'China Was Used To Dealing With Coalition Governments In India': Former Foreign Secretary Vijay Gokhale In Interview With Swarajya

Ambassador Vijay Gokhale holds the distinction of being the only Indian Foreign Service officer (IFS) to have served both in mainland China and Taiwan.

He retired as the foreign secretary in 2020. His latest book, Crosswinds: Nehru, Zhou and the Anglo-American Competition over China, is available here.

Ambassador Gokhale discussed the complexities of India-China relations during a conversation with Swarajya's Sharan Shetty.

Here are the edited excerpts:

Q: What were some of the mistakes Nehru made in dealing with China? Shouldn’t India, at the time of recognising the PRC or when supporting the PRC’s takeover of the permanent UNSC seat, have extracted an agreement or resolution on the boundary?

India even let go of the customary rights and privileges in Tibet inherited from the British Raj.

A: We have to be clear that when we gained independence in 1947, we had very little experience of dealing with foreign states, because the British Empire controlled India's foreign relations with our neighbours, as well as those further ashore from us.

Therefore, when India became independent in 1947, we had to, in a sense, begin afresh. Our first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, had a certain strategic vision. He felt that in a world that was divided between the Western bloc and the Soviet bloc, India would prosper, its security would benefit, and its economy would grow.

We wanted to chart a relatively middle path, which did not allow India to tilt towards one direction or the other. Now, to do this, Nehru perhaps recognised that India didn't have the wherewithal. We were neither a major economy nor did we have a powerful military.

Therefore, Nehru felt that if we were to remain relatively independent and autonomous in our decision-making, we needed to partner with like-minded countries.

By the end of the 1940s, most of the African and Asian nations were still colonies. And there were only two major countries with which India could achieve this partnership — which would give us greater leverage and greater flexibility.

One was Indonesia, which had become independent in 1945. The other was China, which was then ruled by the Nationalist Party headed by President Chiang Kai Shek. That's how the prime minister approached the relationship with China.

When the Communist Party overthrew the Nationalist government, I think one of the big errors of judgment was to presume that the new government in China would share India's view on the need for partnership to navigate through the Cold War.

There was no assessment that we had of how the communist leadership thought. Nehru had met some of them in the late 1930s, but a decade had passed by and things had changed.

The Chinese did not seek a partnership with India in the same way that India sought a partnership with China. This was the beginning of a series of misperceptions that led India down the path, which eventually ended in a confrontation with China.

Perhaps one of the misperceptions or misjudgments was that China, like India, had suffered from Western colonialism, and would therefore be more sympathetic towards nationalistic movements in Asia.

We did not realise that China's thinking was very different. They thought they were a big power. The United States had given them that status during the WWII.

They felt that they had won WWII as the only major Asian power which had participated in the war. As a result, all other countries in Asia were not equal, according to them. There is also the fact that there was no meeting between India and China's leadership for a good five years after that.

After 1947 added to the level of misperception because we presumed certain things on behalf of China, which later turned out to be untrue or not entirely correct.

As a result, we accorded them recognition. Certain core interests of ours were not addressed, whether it was on the boundary or it was the territorial integrity of the country.

Similarly, as you posed in the question, we conceded certain rights and privileges we had in the Tibet autonomous region without seeking necessary security guarantees.

Eventually, we also realised that China did not agree on the boundary line between India and China. These misperceptions and misjudgements cost us. Because it eventually led to conflict in 1962, and even today, ghosts of that era of the 1950s continue to influence our foreign policy. 

Q: Why do you think Nehru took a position very different from that of the US, the strongest power at the time, in recognising China early?

A: We have to acknowledge that among the towering leaders of Indian independence, and particularly those who served in the government after 1947, Prime Minister Nehru was perhaps the only one who had been exposed to the outside world, not because he had studied abroad, but who had consistently shown interest in foreign affairs. 

Several others who had that sort of experience, like C. Rajagopalachari, Shyamaprasad Mukherjee, or Ambedkar did not necessarily serve in Nehru's government, and many of them then left the Congress party after 1947 to form their respective political movements, and therefore really the entire cabinet deferred to Nehru on foreign policy matters.

Now, there's no doubt that Prime Minister Nehru had a vision and that a lot of what he did benefited India. But this question that you pose is an interesting one.

Why did our relationship with the United States not go down a better path after 1947? After all, Washington had supported India's freedom struggle.

During WWII, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, kept on persuading Winston Churchill, the Prime Minister of Britain, to give India independence so that India would firmly come out in support of the Allied effort against Germany and Japan.

After we became independent in 1947, it was the United States and not Britain, which was also our largest economic benefactor. We were also a democracy like the United States. And therefore, the question is entirely legitimate. Why was it that we did not see a commonality of interests?

There's no easy answer to this. I think some of it is because of the whole idea that the Cold War, in a sense, constricted India's freedom of movement and freedom of action.

If we were seen to be too close to the Western camp, we would, in a sense, not be able to fulfil our agenda of leading the decolonisation movement, developing our economy independently, and acting with autonomy in foreign policy. But part of it, I think, is the fact that Prime Minister Nehru also had some sort of an ideological problem with the United States, which led to his not listening to good advice.

I write in my latest book, Crosswinds: the United States handed a piece of paper with four points on it to the Government of India. And that piece of paper said, if India wishes to recognise China, the United States will have to accept it, even though the United States is not happy about it.

But at least ensure that China respects certain understandings, agreements and views. Now, this was sound advice. It was objective advice. It is advice that we all follow. When we make a decision, we do try to look at whether the other side is aligned with us or not, and it is a mystery as to why we put aside this advice.

We did not choose to go down the road of asking the new Chinese government whether, for instance, they would accept the boundary line, whether they would abide by international norms of behaviour, or whether their relationship with India was anything like we were thinking about it.

The only explanation I can say is that there was a dislike of the United States, that both Nehru and some members of the government, including advisers like Sardar K M Panikkar or later V K Krishna Menon shared. Therefore, this led us to such a situation. 

The US perhaps would have greatly helped India, both in its economic development and subsequently when it came to problems with China.

In hindsight, of course, Sharan, it’s always very easy to allocate responsibility and blame. So we have to be cautious because, when the government acts, it doesn’t act in hindsight. Hindsight is for historians. But we can't escape the conclusion that we were perhaps naive as a government, naive both about China and the communist regime there, and naive about the United States and the West. 

Q: Chinese presence in the Indian Ocean Region (IOR) and India’s larger neighbourhood has been growing, and this has been a concern for India. In Maldives, for instance, we now have a government that is pivoting towards China.

We’ve seen this play out in both Sri Lanka and Nepal too. What is your reading of the current situation?

A: You know, I hear a lot of people say that India has lost its ‘backyard’. That is a relatively simplistic view. We are in a globalised world, and my contention has always been that there is no exclusive ‘backyard’ that any country has anymore.

For instance, President Munroe’s doctrine, established in the 1820s in the United States, said that they would not allow the Europeans to get involved in their sphere of influence. But that is simply not the case.

In Latin America, both China and Russia are very much present in the American backyard. Eastern Europe was for centuries, not only under the Soviet Union, but under the Russian Tsars, a backyard of the Russian empire. Yet today, the European Union and NATO are present there. The Far East was for centuries part of the Chinese imperial backyard.

South Korea was a fugitive state. Vietnam was a fugitive military state. Several countries that now belong to ASEAN once paid tribute to the Chinese emperor. And yet today we have Japan and the United States presence there. Even Australia looked at the South Pacific as its backyard. Therefore, the first point I want to make is that there is no exclusive backyard. And I think hand-wringing by Indian experts is not going to change that. 

So what has to be the strategy? The strategy has to be how to protect our core interests in shared spaces, because we're going to share the space increasingly with China, simply because China is not only present on our land border, but by the end of this decade, will very much be an Indian Ocean maritime power as well.

So in this shared space of the Indian Ocean, since you have mentioned Maldives and Sri Lanka, where other major powers also have a permanent or semi-permanent presence, including the United States and China, the challenge for Indian foreign policy is how we maintain our core interests in that shared space. And I think that is the challenge that faces our government.

Now, if you look at the way the government has dealt, it has gone about it in a very systematic fashion. I think one of the great achievements of the current government is to shift our focus away from our land borders to our maritime borders.

So in 2015, Prime Minister Modi articulated his concept of SAGAR — Security and Growth for All in the Region. Where does he do that? He doesn't do that in a continental state. He does that in the Seychelles, which is an island state. In 2018, he went to Singapore and he broadened SAGAR into what is called the Indo-Pacific vision.

And then on the continental part, he talks about a neighbourhood-first policy. The way I would see this is: 

Firstly, we are dealing with the government of the day. You may not like the mandate that is delivered in the Maldives or was delivered in 2018 in Nepal, but we are mature enough as a state to accept that mandate, particularly if it's a democratic one, and to deal with that government. 

The second is I think we have moved towards a policy of prosper thy neighbour. In other words, if our neighbourhood prospers, we prosper as well. And we want to assist in the prosperity of that neighbourhood. And that is the whole philosophy behind India's overseas development assistance, or what we call development partnerships. And that has gained steam in the last 10 to 15 years.

A lot of money, energy and effort is being expended both by the government and the private sector to build connectivity between our neighbours and us. And it is changing things in both places.

Let me give you an example. For the first time, the Nepali government does not have to depend on the tanker mafia to ferry petrol, kerosene and diesel across the border, because the government of India has invested in a pipeline from Motihari to Amlekhgunj in Nepal, which allows cross-border movement of petroleum oil and lubricants.

Now this frees Nepal from the tyranny of the difficult land border, the tanker mafia and so on. It also gives India leverage, because ultimately that pipeline is anchored at Motihari and the oil is going to come from Indian refineries. 

The third element, of course, is the hard security element. And that is that while we cannot prevent sovereign states, whether they are Maldives or Nepal or Bangladesh, from taking certain decisions, which might adversely impact India’s security, India has been quite clear in saying that the consequences will follow. And it is important that these states, therefore, understand the consequences before they make a decision.

And the government has been fairly effective in outlining those consequences. So I would think that this is the core of our policy, whether it applies to Maldives at the moment or Nepal when there was a communist government or even currently any other neighbour, and it has been a fairly successful policy by and large.

Of course, there is always an exception and that is Pakistan, but you know, that's a sui generis case. We all know the history of India-Pakistan relations. We don't have to go into it here. That's difficult simply because it takes two to tango, and the other hand is not clapping.

But apart from that, I think it's been a fairly successful policy. Maybe, some of the statements that we are getting to hear from political leaders in Sri Lanka and Maldives also confirm what you've just been saying, that there is a slow realisation that India is by far a better partner to deal with than China.

Yes, I mean, we have to also accept that it is part of normal human behaviour that if you are a small country, or for that matter, one individual as well, caught between two big countries or between two or three much more powerful individuals, you will tend to leverage that. 

We have to expect it from our smaller neighbours, particularly as China's footprint in our region grows, and we have to tackle it.

A successful foreign policy is one where it can protect its core interests. And if you look at it from that perspective, I'd say foreign policy over the last 20-odd years has been fairly successful.

Of course, there have been setbacks. No country’s foreign policy is linear for that matter. In hindsight, after a few years, it would be difficult to say, that on balance, we did poorly.

Q: Regarding the current state of India-China relations, in 2020, when China deployed troops to the Ladakh border, it shattered the consensus India believed existed between the two nations for maintaining peace on the boundary.

Why do you think this breakdown occurred? Despite previous incidents like Doklam and subsequent high-level engagements, why do you think the government and military were caught off guard by this development?

A: I think to answer this question, we have to go a little back in time. So I want to begin with the late 1980s. Remember both the Republic of India and the People's Republic of China were in a sense born in the Cold War.

And for the first 40 years of our existence, we only knew of a two-block world where we had to choose between the West and the Soviet Union. And all that changed very dramatically when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. Suddenly, both countries were in a new world, and a lot of our policies made no sense.

For instance, India had a policy of non-alignment. But in a unipolar world where the United States was the predominant power, who were we aligning with or against?

We were also dealing with several political challenges. In our case, 1989 was the last year when we had a single-party government, until Mr. Modi took office in 2014. So we were dealing with a series of coalition governments.

We were dealing with a series of major socio-political movements, whether it was the Mandal agitation, whether it was the Ram Janmabhoomi movement and so on.

We were also dealing with terrorism and separatism in two major states of India, Jammu and Kashmir and Punjab.

China had its problems domestically. We are all aware of the 1989 Tiananmen incident.

Both states felt vulnerable in the post-1991 era and therefore saw common ground in building a better relationship. Therefore, you see significant progress in India-China relations. These are the years when two major agreements (the 1993 Boundary Peace and Tranquility Agreement and the 1996 Confidence Building Measures Agreement) were signed to keep the peace on the border. 

These are also the years when you see trade, people-to-people relations, cultural relations, science and technology relations all growing. These are also the years when you see both India and China talking the language of reshaping a multipolar world so that the United States is not the dominant or the only pole. Circumstances brought us together.

Those circumstances, however, began to change after the year 2000. There are several reasons for this. First of all, the Chinese economy took off. By 2000, the Chinese economy was double India’s size. China had a trillion dollars in GDP. 

By 2015, India’s GDP was still just 3 trillion dollars and China’s had reached 15 trillion dollars. So it had gone from a 1:2 ratio to a 1:5 ratio. China’s military expenditure had also grown, and therefore, was much more capable than India in that sense.

They were also back in the diplomacy game. It increased its influence using economic aid, its military capability to build a strong influence in the Indo-Pacific. It normalised relations with the United States. It built new relations with Russia.

We can only guess it, because the Chinese government is so opaque and intransparent that you rarely know what is happening there, but I sense that Beijing assessed that India was not that vital to them. Especially in maintaining global peace. As a result, they stopped being sensitive to India’s concerns.

So what you saw from 2010 was a steady, almost drip-like walking back of the understandings of the 90s. For instance, they started referring to Arunachal Pradesh as South Tibet to suggest that it was a very disputed part of a boundary. They gave stapled visas to people from Jammu and Kashmir and Arunachal Pradesh, in a sense suggesting that they were not Indian citizens. They denied visas to our athletes from certain states, simply because the Chinese did not recognise those states as part of India. And then it went on to bigger things like problems along the Line of Actual Control (LAC).

Whether it was about India’s interests in international forums like the Nuclear Suppliers Group, or the listing of Pakistan-based terrorists in the United Nations Security Council, China was pushing us back on these matters. You see a buildup of such events till Galwan happened in 2020.

I think there were a series of strategic missteps that China took in these years as well. One big change, which I think they needed to understand the implications of, was that in 2014, we again returned to a single-party government in office.

The Chinese leadership for the past 25 years was used to dealing with coalition governments in India. You would know better about the infirmities of coalition governance. 

I think they did not factor in the fact that we now had a government which did not depend on any other political party to make decisions.

Secondly, they may have misread some of the actions that the government of India took, whether it was Prime Minister Modi’s visit to Pakistan or his informal meetings with the Chinese leadership at Wuhan, as an attempt to rebuild relations, to start afresh in a sense. 

But perhaps the reading in Beijing might have been different. As a result, what happened was growing friction on the LAC. Trade was also a big issue because the gap kept widening. The Chinese were unwilling to address our concerns.

Galwan incident, in that sense, was the straw that broke the camel’s back because it finally drove the Indian public opinion that despite every effort that India was making to carve a new relationship, the Chinese still wanted to deal with us with an old mindset.

So yes, I can say that the old framework is broken, and it is unlikely, in my opinion, that we will be able to restore it.

But if you ask me what the new framework is likely to be, that is something I cannot predict. I cannot predict it because so far I haven't seen any indication or articulation of how things will move forward over the next two to three years.

What we have right now is an unstable equilibrium, that I can say.  Therefore, I think it behoves us to also think of ways in which we craft a new relationship with China.

And I have for some time been advocating that the way to do so is a two-legged approach. The first leg is to build deterrence, and the second leg is to build dialogue.

I think we just have to wait for another few months, let the electoral process run its course, and then the government, I'm sure, will deal with this as one of the priorities.

Q: Boundary negotiations: It has been ongoing since the 1950s, but very little has been achieved out of it. Where do we stand today?

A: The Government of India, in the 1980s, made several efforts to try and settle this issue. Successive governments, beginning with Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, have all made efforts to try and break the deadlock.

What we agreed to in 2005 under the Manmohan Singh government, which was being discussed during the Vajpayee government, was that we would adopt a three-step process to settle this intractable issue. 

The first step would be to see whether we could agree on certain principles and parameters. Based on this both sides might proceed with a discussion or a negotiation on where the boundary lies. 

The second was then to build a framework agreement on the boundary, based on those principles or parameters which have been agreed upon. 

And the final step was to draw the line.

In other words, delimitation, delineation and demarcation had to be done. We completed the first step in 2005. We have an agreement on political parameters and guiding principles for the settlement of the India-China boundary question. This is in the public domain. It was signed on 11 April, 2005, and it outlines broad principles.

Principles like force will not be used to settle the boundary issue, that we will respect history, that geographical features will be taken into account, including the highest watershed. That settled, the populations will be given due regard and so on. So these were broad principles and we were able to agree on it, and that was a good first step.

Where we are stuck as far as I understand, is the second step, which is building a framework, for actually working out a detailed map or a line. A lot of this is still confidential, but broadly speaking, it has stalled on non-recognition by the other side, of India’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.

And the presumption that parts of India do not belong to us. One of the problems is the 1963 boundary agreement that China concluded with Pakistan, which in a sense, decided that India's boundary with China ended at the Karakoram Pass, rather than at the India-Afghanistan-China tri-junction many, many, many kilometres to the west.

We have been stuck on this whole idea of the framework. If we cannot even outline the scope of the boundary we are speaking about, we dispute the length of the boundary we are speaking about, then it becomes difficult to establish a framework.

Therefore, we have been unable to move on to the third step, which is drawing the line on the map and putting the boundary pillars on the ground.

This is not for want of trying. Both sides have tried. Sincere efforts have been made. Both sides have nominated a special representative. On our side, it is the current National Security Advisor (NSA) Mr. Doval. On the Chinese side, it is their current foreign minister Mr. Wang Yi.

For one reason or another, the agreement has eluded us. That doesn't mean it will continue to elude us. Given the current atmosphere of distrust, it is not going to be easy to resolve this.

The border is only one of the knotty problems, and unless the two governments rebuild trust with each other. An early solution seems unlikely since we’ve reached this impasse.

Q: How can India manage the domestic public perception, if there is a possible territory swap with China?

Because, as you have written in the past about it, boundary disputes have gained salience with the public in the last few years. But with the digital era, public opinion has become important in making diplomatic decisions.

A: I would rather argue that public opinion did not attach much importance to foreign policy and preferred to focus on domestic issues for our first 60 or 70 years. Some of our previous government’s policies of import substitution, non-alignment, and so on also led to a certain insularity in our approach.

But I always think that Indian public opinion is interested in public policy. It was in the 1950s. It is today. But I do concede to the point that with the mobile phone in the hands of 1. 5 billion people, it’s become easier for those 1. 5 billion to express their views in real-time.

We have a boundary problem, not just with China, but with Pakistan. We don’t have a settled boundary even with Nepal and  Myanmar, with whom there are, parts of the boundary, which are still not settled.

At some point, in the life of any state, it becomes important to settle the boundaries and that stage will come to India. Public opinion will have a say and it becomes difficult to convince public opinion, especially if there is a change in the map or the way the map looks. After all, you and I have all grown up visualising India in a certain form on a map.

I think the effort of the government has to be to educate public opinion on China, but more broadly on foreign policy. This involves a lot of public speaking by officials of the government, more debates in the parliament, and more informed debates by the media. 

I have always expressed my disquiet about the public discourse on China. In India, it is either sensational or prejudicial. We never offer the facts or the background when an incident happens, but we sensationalise it.

Prejudicial because we swing between those who believe we will never catch up with China and those who seem to be under the delusion that we've already caught up with China. Now, this is all public debate. It is not government. The government is not saying either. But I think it is the job of people in public life, whether you're in government or opposition, whether you're part of the media or parliament, to educate broader Indian public opinion. 

The West has superb research and outstanding works, but that is from a Western perspective. We need an Indian perspective.

Q: Taiwan has been in the news due to China’s aggressive posturing in recent months. India hasn’t said much on the issue publicly, but the level of engagement between the two countries has grown significantly in the last few years.

Has there been a change in India's position on Taiwan?

Do you think India would respond differently to a crisis in the Taiwan Strait in 2024 than it did during the crisis in the 1950s? 

A: Well, the answer to that is both yes and no. By the end of the Cold War, the Government of India decided that it was necessary to reach out to Taiwan simply because they had very advanced technologies, and they also had a large foreign exchange surplus, both of which were needed by an Indian economy, which as you know, was struggling and on the verge of collapse.

We also felt that relations with China were relatively on course. And therefore, Prime Minister Narasimha Rao decided to establish a non-official office in Taipei.

Successive governments have built upon that. If you ask me whether we have done anything new, the answer is no. If you were to ask me, has the current government advanced the agenda with Taiwan, the answer is yes.

Even in the 1950s, we recognised Taiwan as a part of the People’s Republic of China. There is some talk today in the media about us changing that position, and policy can always be changed. That is the prerogative and privilege of a government.

But I think a cost-benefit analysis needs to be done, as it was done in the 1950s. What is the price you pay to change that policy and what is the benefit you get? And at least as an individual, I can say that to me, the cost-benefit analysis does not make sense. A policy change does not make sense from a cost-benefit perspective, but that is only my view.

On the other hand, in the 1950s, we did involve ourselves in a crisis in the Taiwan Strait because it does affect the peace and stability of the broader Indo-Pacific. And we are a major Indo-Pacific state. That is even more relevant today because it is not just geopolitics which affects India, it is geoeconomics.

A lot of India's trade passes through East Asia. A lot of investment from abroad comes from East Asia. A lot of high technology comes from East Asia as well, from Japan, from South Korea, from Taiwan, and so on.

So India has vital stakes in what happens in the Taiwan Strait from an economic perspective, irrespective of whether or not Taiwan is part of China.

That's not the debate. It matters to us because our future is linked to it, our economic future is linked to it, and the well-being of our people is linked to it.

There has been a much greater confidence in dealing with Taiwan, a much better effort to reach out to them to leverage them, and so on. It has to be a yes and no answer.