Coping with China-India Rivalry South Asian Dilemmas TTTThhhhiiiissss ppppaaaaggggeeee iiiinnnntttteeeennnnttttiiiioooonnnnaaaallllllllyyyy lllleeeefffftttt bbbbllllaaaannnnkkkk Coping with China-India Rivalry South Asian Dilemmas editors C Raja Mohan Hernaikh Singh World Scientific NEW JERSEY • LONDON • SINGAPORE • BEIJING • SHANGHAI • HONG KONG • TAIPEI • CHENNAI • TOKYO Published by World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd. 5 Toh Tuck Link, Singapore 596224 USA office: 27 Warren Street, Suite 401-402, Hackensack, NJ 07601 UK office: 57 Shelton Street, Covent Garden, London WC2H 9HE Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Raja Mohan, C., editor. | Singh, Hernaikh, editor. Title: Coping with China-India rivalry : South Asian dilemmas / editors C Raja Mohan, Hernaikh Singh. Description: New Jersey : World Scientific, [2023] | Includes index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022049657 | ISBN 9789811263712 (hardcover) | ISBN 9789811263729 (ebook) | ISBN 9789811263736 (ebook other) Subjects: LCSH: China--Foreign relations--India. | China--Foreign relations--South Asia | India--Foreign relations--China. | India--Foreign relations--South Asia | South Asia--Foreign relations--India. | South Asia--Foreign relations--China. Classification: LCC DS341 .C666 2023 | DDC 327.51054--dc23/eng/20221019 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022049657 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Copyright © 2023 by World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission from the publisher. For photocopying of material in this volume, please pay a copying fee through the Copyright Clearance Center, Inc., 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. In this case permission to photocopy is not required from the publisher. For any available supplementary material, please visit https://www.worldscientific.com/worldscibooks/10.1142/13066#t=suppl Desk Editors: Logeshwaran Arumugam/Thaheera Althaf Typeset by Stallion Press Email: [email protected] Printed in Singapore © 2023 World Scientific Publishing Company https://doi.org/10.1142/9789811263729_fmatter Preface For close to two decades, the Institute of South Asian Studies (ISAS) in the National University of Singapore has been tracking the rapidly growing interactions — economic, political and strategic — between East Asia and the South Asian subcontinent. Of special interest to ISAS has been the impact of a rising China on the South Asia’s international relations. Although China has been an important external actor in South Asia since the middle of the last century, it is only in the 21st century that China became a decisive influence on the region’s evolution. The emergence of China as the world’s second largest economy has naturally made it the largest trading partner for most of the South Asian countries. China’s rapid military modernisation, facilitated by its expansive economic growth, has a major impact on the region’s security politics. China’s political and diplomatic weight is now visible sharply not only in the economic, foreign and security policies of the South Asian nations but also in their domestic politics. Meanwhile, India has emerged, albeit at a slower pace than China, as a major power over the last two decades. Like Beijing, New Delhi’s geopolitical aspirations too have steadily risen during that period. This has set the stage for growing strategic friction between India and China. The friction has enveloped many regional and global domains, but its greatest expression has been in the shared South Asian neighbourhood. India is determined to sustain its traditional primacy in the region and China is set on consolidating its growing influence in South Asia. The sharpening friction has also begun to intersect with the growing great power tensions, especially between the United States and China. Many elements of these v vi Preface new dynamics have drawn academic engagement, in particular from the major power perspectives. However, the voices of the smaller South Asian nations have not been sufficiently heard or analysed. This volume seeks to address that major gap in the current discourse on the Indian subcontinent and its changing role in great power politics. This volume brings multiple regional voices to assess how the various South Asian nations are dealing with the growing rivalry between India and China. Many of the chapters in this volume were initially published as shorter essays by ISAS in its South Asia Discussion Papers series in 2020. Those essays have been updated and expanded in this volume. Additional contributions have also been commissioned to enrich the special perspectives that this volume presents. We thank Associate Professor Iqbal Singh Sevea, ISAS’ Director, for his support for the project. We also express our gratitude to the chapter contributors to this volume. Several of our colleagues at the ISAS also provided their assistance to the project. We are thankful to Ms Wini Fred Gurung, Ms Harpreet Kaur, Ms Claudia Chia and Ms Shavinyaa Vijaykumarr in this respect. Finally, we owe special thanks to World Scientific Publishing for bringing out this publication. C. Raja Mohan Hernaikh Singh November 2022 6"×9" b4905 Coping with China–India Rivalry: South Asian Dilemmas © 2023 World Scientific Publishing Company https://doi.org/10.1142/9789811263729_fmatter Contents Preface v Chapter 1 Introduction 1 C. Raja Mohan and Hernaikh Singh Chapter 2 India and China in Afghanistan: A Renewed Theatre of Contestation 7 Shanthie Mariet D’Souza Chapter 3 Bangladesh’s Balancing of China and India: Navigating Between Scylla and Charybdis 19 Iftekhar Ahmed Chowdhury Chapter 4 The Egg between the Two Rocks: How Bhutan Has Engaged India and China in Very Different Ways 29 Suhasini Haidar Chapter 5 Drivers of the Maldives’ Foreign Policy on India and China 43 Athaulla A. Rasheed Chapter 6 India–China Rivalry in Nepal 55 Pramod Jaiswal vii b4905 Coping with China–India Rivalry: South Asian Dilemmas 6"×9" viii Contents Chapter 7 China and Pakistan: From Tactical Alliance to Strategic and Economic Interdependence 65 Touqir Hussain Chapter 8 Competing for Influence: China and India in Post-COVID-19 Sri Lanka 77 Chulanee Attanayake Chapter 9 China: Exploring Certainties in Uncertain Sino-Indian Relations 93 Zheng Haiqi Chapter 10 India Meets China in Its Periphery 107 S. D. Muni About the Authors 121 Index 125 © 2023 World Scientific Publishing Company https://doi.org/10.1142/9789811263729_0001 Chapter 1 Introduction C. Raja Mohan and Hernaikh Singh Scholars of Sino-Indian relations have long argued that Beijing and New Delhi are locked in a permanent structural rivalry.1 Yet, there has been consistent ambition in both New Delhi and Beijing that they should work together to build a new Asia. This aspiration dates to the early 20th century when Indian and Chinese nationalists gathered at the 1927 anti-imperialist Congress in Brussels and vowed to jointly build the post-colonial order in Asia.2 However, the new forces rising out of China and India struggled to build a steady and cooperative relationship as the Second World War put them on the opposite sides of the Asian divide. While the Indian nationalists focused on throwing the British out of India, the Chinese nationalists were engaged in ending the occupation of Japanese imperial forces. The Indian and Chinese eagerness to collaborate and their inability to do so persisted through the 20th century. In fact, the contradictions between independent India and the People’s Republic of China became sharper as they found themselves sharing a frontier after Mao Zedong gained control over Tibet. Their inability to settle the dispute over the new boundary and the divergence over the Tibet question saw the Sino-Indian bonhomie of the 1950s end in military clashes in 1962. The normalisation of bilateral relations in the late 1980s saw relative peace and tranquillity on the long and disputed frontier and a steady expansion of bilateral economic and political relations as well as regional and multilateral cooperation. However, that phase began to break 1