Foreign Correspondence

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India follows China's Central Asian steps


China came face-to-face with US ‘double standards’ in the ‘war on terrorism’ and has protested the establishment of a Uighur Government-in-Exile in Washington.
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By M K Bhadrakumar

November 9, 2004

The geopolitics of Central Asia form one significant template in the surprising twists in China's recent approaches toward India. Chinese policy is adapting to the post-September 11 Central Asian situation with a high degree of flexibility. China is seeking cooperation with India in Central Asia, including Xinjiang. On a pending four-year-old Indian invitation, the chairman of China's autonomous region of Xinjiang, Ismail Tiliwandi, visited India in October. He sought development of transportation links between Xinjiang and India and the laying of a natural-gas pipeline connecting the two countries. Again, China is warming to the idea originally mooted by former Russian prime minister (and the doyen of Soviet "Orientalists"), Yevgeny Primakov, of a strategic triangle involving Russia, China and India.

China has doubtless edged closer to the Russian position on the question of India's membership in an expanded UN Security Council. Last but not the least, China's position that there is no obstacle to the resolution of the border dispute with India is indicative of a willingness to negotiate a settlement that could potentially take relations to an altogether new level.

As India would see it, post-Soviet Central Asia has been accorded a degree of strategic importance in China's regional policy, second only to East Asia and the Taiwan Strait. Chinese diplomacy in Central Asia set out to work, paradoxically, from a position of great strength, but beset with challenges. The Silk Road itself is traceable to the secret mission undertaken by intrepid Chinese traveler Chang Chien in the 2nd century BC to the obscure regions to China's west. It reached the peak of its glory during the Tang Dynasty (618-907) which was also China's "golden age". Under the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), when China slammed its door on the West, the Silk Road began to decline - "the traffic slowed, the merchants left", to quote from Peter Hopkirk's masterly chronicle of the Great Game, "and finally its towns vanished beneath the desert sands to be forgotten" - leaving behind the stuff of so many legends.
Thus, when China "returned" to Central Asia in 1992 in the post-Soviet space, it was the inheritor of a legacy embedded in the region's historical consciousness. But China had challenges to cope with - ill-defined borders with Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan; unstable state structures; the specter of religious extremism and militancy haunting the region; economic and social upheaval endemic to periods when an entire era simply gives way; national identities untamed by decades of Soviet rule; and external powers with competing agendas jostling for geopolitical space.

Two distinct phases of Chinese diplomacy are discernible. Up to 1996, China focused largely on giving direction to: (i) establishment of state-to-state relations with the newly independent countries; (ii) settlement of territorial boundaries; (iii) providing legal underpinnings to bilateral relations; (iv) sustaining high-level political exchanges. China, meanwhile, finessed the conceptual framework to move forward. It sought to introduce guiding principles in its discourse with Central Asian capitals - respect for each other's sovereignty and territorial integrity; non-interference in the internal affairs of each other; common cause in strengthening regional stability; and, mutually beneficial cooperation.

Clearly, these principles were the irreducible minimum of China's own national priorities as well - getting the Central Asian countries to scrupulously adhere to the "one-China" policy; safeguarding Xinjiang from cross-border terrorism; facilitating peaceful development of China's western provinces ("Go West" policy); and augmenting China's energy security by drawing on the formidable Caspian reserves of oil and natural gas.

With the underpinnings of state-to-state relations put in place, China began initiating cooperation across multiple areas, ranging from economic, social and cultural issues to politics and security. China projected the cooperation as a factor of regional stability. It sought "soft influence" by molding Central Asian perceptions of a "benign" China. Of course, the diplomacy was helped by Beijing's pragmatic policy of political stabilization; its espousal of strategic engagement with great sophistication; and, the active role of the Jiang Zemin-Zhu Rongji team in projecting China as a responsible regional player and stabilizer.

The second phase of China's policy surfaced in April 1996 with the "Shanghai Five" initiative. From a modest beginning in the early 1990s as an expanded dialogue between China and Russia to discuss border demarcation and arms reduction issues, it has taken shape as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) comprising China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. If SCO has rapidly evolved into a collective security organization with a range of activities - intelligence sharing, anti-terrorism coordination, military cooperation and economic cooperation - China should claim credit. Conceivably, China had cause to worry about the waffle that was Russian policy toward Central Asia during the wayward Boris Yeltsin years in the 1990s and the resultant predatory raids by Western powers into the power vacuum in the region.

Chinese diplomacy had to cope with Western propaganda too - that China harbors a "Middle Kingdom" mentality that aims deep down at making the Central Asian states its tributaries; that China would make inroads into Russia's sphere of influence; that China would invidiously push migrations of its people in their millions into Central Asia's vast uninhabited landscape, and so on. The more China wrapped up energy deals in the region, the sharper became the Western warnings. Nonetheless, Russia appears content with SCO. Indeed, China and Russia share concerns over regional stability to an extent that is compelling them to become stakeholders in averting economic and social unrest on their Central Asian peripheries. (Uighur groups and Chechen rebels have variously exploited the weaknesses in Central Asian countries' state structure and porous borders.)

The civil war in Tajikistan, Islamist revival in Uzbekistan, the Taliban's ascendancy in Afghanistan - these phenomena engendered a climate of religious extremism and militancy in the region within which Uighur separatist groups strove to establish training camps outside of China's reach. Taliban and al-Qaeda funded, Uighurs were armed and trained in camps within Afghanistan. This led to a spurt in cross-border terrorism and in militant attacks on Xinjiang. By 1998, violence in Xinjiang had significantly escalated, prompting Beijing to step up counter-terrorism cooperation with the Central Asian countries and to commit increased Chinese investments within the SCO framework in the region.

Of course, the SCO calculus is more complex than that. China uses SCO for stimulating its bilateral relations with the member countries, while drawing on growing bilateral ties to activate SCO's capabilities. Thus, China regards SCO as a vital instrument to sustain a stable external environment conducive for the development of its backward western provinces. Significantly, China reconciled with Russia's leadership roles in other overlapping regional processes - the Commonwealth of Independent States, the Collective Security Treaty Organization, the Central Asian Cooperation Organization and the Common Economic Space - and did not visualize them to be either SCO's "competitors" or "trend-setters".

Meanwhile, a new volatility began appearing in the security environment in the region after September 11, 2001. A long-term US military presence in Central Asia became a ground reality. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization has begun to seriously expand into Central Asia. Japan recently took the major initiative on yet another regional forum - "Central Asia Plus Japan Dialogue" - that promises to engage itself with the entire range of issues affecting the region. Japan is thereby making it clear that it is party to the core issues of Central Asia's stability and security as much as China would be, China being Central Asia's next-door neighbor notwithstanding. To quote Frederick Starr, the influential American strategic thinker on Central Asia, "Japan's move is in full harmony with American interests in Central Asia, and represents a step toward the creation of a 'concert' of interested powers."

The point is, in Central Asia, China comes face-to-face with US "double standards" in the "war on terrorism". China hoped that its fight against East Turkestan (Xinjiang) forces would become part of the international effort against terrorism. But as early as October 2001, President George W Bush warned China that it should not use the "war on terrorism" as an "excuse to persecute minorities".

Washington has in effect followed a two-pronged policy of distinguishing between those it regards to be violent Uighur groups that have links with international terrorism and what it considers to be legitimate Uighur national movements that merit US financing. This calibrated policy aims at isolating China's interests from those of Central Asian countries (or of Russia), apart from creating a lever of pressure on China. Symptomatic of the US policy dilemma is its current predicament in figuring out what to do with the two dozen Uighur militants who were captured in Afghanistan and interned in Guantanamo Bay. Handing them over to China would be tantamount to acknowledging that they were indeed terrorists linked to Taliban and al-Qaeda, while granting them political asylum on US soil would be a brazen act of "double standards". Washington sounded out European allies and Turkey to harbor these Uighurs as "refugees" from Xinjiang, but none would relieve Washington of its excess "baggage".

American scholars envisage that Beijing's response to the Central Asian equations includes weaving together threads of seamless partnerships with other regional powers such as India (or Pakistan) that would preempt their gravitation towards any US strategy of containment of China. As Stephen Blank of the US War College wrote recently, China is holding out the prospect of Xinjiang as a "laboratory for increased cooperation" with its South Asian neighbors.

India has so far remained a passive observer of the process of a long-term US military presence taking shape in Afghanistan and the Central Asian region - neither critical nor approving, neither overtly alarmed nor privately exhilarated. Certainly, to the extent the US is serious about exterminating the forces of militancy and terrorism in the region, India would see the inevitability of the US military presence in Afghanistan or Central Asia. But India has traditionally been averse to joining hands with military blocs. The fact remains that India is neither a natural nor an indispensable partner of the US regional policy in Central Asia in ideological or political terms. For example, India would have no hesitation to see eye-to-eye with the Central Asian countries that a movement like Hizb-ut Tahrir could be a charioteer of political Islam pernicious to the region's stability, while the US maintains an ambivalent outlook. The US would prescribe Western democracy as the ideal model of statehood for the Central Asian countries, whereas India would be acutely conscious of the vanity of attempting to clone these countries to any model without due regard of their culture and history and their contemporary circumstances.

If anything, India has a commonality of interests with Russia and China over the threat posed by terrorism and religious extremism to the Central Asian region's security. India would share the Russian or Chinese perspective that there are no "good" or "bad" extremists. Like Russia and China, India has a high stake in Central Asia's stability for its negative fall-outs on India's own security. All the same, India has not joined Russia and China in voicing condemnations of "double standards" in the "war on terrorism", at the recent meeting of the foreign ministers of the three countries in Almaty. If at all Delhi chooses to refer to the issue in public, it has been in innuendos, unlike the explicit articulations by Moscow or Beijing. Evidently, India would prefer to constructively engage its interlocutors with their burden of "double standards" vis-a-vis issues affecting India's national security, on a one-to-one basis, away from the glare of public diplomacy. Interestingly, India suggested that future trilateral consultations between Russia, China and India should also bring onto the agenda the prospects of economic cooperation, apart from political exchanges. It must be noted that no joint political statement was issued after the Almaty meeting of the three foreign ministers.

The hard reality is that apart from the common bonds of history and despite having a head start over most other regional powers - India was one of only four countries permitted by the Soviet authorities to maintain a consulate in Central Asia - India's presence remains thin on the ground in economic terms. Even in political terms, if a touchstone were to be applied, it is noteworthy that the Central Asian countries have chosen to back Japan's claim to be represented in an expanded UN Security Council. This despite the Central Asian leaderships being uniformly comfortable that India has never moralized to them on the dynamics of democratization, human rights or globalization affecting their national life. The point is India has not put much money on the table in Central Asia. (Japanese assistance to the region over a 10-year period till 2002 amounted to US$2.6 billion, as against India's $100 million or so; at the SCO summit meeting in Tashkent in June this year alone, China pledged a fresh top-up commitment of $500 million.)

Indian diplomats in the Central Asian capitals has not frittered away their time or energy by factoring China as a "rival" or "competing" power. China would also take comfort that despite India's determination to forge close relations with the US and despite India's manifest aversion towards taking any confrontationist stance towards the US on regional or international issues where opinions (or interests) may vary, India has studiously kept its distance from any US strategy of containment of China.

India's Central Asia policy places strong emphasis on the bilateral track with the five countries in the region. India's diplomacy works independently of even an exceptionally friendly power like Russia that doubtless enjoys a privileged status in the Central Asian region and could be of help in advancing India's interests. As for regional frameworks like SCO or the Central Asia Cooperation Organization (or the newly formed "Central Asia Plus Japan Dialogue"), India's cogitations with them would be essentially as supplementary channels at the secondary or tertiary level, even as India would place primacy on ploughing the bilateral furrow with the Central Asian states. This might make India a lousy team player. But it has sound logic. India views the Central Asian leaderships, with their sturdy experience in the corridors of Soviet power, as far from novices in realpolitik who could be shepherded around from one regional forum to another piloted by grandiloquent foreign powers.

As such, India's policy has been guided by considerations of what is in there for India in tangible beneficial terms vis-a-vis any of the on-going noisy tournaments of the Great Game in the Central Asian region. Indeed, if a possibility to tap energy sources in Xinjiang were to emerge, India would be seriously interested. Energy security is after all a national priority of development for India.

M K Bhadrakumar is a former Indian career diplomat who has served in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan and Moscow.

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