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New Delhi, July 25 (IANS) China has formally invited United Progressive Alliance (UPA) chairperson Sonia Gandhi and her “family members” to attend the August 8 inaugural ceremony of the Beijing Olympic Games. Sources said Chinese ambassador to India Zhang Yan called on Gandhi Thursday at her 10, Janpath residence and handed over a formal invitation from the Communist Party of China (CPC).

“The Chinese ambassador took the opportunity to congratulate her on the UPA government winning a confidence vote in parliament and also handed over the invitation to attend the inaugural function of the Olympic Games,” the sources said.

A number of heads of states and governments, including US President George W. Bush, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, and French President Nikolas Sarkozy have already confirmed their participation at the Olympics’ inaugural.[link]

While China has taken care to invite the formal heads of State and Government from all other countries. In the case of India it has deliberately decided to not invite either the President or the Prime Minister of the country and has instead extended an invitation to Sonia Gandhi and her “family members”. While it is common knowledge that she is indeed the power behind the throne in the current ruling setup and the PM is a mere puppet of hers. This arrangement is India’s internal matter and for all official purposes Sonia Gandhi and her “family members” who hold no official position as ministers or cabinet members are to be considered as private citizens.

China has to go through the official procedures and invite the formal heads of state and government of India which is only when it will be considered as an invitation to India. Inviting a private family is not the same as inviting India to the opening ceremony.

It is unfortunate that nobody either in Parliament or the Media has raised this issue and it is even more unfortunate that the Indian government and the MEA have remained quite in the face of this deliberate snub by the Chinese and have not lodged a formal protest with the Chinese.

Harsh V Pant in an article titled “India’s Power Challenge” in Outlook in response to Guha’s earlier article in the same magazine saying that India shouldn’t indulge itself in the so called skulduggery of international power politics makes the point that international relations are anarchic and involve skulduggery in the first place to begin with and India cannot close its eyes to that fact and avoid the situation by chanting the peace and goodwill mantra alone.

He also wonders why Indian politicians who practice the worst form of realpolitik in the domestic arena shy away from power politics when it comes to the international arena.

A fundamental quandary that has long dogged India in the realm of foreign affairs and that has become even more acute with India’s ascent in the international order is what Sunil Khilnani has referred to as India’s lack of an “instinct for power”.

Most recently, this ambivalence was expressed by the Indian minister of commerce in a speech when he said: “this word power often makes me uncomfortable”. Though he was talking about the economic rise of India and the challenges that India continues to face as it continues to strive for sustained economic growth, his discomfort with the notion of India as a rising power was indicative of a larger reality in Indian polity. This ambivalence about the use of power in international relations where any prestige or authority eventually rely upon traditional measures of power, whether military or economic is curious as the Indian political elites have rarely shied away from the maximization of power in the realm of domestic politics, thereby corroding the institutional fabric of liberal democracy in the country. It was Indira Gandhi who long back, while addressing a foreign audience, suggested that India doesn’t believe in power (apparently only when it came to foreign policy it might seem).

Well the reality is actually quite down to earth. This is because most Indian politicians and bureaucrats and so called “intellectuals” included do not understand the outside world the way it is. They are more comfortable politicking in a domestic arena where they can easily recognize themselves with their opponents, rivals, supporters and other assorted cast of characters and even second guess them. On the other hand the rest of the outside world is indeed very foreign to them. They do not understand the ideologies, the fears, the ambitions and the desires that animate those outside India and thus their instinct since the last six decades has been to stick to a formula, that of professing its peaceful intentions and goodwill towards the outside world and hoping that they will leave them alone so that they can continue to indulge all their politicking energies in the domestic arena.

And one cannot blame them since they are the product of a culture that has been very insular and did not seek to know very much about the outside world until very recently. Only in modern times perhaps since the mid-nineteenth century have Indians traveled abroad in significant numbers. Until then it was even a religious taboo to travel abroad and those who did faced social ostracism on their return.Nowadays it is becoming more and more common and the globalization process means that more and more Indians are coming in direct contact with the outside world in some way or form.

And resultantly the current generation is much more aware of the outside world and India’s place in it. So it is largely a matter of a generation gap and once the current generation of politicians and bureaucrats who had their young formative years back in the era when the dinousaurs roamed the earth retire and ride into the sunset over the course of the next decade and the new generation takes over India will begin to engage with world in a significantly more assertive manner.

When the External Affairs minister Padmashri Shri Pranab Mukherjee landed in Beijing for his scheduled meeting with the Chinese leadership. He found that neither Hu or grandpa Wen could spare any time to meet him. But they instead fixed up a meeting with the newly appointed Vice President Xi Jinping who is currently assigned for dealing with crank cases.

That has left the Indian side including both the MEA and MEdiA quite confused and they are trying to figure out whether this is a good thing or a bad thing.The current leadership shows no inclination to meet him while at the same they arrange a meeting with the supposed future leadership.

Well let me help them out of their stupor. In one short sentence- It is a BAD thing and it is a straightforward diplomatic slap in the face.

Xi Jinping might be the chosen successor of Hu Jintao slated to succeed him in 2012. but the CCP history is littered with the corpses of such “chosen ones”. from President Lin Biao to Party General Secretary Zhao Ziyang there are many who one day were on the path to superstardom only to find themselves in a dark dungeon the next day holding their intenstines in their hands and begging for mercy from the red guards just because of one small real or perceived misstep.

Xi knows this very well. So all that Pranab can expect from this encounter is more homilies, platitudes, joint declarations ad hominem but nothing of substance.

And one more thing that has missed the notice of most Padmashri Shri Pranab should have chosen a better day to make his trip to Beijing than preferring to go on the 19th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre in an Olympic year when the whole world is trying to use the Olympics as a leverage to pressure Beijing to improve its record on human rights. It is said that diplomacy is a lot about symbolism. The posturing matters just as much as the substance. It is unlikely that the either Pranabda or the babus of the MEA were unaware of the significance of the day.

Now the timing is definitely not an issue between India and China. Most certainly the Chinese would have been just as boorish as they have been today even if the Indian foreign minister had landed on June 6th, 7th or 8th or whenever. it wouldn’t make a dime of a difference.

But where it will come to matter is in the court of International opinion which the Indian diplomats are trying to woo for myriad reasons and especially for their coveted permanent security council seat. For a country that is drumbeating its credentials as the largest democracy in the world to gain a seat at that supposed high table. It matters what message each of its words and actions sends to the rest of the world. This unfortunately has only sent the message that India really doesn’t have any courage of conviction to act on its own professed principles and again when they see the craven attitude of Mukherjee and his ministry in the light of Chinese boorishness it doesn’t raise their confidence that India has the ability to even stand up for its own self. No wonder governments in most world capitals do not take the Indian diplomats seriously.

The following article appeared on the website of the Chinese communist party’s official mouthpiece “People’s Daily Online” reiterating China’s official claim on Tibet under the title “Tell you a true Tibet Story”. Well its a nice story all right but to think that there is any truth in it at all would be ridiculous.It is actually an excerpt from a propoganda book published by the so called “information” office of the state council of the PRC titled “Tibet- its ownership and human rights situation”. If this is the best the Chinese can do then they really need to brush up on their imperialism.

First a brief backgrounder. Tibet was historically a mountainous nomad country tucked away towards the south-west frontier of China. There was little political contact between either country till the mid-13th century when they both came under Mongol domination and then after the disintegration of the Mongol empire into four different factions after the death of Mongke Khan the Eastern part of the Mongol Empire which included Mongolia proper, Sinkiang, Tibet, China proper, Manchuria and Korea came under the rule of Genghis Khan’s grandson Khubilai Khan.

Read the rest…

The Indian Embassy in Beijing seems to be compromised and penetrated to the hilt by Chinese intelligence agencies. According to this report this is the second such occassion in recent years when a top official at the embassy has been caught in the arms of a female Chinese handler.

BEIJING/NEW DELHI: An official posted at the Indian Embassy in Beijing has been sent back to Delhi in the wake of allegations that he had developed some liaison with a Chinese woman.

First Secretary M M Sharma, originally from the RAW, was shifted after his alleged connections with the Chinese language teacher came to light recently, sources said.

Considering the sensitive nature of post held by Sharma, an inquiry is being conducted to ascertain what kind of liaison he had with the Chinese woman and whether or not any sensitive information had been pilfered[link].

Sharma worked as a first secretary dealing with issues relating to science and technology at the Embassy. That it has now been publicly revealed that Sharma was actually a RAW officer throws some light on the government’s ability to keep its own secrets, a source pointed out.

There was no immediate reaction from the Chinese government on the issue. This is the second occasion in recent years that a senior government official serving at the embassy here has been charged with romantic liaison with a local woman.

A source said New Delhi was concerned that the woman in question could have been an informant of the Chinese government. If true, it could mean the Chinese side knew about India’s moves and counter-moves on the border talks over the past one year when Sharma served in the Embassy in Beijing [link].

That the Chinese make extensive use of “honeytraps” and other underhand means to snare senior Indian government officials, politicians, journalists and assorted intellectuals is well known. Even George Fernandes, former defence minister recently in an interview to Karan pointed out this disturbing aspect.

And Considering that the pro-Chinese rhetoric of a certain well known editor from a very famous newspaper published from Chennai and prominent members of a party which provides outside support to keep the UPA afloat becomes more frantic in direct proportion to their frequency of trips to China this phenomenon might be more deep-rooted than ever thought.

This is not an one-off incident but a part of a determined and sustained attempt by Chinese intelligence services to compromise the Indian establishment from within and any complacency on this aspect would prove very costly to Indian interests in the medium to long-term. The Indian security establishment should ruthlessly crush all such attempts at penetrating and compromising Indian security to the point of acting decisively against any and all such Chinese plants and compromised sources regardless of their so called position or status.

Karan Thapar: You always believed that India should stand up to China. How did they receive you when you went to China as defence minister?

George Fernandes: I was well received. The Prime Minister had come to receive me.

Karan Thapar: Breaking protocol?

George Fernandes: I don’t know if it was protocol.

Karan Thapar: I believe he also put his personal plane at your disposal.

George Fernandes: Yes the entire plane was at my disposal.

Karan Thapar: For the full one week.

George Fernandes: For one full week and if I wanted to stay more as long as I stay there.

Karan Thapar: I believe they also tried to make you happy. They put women at your disposal.

George Fernandes: Not in that sense. Some people will think that I had some fun. I didn’t have any fun.

Karan Thapar: But the women were made available. You had three or four women with you all the time – pretty women.

George Fernandes: Yes. When I came back they were waiting at the doors.

Karan Thapar: Whenever you came back they were waiting at the door?

George Fernandes: Yes.

Karan Thapar: So China in other words, despite the fact that you are a critic, went out of its way to make you happy. This is proof that if you stand up to China, China respects you.

George Fernandes:Yes I believe that.

The only problem here is Karan’s Interpretation. He doesn’t seem to have considered the possibility of Honeytrapping. One of the oldest tricks of trade in the spying and subversion profession[link].

Update: An earlier post on Chinese subversive activities targeting important Indian politicians, bureaucrats and business leaders with gifts, bribes and inducements.

The young Mongol knelt “reverently upon the ground” and “with the deepest gratitude”, acknowledged himself “to be a Mongol slave of inferior ability, perfectly unable to repay in the slightest degree the imperial favours of which his family have been the recipients for generations past, he declares his intention of performing his duties to the best of his feeble powers”. He then “turned himself toward the palace and beat his head upon the ground…in grateful acknowledgement of the imperial bounty.”

The above passage is excerpt from an 1878 report in the Peking Gazette and quoted in Jack Weatherford’s book ‘Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World’, giving a glimpse of the ceremony of receiving an Ambassador from a vassal state in the Manchu court of those days.

And this is exactly how future Indian Ambassadors could be sworn in a decade from now at the Chinese court if the recent events are any indication of the path the MEA and its political master the UPA are hell bent on dragging India towards.

The Chinese of course were rude and discourteous enough to summon the Indian ambassador and a lady at that at 2 am in the morning to express their “displeasure” at the scaling of their embassy wall in New Delhi by Tibetan protestors. Now this is something that could have easily been taken up during working hours. And one can easily blame the Chinese for their uncivilized conduct. But what one cannot excuse is the pusillanimous behavior of the MEA in the light of such reprehensible behavior on the part of the Chinese. Not only did the Ambassador meekly turn up at the doorstep of the Chinese foreign ministry to face the music, the MEA did not even lodge a protest at this public humiliation later on!

India was not the only country where the local Chinese embassy was targeted by protestors during the last one week. Protests took place in dozens of countries all over the world. The Chinese embassies were also targeted in New York, Sydney, Paris and Austria. But not one of the Ambassadors of these countries was humiliated in this way. Infact in these cities the incidents were even more violent involving mob violence and in one case protestors scaling the embassy building itself and tearing down the Chinese flag which never happened here.

In all these cases the Chinese expressed “satisfaction” with formal apologies from these countries. Only India was targeted in this manner and this begs an explanation. What is the MEA doing wrong in representing India and its interests abroad?

The Chinese embassy in New Delhi is huge even by the palatial standards of the embassies in the Chanakyapuri enclave. Big enough to host an entire PLA armoured division. There is a huge open ground in front of it and as far as one can tell there are no barricades around the embassy like there is around the US embassy nearby, it is easy for anyone to walk right up to its walls. So the Chinese themselves are not blameless here. To prevent the incident where a small group of Tibetan protestors tried to scale the walls of the embassy the Delhi Police would have had to form a two layer thick human chain all around this huge building 24 hours a day seven days a week in anticipation of such an event which might or might not have happened!

The MEA couldn’t even be trusted to put forth this point forcefully in front of the Chinese and protest the horrible treatment meted out to its envoy and one wonders why? Unfortunately when an incident like the public shaming of the ambassador by a foreign country happens it automatically morphs into an issue of “insult to the country itself” and the people automatically line up behind their man (or woman in this case) .

But in this case this will merely shield the MEA from accountability for its sins which brought about such a situation in the first place. Atleast in this case the Indian public can save their anger and direct it where it should be, not at the Chinese but at their own foreign office. Because the trend since the days of KM Panikkar and going right upto and including the current foreign secretary when he himself was posted there has been for the Indian embassy in Beijing to act as a surrogate for Beijing rather than as a representation of India. No wonder the Chinese, practitioners of realpolitik have developed a healthy disregard for Indian diplomats and treat them as their doormat. This is perhaps what made the difference for an insomniac Chinese foreign office clerk ordered by his masters to find a scape goat among the nearly two dozen countries to trouble early in the morning to pick up the phone and dial the Indian ambassador’s number.

The situation today has many parallels to the situation just before 1962. We have a defence minister AK Antony in the mould of VK Menon, a foreign secretary Shivashankar Menon in the mould of KM Panikker, an Army General Gen Deepak Kapoor, an ignorant and pompous chief in the mould of BM Kaul, and ofcourse the most pusillanimous PM India has ever seen in the shape of Manmohan Singh, a Nehru wannabe to square it up and all this ofcourse in the backdrop of a rapid Chinese military buildup on the Tibetan plateau and increased incursions long the Indo-Tibetan border by Chinese occupation troops just like back in the late 1950s. History repeating itself again as a farce.

The only silver lining is that we have the option of kicking this crowd out anytime within the next one year unlike back in the 1950s when there was no credible opposition party to get rid of that romantic statesman and his rotten core of sycophants.hopefully we get to the polling booth sooner than later.

NEW DELHI: India’s defensive and ultra-cautious mindset towards China has now firmly made its way even to the normally hawkish environs of the Defence Ministry (MoD).

The latest MoD annual report makes it seems that all is hunky-dory as far as the Chinese military threat is concerned, with Beijing even coming in for some glowing mention as an ”important player in global affairs”, proceeding firmly ahead on its ”well chartered out goals”.

It’s not as if the extreme wariness of the armed forces towards China has suddenly vanished into thin air, but the MoD report is yet another indicator of India’s reluctance to say anything to ruffle a prickly Beijing.

China’s hugely aggressive border posture with India is evident from the fact that around 350 cases of intrusions by its troops have been recorded all along the 4,057-km Line of Actual Control - right from east Sikkim and Arunachal Pradesh to Joshimath in Uttarakhand and Pangong Tso lake in Ladakh - over the last three years.[link]

For nearly five decades the present Dalai Lama, the 14th in line, Tenzin Gyatso has been the most recognised symbol of the Tibetan nation. But the question that after him who is going to take over his mantle occupies the minds of most Tibetans and international observers. At present it seems that it is only the communist mafia in Beijing with a clear succession plan in mind, to simply install their own puppet in his place after his death as they did with the Panchen lama and thus eliminate the most potent symbol of opposition to their continued brutal occupation of Tibet.

China’s plans to seek out and enthrone the next Dalai Lama on its own have been known for well over a decade. Nevertheless, the Dalai Lama admitted that he and his government in exile had really come to no decision about how they would manage the search for and recognition of the next Dalai Lama.

China has long been convinced that the Dalai Lama’s passing will deflate the Tibet issue as an international concern. It will handle the succession process by itself, installing its own Dalai Lama on its own terms. It has done this with a Panchen Lama who is rejected by most Tibetans and has long believed it can now install a Dalai Lama with little regard for popular approval.

In India, the Dalai Lama’s stated uncertainty about selecting his successor, combined with the fractures that lie under the surface of the exiled community, may make it likely that at his passing he will leave a resident Tibetan refugee community adrift. For all of his missteps in dealing with China, the Dalai Lama’s achievement in securing the cohesion and stability of the exiled community is considerable. And he is the most universally recognisable symbol of Tibet. Given what has just transpired in Tibet, China feels that the elimination of that symbol can come none too soon.[link]

Update: Brahma Chellaney on the importance of the institution of the Dalai lama.

Second, if Tibet is to be the means by which India coops up the bull in its own China shop, it has to treat the Dalai Lama as its most powerful ally. As long as the Dalai Lama is based at Dharamsala, he will remain India’s biggest strategic asset against China. The Tibetans in Tibet will neither acquiesce to Chinese rule, as their latest defiance shows, nor side with China against India. If after the death of the present incumbent, the institution of the Dalai Lama gets captured by Beijing (the way it has anointed its own Panchen Lama), India will be poorer by several army divisions against China. To foil China’s scheme, India should be ready with a plan.

The Army Chief Gen Deepak Kapoor in an exclusive interview to CNN-IBN to be telecast at 8:30pm IST(GMT + 5.5) tonight has gone on record saying that India can be held equally to blame of intruding into Chinese territory!

“The Chinese have a different perception of the Line Of Actual Control as do we – when they come up to their perception we call it an incursion, likewise they do.”

His shocking statement that India can be equally blamed for intruding into Chinese territory is based on a presumed logic that since the two sides have not agreed on a mutual Line of Actual Control both sides can accuse each other of intruding into their territories.

Infact the Army chief by making such a statement has exposed his ignorance of the history of the India-China border issue and also gives the impression that he is completely ignorant of the proceedings of the nearly 11 rounds of border talks that have been taking place since the last two and a half decades which coincided with much of his Army career.

He doesn’t seem to realise that technically India and China do not share a border. The entire length of the India-China border as it is today is actually the borders of occupied Tibet and Chinese Turkestan both forcibly incorporated into Chinese territory in the years immediately after the Maoists seized power from the nationalists in China in 1949. And the entire historical Chinese claim to these two territories is based on the premise that they were both part of Chinese territory during the Yuan dynasty of Kublai Khan.The so called “Middle Kingdom” hypothesis. The only fly in the ointment is that Kublai Khan was a Mongol vassal for much of his rule and thus it is more correct to say that Mongolia has more historical claim to China, Tibet and Chinese Turkestan rather than China has a claim on Inner Mongolia, Chinese Turkestan and Tibet.

The wily Chinese get around this by peddling the fiction that Kublai Khan became a “Chinese emperor” after the death of Mongke Khan and his subsequent defeating of his younger brother Arik Boke who had succeeded Mongke as Khan of the Mongol empire. That is absolute nonsense because after defeating Arik Boke, Kublai Khan had declared himself as the Khan of the Mongol empire the only problem was that the rest of the Golden family refused to recognise him as such. On the other hand Kublai Khan like a lot of other pragmatic conquerors in history also adopted some local Chinese titles and symbols to make himself more acceptable to the Chinese masses and cement his rule over the part of the empire directly under him [1] and by the time the Yuan dynasty was overthrown a century later by the indigenous Ming dynasty Tibet and Chinese turkestan did not form a part of their realm.

In short while the Chinese refuse to recognise the McMohan line terming it as a product of British imperialism their entire claim on Chinese Turkestan and Tibet which brings them to that Border line in the first place is itself a product of their past allegiance to Mongol imperialism which they cleverly disguise as the “Middle Kingdom” for consumption by gullibles!

Gen Kapoor has also conveniently sidestepped the fact that the Line of Actual Control remains undefined because the Chinese side inspite of nearly two decades of border talks have refused to exchange maps of the Western and eastern sectors with India while India’s own claim line is crystal clear for all including the Chinese side to see. It is therefore the responsibility of the Chinese side as a claimant to submit maps clarifying their own stand on where they think the Border in their opinion must run. India as a status quo power which has since the last 100 years adhered to the McMohan line cannot be held “equally responsible” in anyway for incidents on the border.

Gen Kapoor has clearly overstepped his brief in this case and this is not the first time, recently he held forth on the sixth pay commission on foreign soil disregarding all established norms that domestic politics stops at the water’s edge.The Government should either rein him in or relieve him of his responsibilities immediately if he continues to undermine the Indian position with his hollow moral grandstanding and continuous whining.That seems to be a long shot considering that the rest of the current government is no better in this regard.

It is also sad that Karan Thapar who has a reputation of being a “tough” interviewer who wouldn’t let even a bat escape on a dark moonless night gave a free pass to Gen Kapoor and did not challenge him with the fact that it was China which was being the obstacle in clearly demarcating the Line of Actual Control and India’s position in that regard is clear that it adheres to the McMohan line. Thapar would surely have pounced on any bureaucrat or politician if he had said such a thing. That he didn’t in the case of Gen Kapoor proves Pragmatic’s position that the Indian media and the public are in awe of the institution of the Armed forces and do not want to question them too closely for fear of offending them. This has to change. The Armed Forces like the rest of the state establishment should be held as much accountable to the Nation’s interest like anyone else.

Source: 1. Genghis Khan and the making of the Modern World by Jack Weatherford.