Rolling the Sino-India butterball up the slope

Sandeep Dikshit
Tribune News Service
Mamallapuram, October 11

India-China bilateral ties bear an uncanny resemblance to Krishna’s butterball that Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping will walk around on a newly laid patch of untrammelled grass. The butterball is a 250-tonne rock wonder that has remained precariously balanced and unmoved on a downward facing slope despite thousands of tourists trying to edge it up or push it down.

The site of Mamallapuram connects China’s present and the past. It is in the ancient and middle ages that ships from here headed for East Asia, including some to China, mainly to Fujian province. The present crops up because Xi, a student of history and literature, would have visited the ancient temple that marks the site when he was governor of the Fujian province.

The second informal summit is the third attempt in 30 years to experiment with a new format that can take the Sino-India butter ball up the rocky slope. It all began in 1988 with meetings between top diplomats and got upgraded to the Special Representatives level 15 years later. Two years back, when Dokalam soured ties, the first informal summit at Wuhan, that included walkabouts similar to the ones planned for later on Friday at Mamallapuram, sought to restore the equilibrium in bilateral ties.  

This time, the differences are existential and the knot harder to untangle than a faceoff between lightly armed troops at Dokalam. Pakistan, China’s “iron brother” has always tried to keep Jammu and Kashmir in a disturbed and agitated state, a situation helped by the security forces’ heavy-handed ways and the local political leadership’s proclivity to front-load its interests. The Modi government’s rearrangement of J&K is premised, at least in the blueprint, in ending the Pakistani belief that it is a stakeholder in J&K.

As indicated by government sources three days back, there could be additional confidence-building measures (CBMs) to manage the border peacefully. This incorporation of advancements in detection, early warning and surveillance technologies should not be the sole outcome of a meeting where the extremely time-constrained leaders spend two days.

The need, as veteran China hand Gautam Bambawale suggests, is in a grand gesture. The Wuhan informal meeting between Modi and Xi had resolved to jointly cooperate in Afghanistan. It has now petered out into joint training of Afghan diplomats which may not be a great deal for even them, mollycoddled as they are by the west in more sylvan surroundings in institutions of greater lineage.

The time has now come to demonstrate a larger trend of cooperation both among themselves and in the near neighbourhood that both Modi and Xi say is their immediate circle of priority. A mere refresher course for Afghan diplomats is not high-profile enough to catch the world’s attention but can be a stepping stone for a grander announcement on joint cooperation at the Mamallapuram summit, both in India as well as in a third country.