April 27, 1998

Despite China aiding Pakistan's nuclear and missile programmes, India sees it as a benign power. But the defence minister's remarks could spell a change in attitude.

By Manoj Joshi

Defence Minister George Fernandes minced no words. "By and large," he declared, "our understanding is that China is the mother of Ghauri." A remark that has not gone down well with the mandarins of the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) who have shaped the official view on China for the past two decades. In these years in which the two countries have sought to set their relations on an even keel, the MEA has held a one-dimensional view on the powerful neighbour: China was a benign and even friendly power and tough negotiations could normalise Sino-Indian relations.

It took Fernandes, India's very own dragon, to put the record straight. China is all that and much more. It is a country that has an elaborate and sophisticated strategy of engaging India in friendly relations even while aiding South Asian countries, especially Pakistan, to pin Indian security concerns down to the subcontinent. As Bharat Karnad, a research professor at the Delhi-based Centre for Policy Research, notes, "China is the source of all our troubles. Pakistan is only a sideshow."

China's main concern is the maintenance of peace and tranquillity in Tibet. Despite the humiliating defeat it inflicted on India in the 1962 war, China takes the realistic view that the only country capable of embarrassing the Middle Kingdom on Tibet is India, which has hosted the Dalai Lama and 80,000 of his supporters since 1959. In a country that quietly acquiesced to the Chinese occupation of Tibet and surrendered substantial treaty rights, Fernandes has been a maverick critic of the official policy on China and Tibet.

Returning from the north-east on the day Pakistan's Ghauri missile was tested, the defence minister took off on an issue that is taboo, thanks to the MEA: Chinese maps showing Arunachal Pradesh as a part of China. He said that while "we have all along been aware of the existence of distorted maps, what surprises me is that the previous government did not take up the issue with China". Fernandes also referred to another issue that has been kept under wraps for the past two years -- Chinese incursions into the Indian side of the line of actual control that forms the border between Tibet and Arunachal Pradesh. He said the government was investigating a report that the Chinese had set up a helipad on Indian territory.

But even as he targeted China, Fernandes inadvertently added to the confusion over the Ghauri episode. He initially argued that the Prithvi would be an adequate counter. He was obviously not briefed about the fact that the longer-range Prithvi comes with a weight penalty, thus the 250-km-range version Prithvi II carries only a 500 kg warhead. Also, that the Prithvi has been designed as a conventional weapon, a kind of long-range artillery rather than for the strategic role, that Fernandes assigned to it: of being a fitting reply to the Ghauri. Further, the short-range Prithvi launch sites would have to be closer to the Pakistani border and hence more vulnerable.

Given Fernandes' rather hawkish views on China, he was expected to make some decisive comment on the Agni, the "technology demonstrator", which has the potential to develop a missile capable of deterring not just the Ghauri but the Chinese missiles deployed on the Tibetan plateau as well. But all he could say was: "There is no need to test the Agni as such, as far as I understand." This was strange coming from a defence minister, since in 1994, a few months after the Agni's last test, the then minister of state for defence Mallikarjun had told the Rajya Sabha that the "technology demonstrator project, Agni, did not envisage development of the missile for deployment as a weapon system".

India's reticence, born possibly out of a fear of the US, seems difficult to understand considering the Chinese record. China has the dubious distinction of being the first country to supply another state -- Pakistan -- with a design for a nuclear weapon. A secret 1983 US State Department document, declassified in 1991, said that China had provided assistance to Pakistan "in the area of fissile material production and possibly also nuclear device design". In the '90s the focus shifted to the means of delivering nuclear weapons. In June 1991, according to Air Commodore (retd) Jasjit Singh, director of the Delhi-based Institute of Defence Studies and Analyses, a Chinese official admitted at a Washington Press Club meeting that his country had supplied "short-range" missiles to Pakistan. In 1995, US intelligence identified them as the DF-11 or M-11 missiles with a range of 300 km and detected signs of their deployment in ready-to-use canisters.

Last year, when India's Prithvi was sent to the Jalandhar depot for storage, Pakistan tested the Hatf-3, which most analysts said was nothing but the Chinese M-9, or the DF-15, a solid-propellant missile with a range of 600 km and capable of carrying a payload of one tonne. The test came around the time that a leading American weekly revealed the Chinese had also built an entire factory for the manufacture of missiles near Islamabad. All this was happening despite a 1994 Chinese commitment to the US that "China will not export ground-to-ground missiles ... inherently capable of reaching a range of at least 300 km with a payload of at least 500 kg". China's solemn commitment to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty too did not stand in the way of aiding Pakistan's nuclear weapons' programme. In 1995, it sold some 70,000 ring magnets to keep Pakistan's Kahuta uranium enrichment facility going. The next year, special industrial furnaces and hi-tech diagnostic equipment used by nuclear weapons designers were supplied.

All this has made the Indian armed forces wary of the Chinese moves towards India and far more realistic in their estimate of its intentions, especially after the 1962 debacle. According to Jasjit Singh, abundant caution calls for India to maintain "adequate insurance" for the eventuality of a shift in Chinese behaviour. "Look at the way in which the Hindi-Chini-bhai-bhai era of 1959 climaxed in a war just three years later," he says. He points to the Chinese references to reunification with Taiwan as a "sacred mission", and speculates whether they could, in changed circumstances, suddenly extend to Arunachal Pradesh as well. There are other regional developments that India needs to look out for. Beijing's influence in Myanmar has been steadily growing and it has a substantial military component. The most visible are a joint naval base at Hangyyi Island at the mouth of the Irrawady river and an electronic surveillance station at Coco island, that tracks Indian missile tests on the Orissa coast.

Despite all these not-so-benign signals, the ground reality is that India has to coexist with its inscrutable neighbour. It was probably with this in mind that last Thursday in Jaisalmer, Fernandes mellowed his stand, saying philosophically that India and China needed to live in peace with each other. Calling for an expanded diplomatic dialogue, he denied that the positions he had taken after the Ghauri launch were born of any obsession or personal prejudice. They were, he insisted, a result of "an objective analysis of national security".

With Fernandes striking, what many consider, the right chord on Sino-Indian ties, India may well snap out of its self-imposed trance on matters relating to the Middle Kingdom. The new attitude will be tempered by the realistic assessment of the growth of Chinese military and economic power. But as Fernandes pointed out last week, many of these matters, especially those relating to the central issue of inducting nuclear weapons, must necessarily await the creation of a National Security Council which can conduct a Strategic Defence Review. "If at the end of the review, we believe we have to induct such weapons, then the decision will be taken," he said at Delhi's Press Club. Deliberation and caution may not be Fernandes' true style but in the present context, it is a sign of responsibility and maturity needed to convince our northern neighbour that enhancing India's vulnerabilities may not be such a good idea since they could well end up adding to Beijing's own insecurities. For a country of India's size and capability, China ought to be seen not as a threat but as a challenge.

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