really almost look medieval and really very terrible out there? It might be in the form of caste; there may be forms of stratification that are softer than caste, but they're class-bound. There may be gender inequities and possibly maybe urban-rural inequities that are quite significant. And all this requires radical social reform.
And in essence, I think China did this from 1949 onwards – I mean, if one had to focus on one or two things – a massive set of very painful reforms that emancipated people. Now, we may not like Chinese methods, and millions of people lost their lives or had blighted lives, but in effect, people were emancipated. And the second thing the Chinese did gradually and ever more quickly [was to] move people from the countryside into the cities. And India, frankly, at this point really hasn't succeeded in doing either. I mean, just take rural-to-urban [movement]: India's still about 37 percent urban population; China's past the 50 percent mark. Most of Asia, even Pakistan, has gone well past that. So, India is still a very rural-based population, and making massive social changes when you're still rural is a very difficult thing to do.
It seems to me, if you look back historically to other societies, India has to do all of these reforms – emancipation, urbanization, all of this – at a time of two very big limitations that India faces which the Chinese didn't. First of those is protectionism, economic protectionism, and a dialing-back of globalization – globalization, we know, helped China massively – and the second is climate change. India is going to have to carry out its economic reforms and catch up at a time when climate change is pressing in on the world. So, I think that, more than just catching up on GDP and high-tech weapons systems and forging alliance systems with the Americans or whoever it is, India needs what I call “civilizational change.” Social infrastructure change is civilizational change. And that's not civilizational change, let me be clear, [in the sense of a] reversion to some golden age. It's movement forward to a modern, experimental, sustainable future. And I think I want to end with this thought: that this power gap is so important because it means two things to the India-China relationship that I didn't get a chance to underline but which are important: from a position of strength, the Chinese don't feel the need to be accommodative towards India, and India, from a position of relative weakness – and increasing weakness, at least in the economic realm – doesn't have the wherewithal, or let's say the courage or the luxury, of accommodating the Chinese or making concessions to the Chinese. Because that would appear to be a strategic surrender, and no Indian political leader, I think, not even Modi, can afford to do that.
Milan 44:56
My guest on the show this week is Kanti Bajpai. He's the author of a brand-new book titled India Versus China: Why They Are Not Friends. It's published by Juggernaut Books. Kanti, thank you so much for writing this book. I think it illuminated a number of issues for those of us who struggle to understand the history, but it also helps to put the contemporary moment in the proper historical context. So, congrats on the book, and thanks for joining us.
Kanti 45:21
Thank you very much. Thanks for having me.