India can’t afford to ignore China challenge

The third development constitutes a series of recent visits by leaders and senior officials of ASEAN countries to China. This is not something particularly out of the ordinary, and that is precisely the key point here — the sheer density of visits and engagements between China and its neighbours, including those with which it has serious territorial issues ongoing.

During his meeting with the Chairman of the National Assembly of Vietnam, Chinese President Xi Jinping called the bilateral relationship one of ‘comrades-plus-brothers’. While their maritime disputes were discussed, the Vietnamese leader was also keen to improve and expand economic engagement between the two countries, including transit trade through China, border trade, and Chinese infrastructure development projects in Vietnam.

For all of India’s decades-long closeness to Vietnam given their common challenge from China, the depth of the relationship still leaves a lot to be desired. Unlike Pakistan, which has no economic dependence on India, Vietnam is heavily dependent on China. Even as it manages to stay hard-line on territorial disputes with its smaller neighbours, Beijing has expanded trade and its economic presence in neighbouring economies, undermining their ability to mount a serious challenge against Chinese interests.

There are lessons for India to learn from the way China prioritises relations with its neighbours. China and ASEAN are each other’s largest trading partners, while China is also the largest trading partner for nearly all of India’s neighbours in South Asia. The Narendra Modi government’s ‘neighbourhood first’ policy has gone some distance in building up neighbourhood connectivity but it has largely operated in fits and starts, and crucially, people-to-people interactions remain extremely limited . India is nowhere near knitting the region together in the manner of an ASEAN given the state of ties with Pakistan. This allows China to continue its ingress in South Asia.

In each of these cases, there are different ways in which India must react to, respond to, or even learn from Chinese actions.

An important pre-requisite, however, is for the Union government and the public to honestly acknowledge the challenge China poses to India’s foreign policy and security interests in its near and extended neighbourhood. Whether the government chooses to address issues of accountability on China policy in this electoral cycle or on some other occasion, the China challenge will only continue to grow and leave increasingly less room for India to sit on the fence, to wait to tackle the problem, or to ignore it altogether.

Rather, New Delhi must allocate greater resources to capacity-building on not just China, but also on its wider neighbourhood, including for the shaping of international narratives involving China. It must also commit to building more meaningful partnerships with neighbours and friends.