How Nepal sums up the India-China story
Jeevan Deol
India or China? Guessing which country is most likely to become the economic powerhouse of the twenty-first century is all the rage these days. Most answers rely on hard facts like GDP, trade statistics or demographics, but we can make as good a guess as any if we ask the Nepalese.
India’s predicament in Nepal illustrates some of the dynamics that will determine the outcome of the competition between India and China. While India was pushed aside and ceased its military aid after King Gyanendra’s palace coup in 2005, the Chinese have moved in to offer military aid and training and have pledged to build a domestic rail network with links through Lhasa to China, Central Asia and Pakistan. In doing so, China offers Nepal the ability to reduce its dependence on India, and to play a more complex version of the India-China game.
India’s counter-diplomacy has come off looking distinctively reactive. It has belatedly offered to resume military assistance and looks set to build rail links into the country (although not a domestic rail network). Indian pressure failed to scupper the Maoist government’s proposal to stop recruitment into the Indian army. Instead, it took popular pressure from Gurkhas dependent on Indian salaries and pensions to change Kath-mandu’s mind.
Nepal’s case illustrates the reality of a larger issue in India-China relations: India’s failure to consolidate and hold the sphere of influence in the Himalayas, Afghanistan and the Gulf that it was bequeathed by the British in 1947. This happened alongside the loss of networks of influence sustained by the policemen, soldiers, labourers and merchants that India had exported to Burma, Ceylon, Malaya, Singapore, Hong Kong and East Africa.
Some of this influence could never have been preserved in a post-imperial world. But the consequences of Nehru’s optimistic timidity over Tibet and the country’s myopic view of Afghanistan and the Gulf were disastrous: India threw away its influence and leverage in a surprisingly short span of time. China got Tibet; Pakistan took up the space left by India in Afghanistan and the Gulf. India only managed to hold on in Sikkim, Bhutan and Nepal. India even failed to leverage its crucial role in preserving Tibetan culture in the face of China’s determined campaigns to destroy it in the homeland. India’s record with its own diaspora was equally dispiriting: the idea of nationhood created in the 1950s had no space for overseas Indians, and India’s star faded in Burma, Africa and Southeast Asia.
China, as we know, behaved differently. Its links with the diaspora in Southeast Asia remained strong, which led to massive inflows of capital after China began to open up after 1978. Its current round of infrastructure building, aid and investment in Africa, Southeast Asia and even South Asia have outpaced anything that India could aspire to. China clearly has the upper hand.
So, what should India’s next move be? Once again, Nepal may hold an answer. India cannot compete with the generosity of China’s infrastructure spending or the elegance of its solution to Nepal’s dependence on India. But Gurkhas’ desire to keep up their ties with India points to the possibility that cultural ties—and the benefits that come with them— may sometimes trump the politics of infrastructure and promised future development.
Here, too, India has lagged behind. China has set up more than 500 Confucius Institutes and Confucius Classrooms to spread the Chinese language in nearly 90 countries. Despite initial suspicions in some countries about the regime’s intentions, the institutes and classrooms work as freestanding entities run by host institutions. India, in contrast, has set up nine cultural centres associated closely with its diplomatic missions in Asian countries and hopes to set up six more in short order.
India may never match the scale of China’s cultural diplomacy. But it has a legacy of cultural capital that cries out to be deployed in the service of Indian ‘soft power’. For centuries, India sat at the centre of a commercial and cultural ‘Indosphere’ that saw Indian commerce spread to places as diverse as Mombasa, Aden, Baku, Kabul and Malacca; Indian religions, rituals and ideas moulded local belief and practice in Mongolia, Japan, Tibet, China, Bali and Afghanistan. Mughal India produced some of the best writing in a Persian literary sphere that bound together elites from Istanbul to Burma, and India was the heart of Persian-language publishing until the turn of the 20th century. But India has done very little to cultivate, deepen and leverage these associations—so much so that it fell to the government of Iran to spearhead efforts to document, preserve and disseminate India’s Persian heritage.
India missed a chance at a unique and lasting cultural diplomacy with Iran and Central Asia that would have gone beyond well-trodden paths of newspaper libraries, yoga and Hindi. It may yet suffer the same fate in Southeast Asia: after 1979, a security-led agenda effectively ended long-standing educational ties that brought large numbers of Muslim students from Malaysia and Indonesia to pursue Islamic higher education in Deoband and Lucknow. Most of them went on to study in Pakistan.
India lost a significant amount of cultural capital as one of the world’s major Muslim countries and a major centre for moderate Islamic education—and a chance to prevent the spread of radical ideas to Southeast Asia and elsewhere.
India may not be able to outflank China with railways, munitions or even Hindi. But a truly smart cultural diplomacy could deepen the lasting ties that would allow it to stay in the game—and sometimes even to win. Just ask the Nepalese.
The author has taught Indian history at Oxford and Cambridge Universities
