(The writer was an aide to India's former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee. Comments are welcome at sudheenkulkarni@gmail.com)
India and China have a dispute over the nearly 4,000-km border that is now more than half-a-century old. How much longer will it remain unresolved? Another 50 years? 100 years? At some point in the future, it will have surely ceased to be a dispute. For History has a way of making most problems of this kind history in one way or the other.
Therefore, let us position ourselves at that point in the future when the India-China border dispute would have become a non-issue, look back and find out how it was resolved. Let us leave out of our discussion predictions by some loony futurologists that either China or India or both will disintegrate. Here are the two likeliest scenarios.
The second scenario: India and China came to the same conclusion, without fighting a war. This happened due to persistent efforts by some enlightened leaders on both sides, who had sound and pragmatic appraisal of the geo-political realities on the ground. Besides, they were guided by the conviction that the wisdom and the universal human values embedded in the world's two great civilizations strictly prohibited them from seeking a military solution to the border dispute. They understood the truth of what the Buddha, a king among sages whose teachings had effortlessly crossed the forbidding Himalayan border between ancient India and ancient China, had said: "In a battle, the winners and the losers both lose." Indeed, pursuit of cosmic harmony being the common teaching of both civilisations, the Indian and Chinese leaders' adherence to this teaching made their task of finding a mutually acceptable solution to the border dispute a lot easier. What finally sealed the happy agreement was the determined and successful efforts by these leaders to persuade their respective populations to accept the solution arrived at on the principle of mutual give-and-take.
Any eventual resolution of the border dispute will mainly require India making concessions in the western sector (Aksai Chin), and China doing the same in the eastern sector (Arunachal Pradesh). Sadly, as far as India is concerned, a combination of ignorance and obduracy, both at the political and popular levels, has prevented any constructive debate on creating a national consensus around such a compromise-based settlement. Neither the BJP nor the Congress, our two main political parties, is willing to admit that India too committed grave mistakes that led to the entirely avoidable war in 1962. And in today's highly confrontationist relationship between the two parties, neither wants to be seen as advocating compromise with China. In the absence of a broad consensus between major political parties, there can be no societal consensus either. The absence of such national consensus has heightened the risk for any Prime Minister to make resolution of the border dispute with China his priority. The same might be true in China, even though it is under single-party rule.
Yet, true leaders are those who refuse to follow the tide of events and, instead, show the vision and the will to change its course in the direction of the desired destination. Are Narendra Modi and Xi Jinping such history-changing leaders?
Most importantly, the border talks in New Delhi, held for the first time after Modi became Prime Minister, have emphasized the two countries' commitment "to seek a fair, reasonable and mutually acceptable resolution of the border question at an early date". The reference to "an early date" is truly hope-giving.
Modi's visit to China in May should achieve a decisive breakthrough in ensuring complete and irreversible peace and tranquility along the Line of Control (LAC). Thereafter, he and Xi should move quickly towards resolving the border dispute in a mutually acceptable manner. In India in the meantime, BJP and Congress should take the lead in creating national consensus on the settlement.
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