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Ever since our independence 73 years ago, the neighbour we have been obsessed with is
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This is not surprising as until recently we lived in the same damn house and we were the
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With the history we have had and the violence of our separation, it is natural that India
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and Pakistan should think so much about each other.
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But in all this time, we haven't thought much about another neighbour, a country bigger
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than us, an economy more prosperous, a civilisation just as old, a neighbour separated by just
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In the geopolitics of our popular culture, the enemy is always Pakistan, never China.
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But China is the big brother of our neighbourhood and hey, they did actually meet us in a war
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and we are embroiled in multiple disputes with them.
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Welcome to The Seen and the Unseen, our weekly podcast on economics, politics and behavioural
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Please welcome your host, Amit Verma.
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Welcome to The Seen and the Unseen.
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We can't understand the present without understanding the past.
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And given the recent bust ups between China and India in the Galwan Valley, we do need
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to understand what is going on.
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Today's episode looks back at the history of the interactions between China and India.
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First, a bird's eye view that spans centuries and looks at the difference between our civilizational
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Then we zoom into British times in which many of our current border disputes were born as
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the British Empire grappled with China and the questions of how far they could go and
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how far they wanted to go.
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Then we zoom in further to our independence and the changed dynamics of the Cold War.
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We see why the 1962 war happened and how the aftermath unfolded.
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And then through the decades, we come to these present times when China asserts its strength
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as India struggles to define its place in the world.
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My guests today are Hamsini Hariharan and Shivani Mehta.
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Hamsini is a host of the States of Anarchy, a podcast on global affairs and foreign policy.
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She is a Yenching Scholar at Peking University.
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She researches on Chinese politics and policy.
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She used to be a research associate at the Takshashila Institution and the assistant editor
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at Pragati at the time when I was the editor there.
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And our entire editorial team was basically the two of us.
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UNESCO recently certified us as the greatest two person editorial team in world history.
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Shivani is a foreign affairs researcher and writer based in Bangalore.
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She contributes to Eye on China, a weekly bulletin offering news and analysis related
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She is writing about China's engagement in the Indian subcontinent for a forthcoming
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rootledge publication along with Manoj Keval Ramani who has been on the show a few times
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Those episodes will be linked from the show notes.
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Before I begin my conversation with Hamsini and Shivani though, let's take a quick commercial
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If you enjoy listening to the Seen on the Unseen, you can play a part in keeping the
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The Seen on the Unseen has been a labor of love for me.
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I've enjoyed putting together many stimulating conversations, expanding my brain and my universe
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and hopefully yours as well.
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But while the work has been its own reward, I don't actually make much money off the show.
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Although the Seen on the Unseen has great numbers, advertisers haven't really woken
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up to the insane engagement level of podcasts and I do many many hours of deep research
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for each episode besides all the logistics of producing the show myself.
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Scheduling guests, booking studios, paying technicians, the travel and so on.
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So well, I'm trying a new way of keeping this thing going and that involves you.
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My proposition for you is this, for every episode of the Seen on the Unseen that you
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enjoy, buy me a cup of coffee or even a lavish lunch whatever you feel is worth.
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You can do this by heading over to sceneunseen.in slash support and contributing an amount of
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The Seen on the Unseen will continue to be free on all podcast apps and at sceneunseen.in.
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Help keep this thing going, sceneunseen.in slash support.
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Hamsini and Shivani, welcome to the Seen on the Unseen.
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Thanks for having us, Amit.
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So you know, Hamsini, long time since we've actually spoken, we were colleagues for the
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You've come on at least a couple of episodes of the Seen on the Unseen in the past.
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So how has life been treating you?
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I was thinking about, you know, I don't know if you know this Shivani, but when we first
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started doing editorial meets, Anit and I had this tradition of going to Blossoms and
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then we'd go over to the Starbucks across the street and sit there, compare purchases
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and then sit down and talk about like what was going to go on with Prakriti.
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And when we first started this, I think Church Street was at that point in time going through
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So it was literally like you had to dodge and walk on some of these wooden planks that
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And at one point I remember Amit turning and saying to me, you know, we should really go
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in a single file because if the both of us die, then that's it for Prakriti, we're completely
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And yeah, so it's been a long time since we've been holding the soul of Prakriti in our feet
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on Church Street, Amit, but life has been good.
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I don't remember this wooden plank thing, but it sounds like just a kind of morbid thing
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And I must hear tell my listeners something that they've probably heard before from me
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that Church Street is basically the best street in the world, partly because, you know, there's
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Takshashila with that captive studio and all the wonderful people who work there, including
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you guys at one point in time, and plus Blossoms and the Starbucks.
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And you know, I was recording with Ram Guha once in the Takshashila studio when we were
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doing our Gandhi episodes.
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And at the end of that, I said that, you know, he said, okay, where are you going?
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And I said that I'm now going to go to the best bookshop in the world, which is Blossoms.
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And he said best bookshop in the world, you fool, it's not even the best bookshop on Church
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Street, by which there's another store called Bookworm, which is very nice, where I went
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and found a secondhand copy of my own book.
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And I was like, how good can this shop be?
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Clearly, it's great, I mean, if it has secondhand versions of your book.
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So our listeners are now like, this is supposed to be an episode about India and China.
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Let's start talking about that.
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But you know, before that, I want to get a sense of Hamsini, starting with you, how you
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got drawn to China in the sense your master's degree also has to do with China.
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And after that, you went to China and you were actually a student there and you know,
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you're studying in Beijing.
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And now, of course, you're back in Chennai, and you know, waiting for all of this to end
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and bemoaning the loss of WeChat.
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So tell me a little bit about how the journey has been, what got you interested in, say,
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international relations to begin with, and then China?
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And what was sort of your experience in China like while you were there?
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Okay, so there are different versions to this story.
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One is, you know, the one that my parents are most proud of is, you know, when I was
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eight, I said I wanted to be like Kofi Annan.
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And they were like, yes, this girl is going to go into the civil services.
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And then I rebelled like every other person in this country.
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And I really didn't want to go into the civil services.
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I actually did my bachelor's in journalism.
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And when I was doing my bachelor's, I did one of my internships at a Tibetan newspaper
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And my whole point was that I wanted to spend a summer in Dharamshala more than anything
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And that experience really changed me, I think.
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So you know, while I now go to Beijing, and everyone calls me sort of a China apologist
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to various degrees, I think my journey really started out with knowing nothing about China
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or Tibet, but staying there for a month or two and just really realizing sort of the
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boundaries of my knowledge about the world.
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And that's when I realized that I wanted to study more about international relations.
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And I did a master's in India before I worked at the Takshashila Institution and even during
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my master's, China was sort of the thing that was always lurking at the back of my mind.
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I didn't have a specific region or a focus like a lot of other people did.
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But I realized that I enjoyed reading about China, and very few people knew about it.
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So I wanted to dive more into it.
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I think when I was in Takshashila, even when I was working with you, I was doing these
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Mandarin classes on the side and learning more about the language.
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And none of that was useful when I finally went to China, because you know, I could read
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and write quite decently, I think my speaking was just horrible because I'd had no practice
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So I'm doing my second master's in China at Peking University, which is a very good university.
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And I was having a wonderful time until the pandemic hit and I was sort of forced to come
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So I am waiting out the pandemic until the international borders reopen and I can go
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back and finish my research.
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And Shivani, to turn to you, you've also been into international relations for the longest
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time and then you also got into China.
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Not that you've specialized in only that, but that's been one of the key areas on which
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you've been working and you were at Takshashila till recently as well.
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Tell me a bit about your journey.
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Why international relations?
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Because that's not the kind of thing young people get drawn to, right?
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For me, I also had aspirations when I come to me to join the foreign services and which
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is why I was studying history, economics and political science as an undergraduate.
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And international relations was this discipline that combined all of those interests for me.
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So immediately after I finished college, I went to do my master's and I went to Singapore.
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I would say my scholarly sort of journey with China is fairly recent.
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I've only started working on China and related issues in the last year, but my introduction
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happened when I was doing my master's because Singapore has a lot of Chinese students.
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So I was introduced to it in the classroom where you have classmates from China talking
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about the Chinese take on issues that were being discussed.
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But at the time I was completely obsessed with international terrorism.
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That's what I wanted to study for the rest of my life and wanted to become like a war
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correspondent and things like that.
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So that's what I was doing.
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But on the side also like hanging out with people from China, listening to what they
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had to say about, you know, issues of international politics.
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And yeah, so I kind of wandered.
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And at Takshi Jail, I used to hang out with Hamsini and Manoj and just like chat with
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It was nothing more than that.
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But yeah, in the last year, it's become a little more formal.
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I'm studying China's engagement in the Indian subcontinent, trying to look at the Indian
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What is the Indian perception of China and stuff?
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And I have a couple of broad questions I'd like, you know, both of you to sort of take
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on which is, you know, before we get to the subject at hand, which is one is that, you
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know, when we start learning about a subject and this is a process I've seen that happens
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to all of us and is especially interesting when one is young and getting into a subject
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is that you shall, for example, leave China and IR out of it for a while.
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Let's say how do you frame the way that you look at the world?
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And a lot of young people when they find a theory that sort of contains a worldview and
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contains a frame through which they can decipher the world, they get enamored by it.
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And all they can see for a while is, you know, that framework.
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So they're using that hammer to break every nail.
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For example, there's a joke about how if you're not a communist at 18, you don't have a heart
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and if you're not a capitalist at 32, you don't have a brain.
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Something to that effect.
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There are many sort of versions of that.
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And it sort of strikes me that when you guys get into international relations, for example,
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there are all these different frames through which you look at the world or when you talk
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about China and China's engagement with the world, there are all these different frames
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and you know, the moment you come across one theory that seems so good and your eyes just
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open and you're like, wow, this explains everything.
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And how seductive is that and how easy is it then to sort of, you know, keep your mind
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open and just keep taking in influences from all sides and at what point, like, so have
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you guys sort of, you know, been through this sort of journey in, you know, learning about
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IR and learning about China?
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Yeah, I mean, I think for myself, I've definitely gone through that.
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I think even my podcast, the concept of, you know, states of anarchy comes from the first
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time I heard about the concept of anarchy sitting in international relations.
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It really sort of blew my mind and it hasn't stopped blowing my mind.
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But what I also learned very early on is I came across opposing viewpoints, particularly
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from people who thought that concepts of realism really discounted domestic processes, really
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discounted behaviors of certain states, really discounted histories, which were not Western
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And so it was sort of good to go up against those and see how other people felt about
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But something that I say for myself, at least, is that learning about international relations
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helps me understand and make more sense of the world around me.
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And I think that's something that's definitely true of international relations theory as
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Can you briefly elaborate on that?
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What do you mean learning about international relations makes you help sense of the world
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Because that's what I say about economics.
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Now, if you start saying that about international relations, it just gets very confusing for
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What am I supposed to study to make sense of the world?
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You know, economics, sure.
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Amit, we've always had this thing where I've seen you talk about things like how school
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economics, at least when we were at Prakriti.
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But for me, foreign policy theories really help you make sense of the world in the sense
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of they also consider that players are rational actors.
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They also consider decision making.
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What's very interesting for me is that they consider the international system for the
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And that has really helped me figure out debates in my own life.
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And I think sort of the existing conditions for international relations is something that
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I've sort of applied to my own world view, whether it's the way power works or the way
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networks work or just the lack of a hierarchical system in the world at large.
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I think those are just concepts that make me understand how everything takes.
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Shivani, what about you?
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What's your sort of learning through IR been like, like, was there sort of a particular
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school of thought which was attractive to you to begin with?
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And also, how do you sort of, you know, a question I guess you could ask a scholar in
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any field, how do you increase your knowledge?
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How do you figure out what to read?
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How do you organize whatever you're learning?
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I was definitely influenced by one school of thought when I first started studying international
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And that was because the professor that was teaching us IR theory belonged to a particular
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So for me to question a teacher was a very new concept.
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It was not something that we had been introduced to in the Indian education system, unfortunately.
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So I was like, whatever he's saying is like final, right?
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It can't be anything else.
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And then in my second term, I encountered another professor who came from the completely
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like different school of thought.
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And I was as enamored by him.
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And that's when I realized that I have to, you know, you have to figure it out for yourself.
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Initially there was this urgency to be like, who am I?
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What is the label that I would put on myself?
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But right now I'm allowing myself to learn about everything that there is, evolve my
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own thinking process, which is, I think, essential for anyone.
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Even when it comes to economics, same for IR, you have to give yourself some time.
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It's too soon for me to put myself in a box.
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So right now I don't give myself any labels.
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And it also allows you to read a little more, you're more open to the other arguments and
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you can be more objective, which is, I think, what we're all trying to do.
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And you know, all these theoretical lenses are obviously sort of useful tools and useful
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guides to being able to think about the world and understands people's actions in different
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But as you go along, do you find they actually correspond with reality?
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For example, we can have all kinds of frames of about how, you know, foreign policy proceeds
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and how China relates to India and blah, blah, blah.
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And then things happen which don't fit into these frames and you're like, hey, what's
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So, you know, and Hamsini, you've actually sort of been in China and I heard you in the
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All Things Policy podcast the other day with Manoj, where you made the very interesting
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observation that while China is a part of our lives here in India, right down to the
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phones we use and all of that, India was not at all a part of your life in China, which
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I found fascinating and which also kind of indicates that, you know, in all these frameworks,
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we'll talk about Indo-China with a hyphen as if, you know, these are two characters
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equally interested in each other.
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But for a lot of Chinese, India is very far away, which is not quite the case for us here.
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Can you kind of expand on these two sort of angles?
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Yeah, also, as an IR scholar, Amit, I will object to you saying Indo-China, because Indo-China
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typically refers to Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos.
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So Sino-Indian is what they generally say.
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But I agree with your point in the sense that it's very difficult to fathom how the world
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around us fits into these theories that were formed since the 1920s, right?
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And what I try to do, at least with my own understanding of the world, is to, I think
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in the back of my head, I will understand how, say, liberals look at something or constructivists
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look at something and then see if it plays out without prescribing that lens to it, you
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know, and say, this is what happened.
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It doesn't particularly matter what a school of thought thinks about it.
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But what matters is sort of the element that's at play, you know.
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If this is power, then what does that school of thought tell us about that element rather
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than about, you know, large-scale sweeping statements about the world?
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So when I was living in China, for example, there was a lot that we kept talking about,
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for example, in US and India, you talk a lot about sort of the China threat theory, which
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is that China's rise is threatening and it will destabilize the world order and so on.
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And in China, they talk about China's peaceful rise, which is the idea that China will peacefully
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And you have criticisms of both theories on either end.
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And it's very interesting to see how that plays out and sort of live that reality.
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There is always a little bit of dissonance, however.
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What I think for me helps is to use these labels to understand and put a name to what
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is happening around me, but not fully ascribed to that label alone as my own worldview, if
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That makes a lot of sense, and it's about time before our listeners rebel and go away
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to actually talk about India and China.
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I was about to say Indo-China, but yeah, you've corrected me there.
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So to talk about sort of India and China, and obviously, you know, before we come to
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the current time, which is deeply complicated, and it's almost become a trend of, I mean,
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there are actually two simultaneous trends going on nowadays in our discourse, and one
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is to disregard history completely and just talk of the current moment, and the other
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trend is to make up a history and, you know, fit it to whatever ideology you happen to
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But we will not fall into any of these traps before we can talk about what is now happening.
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We have to get complete historical context, and we will do it at different kinds of levels.
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Level one, which I'd like you guys to talk about, is sort of a centuries old view, which
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is how has China traditionally looked at itself?
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And you know, India as a political entity, of course, is recent, but in general, in the
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subcontinent, how have we looked at ourselves?
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What are the sort of different worldviews towards the rest of the world?
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And you know, how has that impacted our relations over the centuries?
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You know, particularly when we talk about China and India, we come across two different
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schools of thought, right?
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And the first in China is Tianxia, or, you know, all under the heavens, and, you know,
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I know it's extremely cliché to now sort of begin talking with Tianxia, but you can't
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And the concept of Tianxia, essentially, is that you have, you know, heaven and underneath
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heaven, the Middle Kingdom, which is China, and, you know, and then you have sort of layers
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And first you have the Middle Kingdom itself, then you have countries that have pledged
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their allegiance, in a sense, to the Middle Kingdom.
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And outside that, you have barbarians.
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And this sort of worldview is supposed to have informed the way the Chinese approached
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the world and themselves for a very long time.
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So there's even a very funny anecdote that the first time that a British envoy goes into
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the court of the Qianlong Emperor and says, oh, my king sends his regards, the emperor
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says, who is your king?
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There is only one king.
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So they didn't really recognize the sovereignty of anybody else.
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And that's very interesting when you consider the Westphalian system, where we traditionally
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pit ourselves, where all states are equal.
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Yeah, that is something that I wanted to point out.
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And in the Indian subcontinent, rather, as you know, there wasn't per se in India, then
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the approach was very different, right?
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It was a very pluralistic kind of approach where you recognize that there are many different
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And there are different ways of dealing with this.
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But you certainly don't have this arrogance that you'll recognize no other king but yourself.
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And obviously, that's kind of dictated also by size, you are a lot of chutkuchutkulati
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Yeah, that's a brilliant way to talk about India sort of checkered history, right?
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Like all these chutkuchutku systems that exist, often making alliances with each other, ganging
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Each of these kingdoms have their own civil services base, they have their own tax structures.
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Of course, when you know, when you look at like small kingdoms in Rajasthan, for example,
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they could have all shared similar features.
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But when you look at it on a macro scale, these were very disparate kingdoms.
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When India finally got independence, we were 540 odd kingdoms that princely states that
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eventually acceded to form the Indian Union.
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And before the British came, this could have easily been twice, thrice that number.
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And there's sort of a tradition in Indian strategic thought to go back to the artashastra
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and cartelian schools of thought that look at how alliances were formed and how they
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were often directed at enemies, you know, the concept of my enemies, enemies, my friend
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But I would not say that you could prescribe this sort of strategic thought to all the
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countries in the subcontinent.
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To all the countries in the subcontinent is an interesting way of putting it.
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And it's interesting that, you know, China, despite the sort of sense of superiority,
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were also in a sense, a little bit insular in the sense that they didn't really have
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imperial ambitions of taking over the world, certainly not when it came to India, for example,
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where, of course, the Himalayas are a natural barrier.
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And I believe before modern times, there was only one conflict sometime in, you know, 600
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A.D. or something, a minor conflict, but otherwise, there was really nothing much.
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No, I mean, the Chinese history is filled with war, if you look at like, whether it's
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the song or the ring or the chin, I mean, towards India, towards India, which is Sino-Indian.
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Sino-Indian would be slightly different.
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I think we have to raise a couple of points here.
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There's this really excellent book that I refer to later as well, called From Frontier
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Policy to Foreign Policy.
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And the author, Matthew Mosca, points out that for the most part, the Qing Empire, which
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was ruling during the 17th and 18th and the 19th centuries, didn't really look at India
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In the sense, you had Indian traders at Guangdong, Guangzhou, the ports on the eastern seaboard.
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And those people were seen as different.
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You had merchants from Calcutta who were being seen as different.
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You had people who were in Tibet who were being seen as different.
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And so for a very long time, the Chinese court had to contend with the fact that these were
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not localized tribes, but rather one large kingdom, which eventually came under British
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So that was something that was a real feature of Chinese foreign policy at that point in
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And it was difficult because of intelligence gathering, because of the way that courts
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were structured, the way information was relayed and so on.
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But they didn't largely have any conflicts towards India.
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There were always skirmishes along the border that could have been traced, for example,
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with the kingdom in Ladakh or across Tibet and things like that.
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So those were regular features of the border, but they aren't really considered in Chinese
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And is it fair to say that the one time where China begins to loom large in India's geopolitical
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considerations is really when the British Empire is underway.
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So in the 19th century, you have the great game happening where you have two imperialistic
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forces in the British and the Russians vying for influence in territory.
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And at that point, you know, the question that the British face is where do we draw
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I mean, we're obviously not going beyond the Himalayas, but where do we draw the line?
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Do we keep Afghanistan as a buffer state between Russia and us?
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What role most pertinently does China play in this?
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And China is almost, you know, this insular force whose approach till then to the rest
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of the world is, you know, who the hell are you guys?
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You are either barbarians or kindly come here to pay tribute.
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But at this point, you know, they are not up against, you know, India, as it will be
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later, or against a whole bunch of disparate nation states, but against the British Empire.
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And this is when the first sort of disagreements about borders start to take shape.
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So tell me a little bit about that period.
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Yeah, I think you raised a very important point, Amit, in that the British wanted a
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And a lot of this does go back to sort of this great game of the 1800s.
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And the British were particularly concerned when Russia conquered Tashkent and Samarkand,
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which are currently sort of Uzbekistan.
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And the British were really afraid that Russia would come all the way to the borders of India.
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And so they wanted not only a frontier, which at that point in time was Afghanistan and
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the Himalayas, but they wanted a border, which was a line in that sense.
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There's often whenever we talk about the border with China, a lot of scholars do point out
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that it's very difficult to pass through the Chinese sources on the Indian border, because
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there's a very little that's been written about.
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And B, it's very, very disparate, as I mentioned a couple of minutes ago.
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So I think, you know, when it comes to this, you have to go back to Ladakh at that point
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And I'm sure you've spoken about this with other guests on your show whenever you're
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But all of this history of even Jammu and Kashmir, right, at the end of the First Anglo-Sikh
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War, you have the Treaty of Amritsar that's signed.
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And then Gulab Singh took over as sort of the Dogra Maharaja of Jammu and Kashmir.
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And so the Dogras are the people who start pushing the frontiers of Jammu and Kashmir.
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They are the ones who subsume Ladakh, which was an independent kingdom for the most part
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And it was independent the way Tibet was, the way Bhutan was, the way Nepal and Sikkim
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And so Gulab Singh and the Sikhs eventually also capture Gilgit-Tartistan, which is now
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a part of POK, and the Hunza region, and so on and so forth.
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But what happens here is that you have all of these British geographers and explorers
#
and diplomats who go in during the 19th century and they start exploring the Himalayas.
#
The Royal Geographic Society is an organization that's now looking at how explorers will
#
see the world and look at unknown places and things like that.
#
So I think this is the period when maps are finally starting to be drawn.
#
And the first map that comes up is something called the Ada-Johnson Line.
#
And what essentially happens is William Johnson, who's a British surveyor, becomes Gulab Singh's
#
And he proposed a line that would go through Aksai Chin, which we know now as very infamous.
#
And it goes all the way to the Kundan Range, which is a little further back.
#
And the Johnson Line was presented in London by a man called Sir John Ada.
#
And that's why it's called the Ada-Johnson Line.
#
This was proposed in 1865, but the Chinese never really recognized it.
#
So the next line that comes up about 20 years later is that the British, again, are in talks
#
with the Chinese and they propose another line.
#
And this is called the McCartney-McDonald Line.
#
And it's very famous because McDonald is also the person who secured the 99-year lease
#
And so he proposes a line that will put Aksai Chin directly under the Chinese rule.
#
So these are two lines that are proposed much before the 1912 similar agreement, which we
#
So they proposed, but how do the Chinese react to that?
#
Like, is this a unilateral thing that the British are proposing, that these are the
#
lines that they're declaring it?
#
Is it pushback from the Chinese?
#
What do the Chinese feel about all this?
#
What's the sort of politics happening there?
#
So the British present these lines.
#
So they get these surveyors to draw up these lines.
#
They present it to the Chinese court.
#
They present it to the Tibetans as well.
#
And you have various interpretations of how this was perceived.
#
The Chinese till date staunchly argue that they have never accepted any of these lines.
#
And there is a certain amount of truth in that, in that even if there were conversations
#
or discussions, you see Chinese diplomats at that point in time or the Qing court just
#
rejecting these maps and the talks finally falling through.
#
And then in 1914, there's another sort of interesting border discussion that has resonance
#
up to the current day, which is supposedly a three-way agreement between India, China
#
and Tibet, which leads to what we call the McMohen line.
#
Tell me a little bit about that, because that's also interesting in the court dispute there
#
was even a little funny to me for reasons I'll get into, but yeah.
#
So I know that, you know, we come up with the McMohen line in 1914, but what's important
#
to remember is that we come up with the McMohen line after nine months of deliberations.
#
So by we, you mean the British, you're referring to we as a British.
#
By we, I mean the British, the Chinese, the Tibetans, right?
#
So all three of us hold deliberations for about nine months about where a border should
#
And what's interesting is that they finally agreed on sort of an inner Tibet, which would
#
be made up of regions of Amdo and Kham and outer Tibet, which is sort of made up of adjoining
#
areas within China, which would typically be in areas of Sichuan and Yunnan right now.
#
And the British finally agreed that Tibet was sort of under the subgenuity of the Chinese,
#
but they also put down stipulations that the Chinese would not interfere with the running
#
of Tibet or they would agree never to annex it and so on.
#
So with the Chinese, the main deliberations were on what would be the boundary between
#
inner Tibet and outer Tibet.
#
And with the Tibetans, the British drew up the borders of Tibet.
#
And this is what Indians now call the McMohen line, which is now disputed.
#
So that is one part of it.
#
Now I think what is important to mention here is that the Chinese argument is that the Chinese
#
representatives at this meeting were kept in the dark.
#
They said that these British imperialists pressured the Tibetans into accepting a new
#
border and that all of this was a conspiracy.
#
And their biggest rejection of the line comes in because their negotiator, this man called
#
Chen Yifan, just initiated some pages of the agreement, he never really ratified it.
#
And so that's why the Chinese argue that the McMohen line is not valid.
#
And for all future diplomats, kindly note the difference between initialing and ratifying.
#
Do not make this mistake.
#
Now it's a very interesting argument because it's like the Chinese weren't too interested
#
at that time in the border between Tibet and British India.
#
And so, you know, the Tibet and British India agree on a border.
#
And later China takes over Tibet and suddenly the border between China and British India.
#
And then, of course, there are all these disputes over, you know, I mean, Tawang is famously
#
kind of part of that dispute.
#
Let me turn to you, Shibani, now as we approach independence and we even reach independence.
#
But before we sort of talk about the post-independence imperatives, one sort of broader question
#
I have is that, you know, when one thinks about all these kinds of border disputes and
#
many of these disputes are over areas which are uninhabited, like Sai Chun is the area
#
of Switzerland, but it's not quite the most bustling place.
#
And these disputes are things that we are stuck with, even though, you know, if you
#
were to approach it with a tabula rasa, it's quite possible that, you know, neither country
#
would really dispute in the first place, but it's a historical artifact, it's been something
#
that's fought over, and then, you know, that kind of comes down over time and it almost
#
becomes therefore a matter of sticking to the previous stance you've made, not just
#
personal ego, but even national pride.
#
Like there's a wonderful quote by Jawaharlal Nehru, which I'll take this opportunity to
#
read out, which he said on September 4th, 1959.
#
I don't quote him much, but here we go, this impertinent quote.
#
Now it is a question of fact, whether this village or that village or this little strip
#
of territory is on their side or on our side.
#
Certainly, wherever there are relatively petty disputes, well, it does seem rather absurd
#
for two great countries immediately to rush at each other's throats to decide whether
#
two miles of territory are on this side or on that side, and especially two miles of
#
territory in the high mountains where nobody lives, but where national prestige and dignity
#
It is not the two miles of territory.
#
It is a nation's dignity and self-respect that becomes involved.
#
And therefore this happens, stop quote.
#
And of course, we could argue that he could have been much crisper there, but it's a speech
#
and not a piece of writing.
#
So in all this talk of this and that, but it seems to me that in these areas that we
#
are fighting about, it's almost ironic that these countries and the leaders of these countries
#
don't seem to care too much per se for these areas, but these are historical disputes.
#
And because you disagree, you kind of keep disagreeing, like Srinath Raghavan in his
#
book War and Peace in Modern India, in fact, writes about how Nehru at first didn't really
#
think that India had alleged claim to Aksai Chin.
#
His whole game was that let's use it as a bargaining chip and all of that.
#
But by the time we get to Chuen Lai's famous sort of offer to India in 1960, which Shibani
#
will enlighten us about soon, Nehru has been convinced that no, we should claim Aksai Chin
#
And some could say that all our future conflicts could have been avoided had we just been pragmatic
#
What do you feel about all of this?
#
I think the quote that you read from Nehru says a lot about his personality.
#
And the reason I bring in personality is because the way I understand international relations,
#
if you look at it as a board game, while the moves that the players make are important,
#
it's also important to understand who's making the move.
#
And that's why the study of personalities, the context in which certain decisions were
#
taken, and what were the constraints that the leadership had are equally important.
#
While your scholarly sort of debate and discussion should be about the policy decision itself,
#
you can't overlook the circumstances in which they were made.
#
And so while we're talking about Nehru, Nehru comes to power much like when Mao Zedong is
#
also gaining prominence and we have People's Republic of China established, when the Cold
#
So both of these people, inherent in international system that's based on great power politics
#
between the US and the Soviet Union, and it's very easy to think that leaders would just
#
adapt to the international system that they inherit and because they are restricted by
#
But both of these people are similar in the way that they sort of assert themselves and
#
challenge the system that they inherent.
#
With Nehru, he knew that non alignment was, you know, one of the key policy decisions
#
He was assertive, but in a more diplomatic way.
#
When you compare it to Mao, Mao viewed it as, you know, the need to be military, like
#
have more military power and be assertive in that sense.
#
And that's why he also sort of inflamed the conflicts in Korea, in Vietnam, and what Hamsini
#
was talking about along the Sino-Soviet border as well.
#
So that's where they sort of contrast.
#
Nehru was, you know, thinking about self-restraint and vigorous diplomacy, and Mao's focus was
#
on being military, you know, exercising military might.
#
Going back to history and ego of people, I think when we talk about Nehru, you have to,
#
at the end of the day, he wanted to be prime minister, like when he woke up the next day.
#
So the decisions that were made were based on the political capital that he had.
#
And if he could not convince the Indian public of a certain decision that he made, he would
#
not go ahead with it, which is what happens later when Chuanlai proposes the compromise.
#
And I forget what your question is.
#
How much of these disputes are sort of just a historical artifact, and then the individuals
#
concerned, whether it's, you know, Nehru in this case, get trapped by circumstances into
#
fighting for something which both they don't necessarily care about themselves, and are
#
also not really of such strategic significance in that sense, like, you know, Srinath in
#
his book talks about how Nehru's approach changed from, you know, viewing Aksai Chin
#
as a bargaining chip to something that no is inherently part of India.
#
And as you correctly said, I will quote Nehru again, using the them and that formulation
#
where Nehru at one point said, quote, if I give them that, I shall no longer be prime
#
minister of India, I will not do it.
#
And by them, he means Chinese and by that he means Aksai Chin.
#
So if I give the Chinese Aksai Chin, I shall no longer be prime minister, but that's something
#
Well, the larger question I sort of had is that, how much of these almost like to me,
#
at least from my layman's perspective, a lot of these disputes seems so tragic to me, because
#
it almost seems like that there is some historical dispute somewhere over reasons that no longer
#
And then you get trapped in a chain of events, and eventually millions of people die.
#
And it's just a natural way it flows out.
#
Sorry, I just wanted to add to what Shabani was saying.
#
And I think it's important to remember that the Cold War was taking off.
#
But it's also important to remember that both Nehru and Mao were at the heads of these new
#
volatile states that were large and that everyone expected to fail.
#
So you had these extremely large, poor, populous states that were formed.
#
And neither of their borders were what they are today.
#
At that point in time, your borders were lines on a map.
#
They weren't even fortified with wires or anything.
#
And I think that's why it was important.
#
India went through the experience of partition, which Nehru, I think, personally also experienced
#
because of where his home was and so on, and him having sort of the cultural identity of
#
being a Kashmiri pundit.
#
And I think, therefore, even if he didn't care personally about two kilometers of barren
#
land, it's about what that symbolized, particularly when you have a belligerent Pakistan on one
#
side, when you have pressures erupting, when you still have the union not officially formed.
#
And I think on the other hand, it's very important to remember that China was going through the
#
exact same experience of consolidating all of its borders.
#
At that point in time, Tibet was still autonomous.
#
Hong Kong was under the British.
#
Macau was under the Portuguese.
#
Mongolia was, you know, Mongolia was still officially not a part of the People's Republic.
#
Xinjiang was very disputed.
#
None of the borders that China had in the 1940s were absolute.
#
And for China, I think it also felt that it bordered the Soviet Union, which was, I think,
#
about 4,300 kilometers of land.
#
And their relationship, though, was heavily influencing the Communist Party, did turn
#
sour at one point in time.
#
So that threat was present.
#
And the Chinese were also afraid that India was sort of being forced by these imperialists
#
because India also had an imperialist history to sort of do what the US wanted and to do
#
what the imperialists wanted.
#
So I don't think it's merely about having these small historical disputes that no one
#
I think if you go back to the 1940s, this is everything, because if you give up on this
#
land, then it's sort of you giving up on your idea of India, which is two years old.
#
And you don't have nationalisms like you do now.
#
You have a lot more at stake by giving up these two kilometers of land, is what I think.
#
That's very insightful.
#
And sort of a couple of thoughts came to my mind while you were going through that.
#
And one is that it's interesting that while both Mao and Nehru were in charge of relatively
#
sort of new regimes or new nations as they were then, they came to power very differently
#
where Nehru kind of came through power through classic Congress moderation, statesmanship,
#
diplomacy, and blah, blah, blah.
#
And therefore, those values also come into play when he's actually prime minister.
#
And similarly, Mao is the quintessential guerrilla warfare guy.
#
And to some extent, that probably influences him.
#
So just looking at sort of, it's not only that these individuals were impacted by the
#
way they came to power.
#
But given that these were the paths to power, it was almost inevitable that the individuals
#
who eventually emerged on top would be individuals like Nehru and Mao respectively.
#
The other thought that strikes me is that despite all the rhetoric about non-alignment
#
and we just want to live peacefully with everybody and all of that, the bottom line is that the
#
Indian Union coming together after the British left could also be described as a profound
#
act of imperialism because you have one central government sort of taking over these hundreds
#
of princely states, sometimes with cunningly cajoling them and breaking promises later
#
as we know happened and sometimes with the threat of force and sometimes with force itself.
#
So after that typical seen unseen digression, we shall now get back to Shivani.
#
And to take us through the 50s, like obviously the whole takeover of Tibet happens around
#
1950, but also take us through what is Nehru's approach to foreign policy?
#
What is Mao's approach to foreign policy?
#
How do they look at each other?
#
You know, where does Patel differ with Nehru, for example?
#
And you know, what is Zhou Enlai's role in all this?
#
Give me a sense of that background.
#
So if you look at like, there's a digital archive, which has, you know, a lot of these
#
conversations between the Indian leadership and the Chinese leadership recorded that anyone
#
And if you look at the minutes of Chairman Mao's first meeting with Nehru, which happens
#
in October 1954, they're talking about Sino-Indian relations.
#
They're talking about the political situation in Asia.
#
Both countries acknowledge that they have suffered from oppression and that going forward,
#
both of them need to play an important role in Asia because they are the biggest nation
#
There is an understanding that they will both pursue rapid development.
#
They're both like agricultural societies that want to industrialize quickly.
#
And that this, you know, chase for development should not frighten the other so-called smaller
#
states in Asia, which is why you have the five principles of peaceful coexistence or
#
the punch shield, which was actually incidentally signed in the same year earlier that time.
#
So there is an agreement in terms of what needs to be done in the region between the
#
But there is also mistrust.
#
Mao viewed Nehru as this Western educated leader who could not be fully trusted because
#
Mao felt that Nehru would lean towards Western ideologies and, you know, would have a soft
#
corner for the institutions that he himself did not believe in and wanted to challenge.
#
On the other hand, there are declassified CIA files that say that Nehru had, was not
#
sure of true and lie and his sort of intentions, and he's quoted saying that he has cheated
#
me multiple times, so no matter how many times we have discussions on the border, I'm not
#
sure I can believe him.
#
So there is that mistrust that we talk about between India and China even today that exists,
#
you know, from the 50s.
#
And how does sort of the Chinese take over of Tibet play into that when it happens in
#
Like, you know, Nehru is almost inclined, it seems at that time to sort of not take
#
an aggressive note and give them the benefit of the doubt, while, you know, Vallabhai Patel,
#
you know, famously in a note to Nehru said that, you know, this throws, quote, into the
#
melting pot all frontier and commercial settlement, stop quote, you know, I mean, he kind of saw
#
He described the northeastern frontier as one with, quote, unlimited scope for infiltration,
#
stop quote, and also added, and that might be true to the current day for good reason,
#
but quote, the people inhabiting those oceans have no established loyalty to India, stop
#
But leaving aside what Patel kind of feels about it, you know, what does this takeover
#
of Tibet kind of shake the relationships and how do they then, you know, those border disputes
#
are still sort of being discussed?
#
How does all of that proceed for the rest of that decade up to 1959 when of course it
#
So I have a very brief point of note here and then Hamsini can take over.
#
But with respect to Tibet, I think China felt that India was interfering within its sovereign
#
territory and that was not acceptable, whereas India didn't view it that way.
#
Yeah, I think what Shivani has pointed out is very important, you know, the way I think
#
about the 1950s often is that, you know, we sort of celebrated with, you know, the non-Lenin
#
movement and Panchil and everything that Shivani talked about and there was this real sense
#
of feeling that here are these two countries that are very similar and facing challenges
#
and could possibly lead the third world, right?
#
And something that I came across in some of my readings recently is statistical exchanges
#
between India and China, for example.
#
The Chinese rejected a lot of statistics as a discipline that took place and they said
#
that there was a need for socialist statistics to come about and things like that.
#
It's very, very fascinating.
#
Arnab Ghosh has a book called Making It Count and I had a podcast episode with him recently
#
and he was talking about how during the 1950s, you even had some Chinese statisticians come
#
over and train with P.C.
#
Mahal Nobis was invited by Zhou Enlai to go to China and deliver lectures and that was
#
something that you didn't really see particularly at that period of time.
#
These exchanges that are happening very under the radar, that are very technical, but still
#
count rather than these big picture things that we think of otherwise.
#
Moving on to Tibet and I think Shivani raised again a very, very pertinent point, which
#
is that the Chinese saw it as interference within their internal affairs, whereas the
#
Indians perceived it differently.
#
And the Indians perceived it differently because even the 13th Dalai Lama, the Dalai Lama before
#
the present one, had served out a period of his exile in India.
#
And so there was a lot of exchanges that were happening between the Tibetans and the Indians.
#
And Nehru had met the 14th Dalai Lama in Beijing and the 14th Dalai Lama, I think, had come
#
down for Buddha Jayanti celebrations or something like that a year before he fled.
#
And so the takeover of Tibet was something that was seen as a natural part of Chinese
#
history and it still continued to be seen in that manner.
#
But this was definitely sort of a pivotal point in the relationship because China was
#
convinced of India's role in aiding Tibetan rebels in that there were covert CIA operations
#
that were happening in Sikkim and all of this was part of the giant imperialist plot.
#
And I think this also may have hardened the Chinese stance on the border.
#
So let's kind of get to the subject which Indians like to avoid unless they are Indians
#
who don't like Nehru in which case they keep coming back to it.
#
But leading up to sort of the 1962 war and before that you have things kind of beginning
#
to fall apart in 1959 and 1959 seems to me in some ways to almost be similar to modern
#
times where there almost seems to be this naive expectation from the Indian side that
#
nothing will really happen at the border and it's cool and we are all chill and then suddenly
#
there are these attacks and Indian soldiers die and it's like what's going on.
#
And take me through sort of what are the issues there, why do those skirmishes happen, how
#
are the Indians looking at China at that point in time and the Chinese as you guys mentioned
#
obviously are suspicious because they are just worried that India will continue the
#
imperialism of their predecessor colonial powers so to say.
#
So I can get into what happened and I think before you dive into 1959 Amit, I think it's
#
important to go to 1957 and what happens in 1957 is that China constructs a highway from
#
Xinjiang to Tibet all the way to Lhasa and this cuts across Aksai Chin and this really
#
surprised the Indians because they hadn't imagined that a project like this could have
#
At that point in time the highway was still sort of calistones, right, it's not a six
#
way lane in which we imagine highways today but this was still a road through a boundary
#
that the Indians considered disputed and therefore this also steered the Indian stance on taking
#
a harsher line to the border.
#
And so you have two clashes in 1959, one in what we used to call the North East Frontier
#
region, the Arunachal Pradesh or Nefa and one in Ladakh which is still disputed.
#
And so what happens with the fallout of these two clashes is that China offered that both
#
countries fall back by 20 kilometers in Ladakh and they don't violate the Mahmohan Line in
#
So talking about what Hamsini said that the conflict that led to the 62 wars started in
#
the 50s and I would go even further back to say that it started in 1954.
#
This is when India published new maps that included Aksai Chin within the boundaries
#
of India and when it discovered the highway, Nehru sort of called up Cho and Lai and said
#
what's going on and Cho reassured him multiple times that there was an error and that the
#
maps needed revising, there wasn't actually any sort of crossing of the line so to say.
#
And there were multiple conversations around this which also led to an increase in suspicion
#
towards China that Nehru felt.
#
This is also evident in the fact that, in how Nehru sort of tackled China within his
#
office, so Ji Pathasati who was the Indian envoy to China at the time was asked to bypass
#
the defence minister who was Mr Menon at the time and bring in all communications related
#
to China directly to Nehru.
#
Again Nehru, I would sort of call this fog in foreign policy.
#
Fog is actually a strategic studies term where you talk about the uncertainty on the battlefield
#
in times of war but you also see it happening in foreign policy where the leadership is
#
unsure about what the other side is doing, there's information asymmetry and you're
#
not sure who you can trust.
#
The same way Nehru was not sure that the defence minister could be trusted because of his leanings
#
towards the left and he felt that he would be sympathetic to the Chinese so he should
#
be bypassed and that sort of brings us to what Hamsini was saying where the highway
#
was discovered and in 1960, Chuan Lai proposed that India drop the claim to Xi Jinping and
#
if India were to do that, China would withdraw its claim from the North East Frontier Agency.
#
This was not a subtle move on the part of the Chinese and Chao consistently refused
#
to accept the legitimacy of India's territorial claims so it was, I think, a very frustrating
#
round of negotiations between India and China that I think Chao tried so many times, within
#
1960 he visited India four times and the meetings, if you read the transcripts, they go on for
#
hours, so it was an increasingly frustrating process and neither side was willing to sort
#
of back down on its claim.
#
In hindsight, a lot of people argue that Nehru should have taken the deal and all future
#
conflict could have been avoided, 1962 could have definitely been avoided, but I would
#
say that in my understanding of international relations, there are no guarantees.
#
We cannot say that had India taken that deal or made that compromise at that time, we would
#
not be sitting here recording this podcast discussing the exact same things with that
#
So yeah, I mean, you will always be blamed for things that you didn't do, Nehru did not
#
have the political capital at the time to justify taking on the deal, and like I said
#
before, if you are a leader, you want to wake up and still be the leader of the country,
#
so that is a big consideration for any decision that you make.
#
And I'm very pleased at the implication that the recording of this episode is not contingent
#
on random historical events, you know, you were talking about, I have a quote from Cho
#
An Lai where he visited India in April 1960, this was his April trip, as you said, he came
#
a number of times that year, where he says, quote, I have come here to seek a solution
#
and not to repeat arguments, stop quote.
#
So you get a sense of what is going on through his head.
#
And earlier, one of you mentioned that Nehru didn't like him because he was like, this
#
guy is always cheating me.
#
So this is sort of the mutual distrust that is going on.
#
And also, at this time, sort of what the Indians do is they have a strategy which is called,
#
I think, the forward strategy or the forward policy, where, you know, the approach is that
#
whatever is disputed territory, you don't cross that, but you set up Indian outposts
#
over there aggressively so that the Chinese don't come over.
#
And India apparently did that, and I think up to 60, if I remember correctly, 60 outposts
#
And the Chinese viewed it as almost an act of war.
#
It's like, you know, they are creeping closer and closer, and all these areas on either
#
side of whatever those de facto borders are were sort of unoccupied.
#
And why are they setting up so many posts?
#
And that was kind of what sparked the whole thing off.
#
And what sort of interests me, and this is also sort of a subject that is pertinent today
#
and is going to be wherever there is politics, this will be pertinent, is the incentives
#
Whereas, you know, we earlier discussed how Nehru said that, look, I want to wake up tomorrow
#
morning as prime minister, and it is, you know, not going to be possible if I give away
#
Although, and there are stories about how, you know, within the Congress, he was under
#
pressure to do something and to ramp up the sort of the aggression.
#
How much, in your view, does politics drive all of this?
#
And to me, it's, you know, when I look at the incentives of politicians, it's very sort
#
of much easier to understand what the incentives of politicians in India are, like Nehru then
#
or Modi today, that you cannot be seen to back down beyond the point, which is possibly,
#
you know, why Zhou Enlai could have understood that and framed the whole thing differently
#
so that Nehru could have had a face saving way out.
#
And we would still be recording this episode, but he could have had a face saving way out.
#
But I'm sort of a little baffled by what are the incentives on the Chinese side, like what
#
What are Mao's incentives?
#
You know, and today in a question we'll come to much later also in the episode is what
#
are Xi's incentives today, for example, what were whose incentives in the early 2000s where
#
he was, you know, far friendlier.
#
So can you guys shed some light on that?
#
What constituencies are they playing to and what is driving them?
#
So I think there's it's very important to look at China in the 1960s, right?
#
This is right after Mao started his Great Leap Forward, steel is being melted around
#
the country so that it can be poured into industries.
#
And that's what's happening domestically.
#
But this is also the time when there's something called the Ita Incident that happens in Xinjiang,
#
where about 60,000 Kazakhs suddenly flee from Xinjiang.
#
And so the Chinese realized that they really need to start putting up definite boundaries.
#
So the 1960s are a period when China had boundary issues with countries all over.
#
But it managed to at this period of time, 1960 to 1963, 65, settle its boundaries with
#
Pakistan, settle its boundaries with Myanmar.
#
And that's very interesting for me, because when you look at why would China resolve its
#
boundaries with Pakistan and Myanmar, but not with India?
#
And there's this book by M.Taylor Francis called Strong Border Secure Nation.
#
And it's really fascinating.
#
Because what it suggests is that rather than simplifying it as whenever China has been
#
in internal strife, it seek to be more aggressive on the outside is something that we hear even
#
You know, China is going through this covid pandemic needs to deflect and therefore it's
#
But I think what the book argues and what I think makes a lot of sense is that whenever
#
China has faced internal crises, whether it is Tibet or Taiwan or Xinjiang, it's been
#
more open to compromise and cooperation, whereas if it's had external threats or crises, it's
#
been more prone to aggression.
#
So how this would play out in the India Pakistan scenario, for example, is that China was going
#
through the crisis in Tibet, it was going through a crisis in Xinjiang and of course
#
facing off with Taiwan and apart from the Great Leap Forward, which is ongoing.
#
So this is a period of internal strife.
#
And therefore they did not want to have to deal with border wars with the Pakistan border,
#
for example, Pakistan was supposed to have reached out to China during this period of
#
time in the 1960s and the Chinese didn't get back to them.
#
But as soon as the month long border happens with India, they immediately resolve their
#
border differences with Pakistan and with Myanmar.
#
And that's what's interesting for me, because it's not internal crises that's led them
#
to resolve those boundaries.
#
It's sort of the aggression with India.
#
So you can ask, hey, then why did we fight the border war with China?
#
Why didn't Pakistan and Myanmar fight it?
#
And the answer there could be in the forward policy that you had mentioned, Amit.
#
It could be that Mao had perceived this policy as external aggression, coupled with whatever
#
was happening in Tibet, and therefore construing all of this as sort of expansionism that needed
#
That's a quote that's often come, right, and there needs to be taught a lesson is something
#
that Mao supposedly said.
#
And that's seen very clearly in what happened in terms of politics between Mao and Nehru.
#
Just to add a bit of trivia for politics between Mao and Nehru, I read that Mao actually told
#
Nehru that he would like to discuss with him war as a policy instrument.
#
And what were Nehru's thoughts on it, if war became the instrument of statecraft?
#
And this is happening in the backdrop of Tibet and India and China discussing how they need
#
to be responsible Asian powers.
#
So yeah, that is an interesting bit of detail I wanted to add.
#
I think the other important thing, and this is something that Bertil Lindner says, is
#
that it could have sort of been a strategy, whereas, for example, Mao had his disdain
#
for Nehru and this idea of teaching India a lesson, whereas Zhou Enlai was entrusted
#
with keeping India guessing about China's actual intentions.
#
And I think what scholars have said at various points with Zhou is that he genuinely attempted
#
to impress on Nehru that India should meet China halfway.
#
And what's evident with the other countries is that they sort of signaled a willingness
#
And with the Pakistan border, if you look at it, China actually granted them some extra
#
territory and took very little in return.
#
And so that was sort of taken as an example of China's benevolence, you know, and look
#
at how we deal with our smaller neighbors.
#
Most of these deals are made at our own cost, whereas their cost was just that they wanted
#
these borders to be sealed and to not have any loopholes with them.
#
So this could have also been sort of another factor that was dealing in the politics between
#
No, and I want to get a voice track out of the way before I get onto my observations,
#
which is when Mao said we want to teach India a lesson, maybe he recognized how broken our
#
education system is and it still is today.
#
So perhaps Nehru should have let him.
#
But the irony of all this is that if you look at how the alignments are happening, despite
#
all our claims of being non-aligned and all that, if you look at all the alignments, the
#
Chinese in the 50s actually looked at Pakistan with a little bit of suspicion because hey,
#
Pakistan is aligning with the U.S. and it made complete sense for the Soviets, China
#
and India to kind of form a block.
#
And in fact, you know, when the 59s commissions happen and all that, and the Soviets make
#
a statement in favor of India, initially, you know, it's a little bit awkward.
#
And then, you know, Khrushchev and Mao meet and they have some interesting dialogues.
#
And then the moment that Mao really chooses to step up Chinese aggression in 62 is when
#
he knows that hey, U.S. and Soviets are going to be busy because the Cuban crisis is happening.
#
So he's like, OK, they are busy here.
#
Let us bully this kid in sort of our neighborhood.
#
And the other thing that also strikes me is that something that Mao actually articulated
#
and which would not have been a mystery at the time is that China, as far as it came
#
to, you know, South Asia, was not interested in taking territory, as we see even after
#
the 62 war got over and in the offers of you and all, it's not like they wanted to conquer
#
So, you know, what you just said in the context of Pakistan, at the moment, Pakistan agreed
#
to a deal, they actually gave them a little bit of territory, makes sense, even, you know,
#
during the 62 war, their strategy was, OK, we just drive the Indians out and we get back
#
to whatever the de facto line of control was.
#
And then we call a ceasefire and we withdraw.
#
And that was the whole game.
#
So at some levels, you know, to get into that conflict, sort of end up kind of losing and
#
everything that happened seems to me to, you know, constitute a series of self goals.
#
And I am so traumatized by the thought that I need a break and I will share it with both
#
of you and all our listeners.
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That's colors with an OU and make art a part of your life.
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Welcome back to the Seenandian scene.
#
I'm chatting with Hamsini Hariharan and Shivani Mehta on what I realized much to my embarrassment
#
is not Indo-China conflicts because that would involve Cambodia, but Sino-Indian conflicts.
#
Yes, that's completely right.
#
So we are talking about Sino-Indian conflicts and we just finished chatting before the break
#
about the 1962 war, you know, which we basically ended up losing.
#
But the Chinese philosophy was not really to, you know, a colonial one of conquer territory
#
and let us march to Delhi and all of that.
#
But you know, they kind of proved their point, established sort of the lines of control that
#
they wanted and they headed back.
#
Now what's the deal with the aftermath of the war, like one thing which in an Indian
#
context everyone knows is that of course VK Krishnamen and the defense minister was kind
#
of disgraced and he had to quit and all of that happened, which is I think what is known
#
in the Indian popular imagination.
#
But give me a deeper sense of what is the aftermath between both countries?
#
What are you mentioned that there was schools of thought on it?
#
Tell me a little bit about that because I find that fascinating.
#
Sure, I think whenever you're looking at the 1962 war, I didn't really want to get into
#
sort of the specific the war itself because I'm not someone who served in the military
#
and therefore I would not be the best person to speak about it.
#
But I think whenever you talk about the 1962 war, some clear strands really stick out at
#
And the first is that why did the Chinese withdraw in a month?
#
Why didn't they march down to Delhi or why didn't they march down to Assam?
#
And that is something that really came about.
#
The second was this question that how could they construct a highway in 1959 that we spoke
#
How could they rise to such commanding heights across this border?
#
And we didn't even have a clue.
#
So that intelligence failure was something that was repeatedly brought up.
#
And the third was something that military historians still talk about, which is why was
#
offensive air power not used?
#
You know, we had the Indian Air Force, which was possibly one of the best air forces at
#
We had bases, we had aircrafts.
#
So why didn't we use these?
#
So these were major questions that came about.
#
And I think to be fair to the Indian establishment, they did take a lot of them into consideration.
#
There was a clear effort by the Indian government to rehaul intelligence, for example.
#
So this is when it was after the 1962 war that the RNAW, the Research and Analysis Wing,
#
So you had a lot of internal reforms that took place.
#
Now when you think about the war itself, the first question that I asked, which is why
#
did China just withdraw after a month, this is possibly one of the shortest wars that
#
have taken place, is you can look at the Sino-Indian conflict through two major schools of thought.
#
And both of them sort of come down to this report called the Henderson-Brooks-Bhagat
#
And the Henderson-Brooks-Bhagat report is a report written by two Indian Armed Forces
#
officers who were both serving at that point in time.
#
And they'd written this report to sort of point out that the Indian Army had intelligence
#
that they believed that the forward policy that we'd spoken about was erroneous in a
#
And they pointed out clear gaps in the political vision of the border and of the tensions.
#
And so that clear misreading was picked up.
#
And the reason that the Henderson-Brooks-Bhagat report is important is because the report
#
got leaked and it got into the hands of this Australian journalist called Neville Maxwell,
#
who didn't publish the report then.
#
He published parts of the report and then retracted it in 2014 on his website.
#
So before then, the only thing we could do was sort of take his word for it.
#
And what Maxwell essentially did was write a book called India's China War, where he
#
wrote a book along with other voices like Alistair Lamb, who writes his own book.
#
And what these authors essentially argue is that Nehru was wrong.
#
There were all of these glaring gaps in India's foreign policy.
#
Nehru misread the situation.
#
And it is clearly India's fault that they went ahead with the forward policy.
#
And that's why the Chinese sort of struck back.
#
And there's even a very funny anecdote of Joe Enlai and Mao are having sort of a state
#
dinner with I think the Pakistani head of state, yeah, with Zulfikar Ali Bhutto.
#
And Neville Maxwell is there, this is 1971.
#
And what Joe does is he stands up and he calls for a toast.
#
And through his interpreter, he tells Neville Maxwell, he says, Mr. Maxwell, your book has
#
done a service to truth and China has benefited from that, stop quote.
#
So this is something that was immediately rubbish by a lot of Indian analysts, by the
#
Neville Maxwell had sort of a notorious reputation for being this China hand, as did Alistair
#
And to be fair, they raised a lot of pertinent questions that a lot of scholars at that point
#
in time were possibly not able to justify.
#
But I think it's also fair that a lot of criticisms have been leveled against them.
#
In particular, there's a book that Bertel Lindner wrote recently called China's India
#
War, which is a play on Maxwell's book.
#
And Indian authors and Lindner, they systematically refute a lot of the claims that Maxwell and
#
For example, if you remember, in the first half of the podcast, we spoke about sort of
#
this inner Tibet and outer Tibet, right?
#
And that was sort of the basis for the 1914 McMohan Line.
#
Lamb also points out that there was an inner line and an outer line in the Nifa region,
#
And he says the inner line was clearly what was put down by the British, which the inner
#
line still exists in some parts of the Northeast today, which didn't allow mainland Indians
#
in court to go to these regions.
#
And so he says, you know, this inner line itself proved that the Indians did not have
#
control over these regions, that these regions clearly came under South Tibet.
#
And this inner line is supposed to end where the McMohan Line ends, and so on.
#
And these claims are, a lot of them are misguided, a lot of them are just false.
#
So what I would say is that most scholars today, whenever they're talking about the
#
Sino-Indian War, follow one or two of these schools of thought.
#
One believes that India was responsible for the war, that it triggered Chinese aggression
#
through the forward policy.
#
And the second believes that even if the forward policy was put down by Nehru, it was put down
#
because India was triggered by what China was doing in the regions.
#
So this is essentially how people categorize their views.
#
The Maxwell Lamb School of Thought has really influenced the way debate about Sino-Indian
#
relations has been done for a very long time.
#
It's because their books came out in the 1970s.
#
So they were possibly one of the first few authoritarian works that was written.
#
But over the last couple of years, there's been more inquiry into the war.
#
Yeah, so that's basically the two main schools of thought.
#
Yeah, so let me kind of sort of process that and sum that up, and you can tell me if I
#
And this kind of raises a very interesting question, like when you spoke of sort of Maxwell
#
and Lamb being called like China hands, as if they are sort of peddling the China narrative,
#
and they obviously have their own incentives.
#
And I guess all authors will have incentives of some kind or the other.
#
It doesn't mean that a government is necessarily paying them.
#
But in terms of access or where they are based or what are their intellectual communities
#
like and all of that, there will be these incentives.
#
And you pointed out that there are two schools of thought.
#
One is sort of the one which was dominant in the early years.
#
Because I think Maxwell's book, India's China War, came out in 1971.
#
And that's a period you also refer to the fascinating meeting with the Pakistani and
#
And the Chinese obviously had reason to be wary of the Indian because they saw the British
#
as an imperialist colonial power, and they were worried that India, even after independence,
#
would continue along those lines.
#
And Nehru's forward policy sparked off the conflict in which they behaved responsibly.
#
And you're pointing out at the other school of thought, which is something that is finding
#
more voice now among Indian scholars and people like Berlin Lindner, who couldn't think of
#
an entirely different title, he said, uska book tha India's China War, I will be China's
#
Basically, it takes the whole approach of pointing out that, listen, China was doing
#
all of these little things, these border disagreements and so on through the 1950s, that they were
#
They were the one who, you know, took Tibet to begin with, and Nehru was just trying to
#
So it's really not India's fault.
#
You know, this seems to be one of the situations where whichever case you're making, you know,
#
it's not like there is truth out there.
#
You can essentially believe any version of these because we don't know what the main
#
It's quite likely that in certain minds of the players involved, both accounts are completely
#
Nehru may have felt he was entirely justified and, you know, Nehru may have felt what is
#
this guy doing and all of that.
#
So yeah, I'm just kind of thinking aloud and trying to sum up what you said.
#
And given that this is the case, how does then policy towards each other in both these
#
Like I presume the war is over and China is like, okay, these guys were getting too fresh
#
and we taught them a lesson.
#
And for India, it's just a humiliation, but it's okay, Nehru dies a couple of years after
#
and you'd imagine there is some kind of reset and VK Krishnamenon is, you know, consigned
#
So, you know, how do those sort of approaches within both countries domestically evolve
#
When I think about it, I was speaking a little bit about how, you know, structures were overhauled
#
And I think in India since 62, we continue to have this insecurity about China.
#
I think it's just something that we have never gotten over, this sort of national humiliation,
#
you know, in a month they were able to completely override us.
#
And I think you continue to have those narratives today when we talk about India and China's
#
relationships, you know, there's a lot that's written about how Nehru died a heartbroken
#
man and you could see that this clearly had an effect on his health.
#
And I think, you know, the war really left a lasting impression on India's narratives
#
and the way it saw itself as a country.
#
But I think more tangibly, you know, barely months after China and Pakistan reached their
#
first border agreement in a year, they completely finalized their border, which was something
#
that India was very angry about.
#
And then in 1965, India and Pakistan fight another war.
#
And this is the time where there is a real fear that India would be fighting a two front
#
And this is particularly true of Sikkim, Sikkim was at this point in time still independent
#
So there are reports that when the war with Pakistan was really beginning to heat up,
#
the Chinese government sent a note asking India to vacate from some of these posts that
#
it had occupied along the border between Sikkim and China.
#
And the Indians were rather perplexed because they didn't really occupy anything.
#
So at that point in time, the governor said, you know what, just ignore the note, don't
#
But the note was an ultimatum in that sense.
#
It was saying, you know, if you don't vacate in three days, then we will attack.
#
And what essentially happened was that India ignored the note, nothing came of it.
#
And then the Chinese, I think at the end of three days said, oh, thank you for vacating
#
the land that you occupied.
#
You know, so but that really drove the fear that what would India do if it was faced with
#
a threat, both in its eastern as well as its western sectors.
#
And this is when India really started looking at how it was going to deal with threats along
#
Something else that's also happening internally is you have to remember that the Northeast,
#
as it looks right now, it's still not very much in sort of the Indians imagination.
#
But it was even less at that point in time.
#
What happened was that the Chinese began to aid Naga rebels and more than about 700 rebels
#
were actually trained in Yunnan and provided with guns.
#
And this also happens with Manipuri revolutionaries, Meso rebels, a lot of them get training and
#
Before we get into that in detail, I think that a couple of other things that I want
#
One is the Communist Party in India, the left took a huge sort of ideological beating in
#
And the CPI split after 1962.
#
And that's when you know, you have the CPI Marxists being formed.
#
And this is because the CPI largely condemns the war, Krishna Menon was essentially a part
#
And the CPI continues to condemn the 1962 war, whereas the CPI M essentially saw the
#
war as a fight between, you know, the socialists and the capitalists, China being the socialists,
#
us being the capitalists.
#
So they were on the Chinese side, they were on the Chinese side.
#
And after this, you know, you have people like Karu Sanyal and others traveling to Nepal
#
and finally going to Beijing, where they meet Mao and were promised men in arms.
#
So you have that thread that eventually comes out to play.
#
The other thing that happens is, you mentioned Krishna Menon, you also have a lot of army
#
officers who go into early retirement, you know, the chief of army staff, the chief of
#
So a lot of them, even if they weren't directly responsible for things that happened, still
#
saw a lot of heads rolling.
#
So just adding to what Hamsini was saying about the humiliation that India faced, particularly
#
in Heru after the 1962 war, this was something that Indira Gandhi, when she became Prime
#
Minister of India, knew she wanted to fix.
#
She wanted to redeem the image of her father and also redeem the image of the humiliation
#
that the Prime Minister's office itself had suffered in the country.
#
And it can be argued that she was open to dialogue with China about the territorial
#
So while, you know, like Hamsini was saying, there was a lot of argument about who was
#
right on either side, there was this very small window in 1970, when both India and
#
China were open to dialogue, but they kind of just missed each other multiple times.
#
And this starts with on the 30th of April, 1970, the day before China celebrates May
#
Day, there was a display of fireworks.
#
Now, remember, at this point, diplomatic relations between both countries have completely broken
#
Ambassadors have been called back.
#
So there is no formal sort of representation.
#
But there is an Indian representative in British Mishra who's at this display of fireworks.
#
And during the meet and greet, he's approached by Mao, who says, we cannot keep quarreling
#
Let us try and be friends.
#
And this is seen as an enthusiastic sort of move that China is making.
#
Mao tells British Mishra to convey this message to the Prime Minister, which he says that,
#
you know, this is the time we can sort of resume dialogue.
#
And so both sides are open to it, the sort of conditions in China, which is undergoing
#
the Cultural Revolution, as Hamzani had pointed out, also would have made negotiations easier
#
because of the domestic conditions in China, and there was some sort of civil unrest amongst
#
the left in China itself.
#
So the negotiation could have been favorable for India.
#
But there is a delay in response from the Indian side.
#
And Sudhir Kulkarni has a two part series in the wire about the events that lead up
#
to the 71 Bangladesh Liberation War and sort of explains the entire dynamic.
#
So I would recommend people reading that.
#
But the reason there is a delay in replying from the Indian side is because, again, what
#
Hamzani pointed out, there is division between the CPI in India, and one side is seen favoring
#
China, therefore being anti government and anti Indira Gandhi, which did not please the
#
And second, there was a rising insecurity towards Pakistan.
#
So we see a distinct shift between Nehru and Indira Gandhi, where Nehru was trying to be
#
the peacemaker and trying to bring in the aspirations of all Asian powers and achieve
#
But Indira Gandhi becomes more regional.
#
She's driven by securing regional security.
#
And a lot of her actions and her foreign policy is driven by that motivation.
#
So there is some sort of a distraction with Pakistan and how that is going to be handled.
#
At the same time, and this one here is really exciting for an international relations scholar,
#
because you have a lot of players getting involved slowly.
#
So this is a time that United States realizes it has a chance to rebuild its relationship
#
So you have President Nixon and NSA Kissinger arranging a meeting with China, which is, you
#
know, a sort of secretive meeting and it's aided by Pakistan.
#
So Pakistan is also involved.
#
And what is argued is that the window that India had is sort of grabbed by the US.
#
And Nixon is able to sort of reestablish relationships with China because Pakistan helped the United
#
India is unhappy and therefore turns to the Soviet Union, signs the Treaty of Peace and
#
Friendship as a security from Pakistan, which China in turn views as an anti-China move.
#
So a lot of things happen in that really short period and of course, then you have the Pakistan,
#
Bangladesh Liberation War, which again takes a toll on the country and that window sort
#
Yeah, and I had a fascinating episode on that year.
#
I mean, basically the Bangladesh war with Srinath Raghavan.
#
But you know, we spoke about the events of that year and how, if I remember correctly,
#
Kissinger makes a secret trip to China and he pretends he is visiting Pakistan, but he
#
you know, flies down to China and today they could just, you know, chat on WeChat or something
#
and say what they have to say while every other country watches on because they've hacked
#
But let me also then sort of take a lateral detour and I'll come back to Indira Gandhi
#
and what her policy was like and those very interesting years and what happened in the
#
aftermath of that and I also briefly want to talk about Sikkim.
#
But just to take a lateral detour at the same time, you know, India's popular imagination
#
is both shaped by and reflected in Bollywood to a certain extent, right, or, you know,
#
other regional cinema and all that.
#
And I found that, you know, popular culture often acts as a barometer of what people think
#
and feel in the culture.
#
So Shivani, tell me a little bit about, you know, how was China looked at in the Indian
#
Like even today, you know, Indians are very xenophobic towards the Chinese.
#
So what were sort of attitudes like, how were they evolving?
#
You know, that there was also this Hindi chini bhai bhai stuff that had kind of happened.
#
Give me some gop on that.
#
So Bollywood presents a very interesting case to understand Naifman's sentiment.
#
I should say that I haven't been exposed to regional cinema, so I can't speak for what's
#
If anyone has recommendations on what I would watch, please let me know.
#
But speaking about Bollywood, so in the 50s, cinema felt or Hindi cinema, there was a lot
#
of social responsibility in the film.
#
You had Guru Datt's Pyaasa, which was a critique of a materialistic society.
#
The same year you had Mother India, which was, you know, the Indian nation state as
#
it existed in the villages.
#
And then you also had B R Chopra's Naya Daur, which was, you know, a salutation to
#
So there's a lot of celebration of the birth of India, the growth of India, and you know,
#
the aspirations that India has.
#
With the 62 war, you see a departure from social responsibility and move towards escapist
#
So you have films like Teesri Manzil, The Jewel Thief, Guide and Vat, that come in the
#
60s, which are just purely for entertainment, their thrillers, their dramas, their romance.
#
Films are being shot in foreign locations, and it's just pure entertainment value.
#
The only movie about the 1962 war, which you quoted, is Hakikat, that came out two years
#
And this movie is also being, it over sympathizes with the Indian side.
#
It tries to, you know, sort of bring down the humiliation that India felt and, you know,
#
bring up the loss of life of soldiers and things like that.
#
But I should point out that it does not villainize the Chinese.
#
So it is only looking at the Indian point of view, what happened with the soldiers goes
#
into the personal lives of some of the characters, but there is no villainization of the Chinese
#
It was just a war that went wrong.
#
And yeah, after that, the few films about India, so I think you had Shaheed, which was
#
based on the life of Bhagat Singh that came in 1965, but that's again, pre-independence.
#
So again, going back to that freedom, notion of freedom struggle and stuff, but nothing
#
really touches upon Indian society till you have the angry young man making an appearance
#
So it's almost like, you know, it was just a dark moment and we choose to blot it out
#
of the collective imagination and pretend it never happened because, you know, it's
#
much easier to sort of like the constant sort of nationalistic trope that has happened in
#
the decades since is, you know, where you show Pakistanis as a villain and you're fighting
#
the ISI and Sunny Deol is going to the border with a big gun and saving all of us.
#
But China is just something that we choose to sort of not think about because, hey, look
#
Let's get back to the politics.
#
I mean, as you guys would know, I am no fan of Indira Gandhi for all the things she did
#
in the domestic sphere.
#
But at the same time, as far as her geopolitical sort of acumen was concerned, she seems to
#
have kind of done a much better job, one in the way she handled the Bangladesh war.
#
And if I'm not mistaken, and Hamsini maybe you can sort of elaborate on this, she also
#
seems to have moved away from Nehru's mistaken idealism and actually taken a much more hard
#
nose realistic view of what one realist view rather of what one needed to do in the in
#
So tell me a little bit about that.
#
I mean, and also, you know, one thing that kind of intrigues me is today, of course,
#
there is a lot of talk and I've had episodes in this as well about how sort of China and
#
you know, the worry of between China and Pakistan kind of getting close together and how that's
#
And there was recent talk that, you know, when Nepal cocked a snook at us, it's because,
#
you know, they've been emboldened by China kind of getting there.
#
Were these worries back then, you know, in the 70s and 80s?
#
So this sort of take me through a bit of that period.
#
Amit, just something that I wanted to just briefly go up on before we get into the 1970s
#
is that in the 1960s, one important thing happens, which is another sort of clash between
#
And this happens in 67, a little before the 70s and the Bangladesh war and all of that.
#
And the reason why it's important is because accepting the current crisis at Kalwa, that
#
was the last crisis where India lost men across the line of actual control.
#
So what actually happens in 1967 is there's still not a lot of scholarship that's done
#
There's a new book by Prabhol Das Gupta called Watershed 1967.
#
So what essentially happens in 1967 is that you have the two passes in Sikkim, Chola and
#
Attula, where we were afraid that the Chinese would also fight against in 65.
#
The Indians decided to fence that border.
#
And while they were fencing the border, often there were Chinese troops that came about
#
saying that you can't fence this border because you're in our territory.
#
And in one of those scuffles, there were both Indian and Chinese lives lost.
#
As a scholar, I will say that objectively, we don't have a number, an exact number of
#
lives that were lost during that point in time.
#
The lowest numbers put it at 30 on the Chinese side and 60 on the Indian side and the highest
#
numbers put it on 350 on the Chinese side.
#
So that is something that we need to keep an open mind towards.
#
But these clashes did happen.
#
And the other thing that sort of came out of it, which Shivani referred to when she
#
was talking about Indira Gandhi, the reason we didn't have any ambassadors present in
#
China is because in 67, in the same year, two Indian embassy officials were accused
#
by the Chinese of spying.
#
And so they were beaten by the Red Guards.
#
They were publicly humiliated and they were eventually, you know, the Indian embassy was
#
supposedly under siege for days with people standing outside clamoring to get in and other
#
embassies tried to send in, you know, supplies and but they couldn't get through.
#
And then when the Indians heard of it, the exact same thing happened here.
#
The Chinese ambassadors were beaten up.
#
They were and essentially all of them were deported and became sort of like persona non
#
And that is one of the reasons why relations started even more.
#
And when Indira Gandhi comes into office, that's sort of, you know, the last exchange
#
that India and China have had on an ambassadorial level.
#
I think I agree with you.
#
I am not a big fan of what Indira Gandhi's policies were domestically.
#
But on a foreign policy landscape, she dealt with a lot of challenges that India was facing
#
very, very well, the Bangladesh war, which you have spoken about in detail for one.
#
I think the other was from then on, this prevailing worry that India would lose its neighborhood.
#
And why the Indira Gandhi government onwards were afraid of this is because, as I mentioned,
#
the Chinese were providing resources to rebel groups.
#
At one point in time, there was this idea that a red corridor would be formed, right,
#
when like the next like movement was coming to the fore, that it would go through India,
#
go through Nepal, and finally go to China.
#
And this was sort of the revolution spreading to all across the world.
#
But I think Indira Gandhi was, and this is sort of one of the great things about studying
#
the foreign policy about that period, is that, you know, in 1976, both countries exchanged
#
ambassadors for the first time.
#
And you know what happens immediately, the emergency, so nothing else happened.
#
And so Indira Gandhi didn't really have any other contact with the Chinese while she was
#
When the Janka government comes in for a very brief period, what happens is that Vajpayee
#
visits Beijing, but he had to cut his trip short because he was protesting the Chinese
#
And then you move forward, Indira Gandhi comes back to power.
#
And the main issue then doesn't turn out to be the border.
#
It doesn't turn out to be, you know, relations in the neighborhood.
#
It's very odd, but from what I can read, the main issues at that point in time was that
#
in Indochina, there was the war between Vietnam and Cambodia.
#
And in Cambodia, you had the Khmer Rouge, who the Chinese were backing.
#
And you had the People's Republic of Kampuche, which was Vietnamese backed.
#
And the main issue between India and China was supposedly the Indian government's recognition
#
of the People's Republic of Kampuche.
#
And that became a huge issue for some reason.
#
And that was the sort of roadblock between relations.
#
So adding to what Hamsini was saying about Indira Gandhi's foreign policy, it's the first
#
time we see a departure from non-alignment because Indira Gandhi, like you said, was
#
more of a realist than her father was.
#
And there was an inclination towards balance of power politics.
#
And she also displayed a greater willingness to use coercive tactics and force.
#
But the challenge that, you know, the Indian government faced during the 70s is that there
#
Governments were coming and going very quickly.
#
And there was a lot of domestic disturbance that it had to cope with, because of which,
#
as Hamsini was saying, you would establish contact with the Chinese, but you wouldn't
#
be able to engage with China because something else would happen.
#
And Hamsini, I also want you to sort of briefly mention on what happened in Sikkim, significant
#
Just bring me up to speed on that.
#
And also just sort of another point I'd like you to clarify, which is, you know, when we
#
use the term the line of actual control, and there is sort of in the popular imagination
#
a border is one line, right?
#
And on one side you have the Indians and on the other side you have the Chinese.
#
But actually there is no line in the sense that, you know, both countries are quite clear
#
about what territory definitely belongs to them.
#
But there is also a sort of no man's land in between where there is, you know, much
#
ambiguity and uncertainty and a lot of action happens on that no man's land, like allegedly
#
in 67 or recently what happened in Galwan, which is why, you know, you could actually
#
have a conflict on territory that was not Chinese territory, but at the same time, the
#
prime minister wasn't entirely wrong when he said they haven't come into our territory.
#
It was sort of like a kind of a buffer zone.
#
Is that understanding broadly correct?
#
Yeah, Amit, I'm not, again, as I said, like a military specialist, but I think that is
#
a good way to sum up the line of actual control.
#
You know, as much as we like to imagine, you know, maps in our heads and you have the specific
#
thing that separates India from China, that's not exactly true.
#
You know, in 1962, the Chinese, you know, swept into India and then they drew back to
#
what they believed was the line that was supposed to be the border between India and China.
#
And we there have been a lot of border talks and stuff that I can get into, which were
#
And there is this sort of agreement that these are the Indian and Chinese positions and you
#
keep a couple of sometimes less than a couple of kilometers in between that neither side
#
And this is essentially the problem, even with the clashes that happened this year.
#
Therefore, this fundamental misunderstanding about knowing what the border actually is.
#
I remember reading some reports about this crisis talking about, oh, does China refer
#
to the border as what it had captured in 1962?
#
Because if that's the definition of the border that it's going by, then it's going to be
#
So that's one of the main problems, the line of actual control, unlike the LOC, the border
#
with Pakistan, which is fenced, which for the most part is clearly demarcated, the LAC
#
So during the 1970s, as Shivani had spoken about, there was a lot of worry about neighborhood
#
There was also, you know, personal anxiety about from Indira Gandhi's end about instability
#
And this is where Sikkim becomes really interesting because Sikkim was this independent kingdom
#
and it was independent the same way Bhutan was independent.
#
So Sikkim and Bhutan both had treaties with India where India said, you know, it would
#
advise these governments on external affairs and so on, which India continues to do for
#
Whereas what happened with Sikkim is that the Chokyal or the leader of the Sikkim kingdom
#
married an American and there was a lot of vitriol directed towards her, particularly
#
A lot of people said, you know, she was a CIA spy and she was, you know, influencing
#
the kingdom to go against India.
#
And you know, we won't know if that's true just because, you know, she's a woman and
#
in a powerful position or if she was actually a CIA spy.
#
But that's not really the point, right?
#
The point is that you were suddenly dealing with an other problem on this front.
#
And this is a front where you've already had a clash with just in 67.
#
So I did an episode on states of anarchy with a scholar called Deep Pal recently.
#
And we were talking about this and what I was essentially asking him was, you know,
#
why did Sikkim get annexed by the Indian kingdom?
#
And why didn't Bhutan, you know, why was there sort of a disparity between Indian foreign
#
policy towards the two?
#
And what he says, which I think makes a lot of sense, is that this fits into the Sikkimese
#
imagination of India's perception towards itself, towards India, as well as of Sikkim.
#
So I'm going to break that down a little bit.
#
Essentially, what that means is that India had a perception of itself as a country.
#
And it perceived Bhutan and Sikkim into fitting into that imagination in a particular way.
#
Bhutanese army officers, for example, were trained in India, Bhutan fell in line with
#
a lot of things that India wanted, India in return gave it military aid and continues
#
to give it military aid.
#
Sikkim, on the other hand, was starting to show a lot of signs of wanting more.
#
And India was afraid that this was going to have to be yet another border that they would
#
And that was not really something that they could deal with.
#
There are a lot of books that are written about the annexation of Sikkim alone.
#
But I think one of the reasons why Sikkim was incorporated into the Indian Union was
#
definitely its place on the border between India and China.
#
How did China react to that?
#
China did protest because it saw this as sort of a unilateral move by India.
#
And for years, China didn't really recognize that Sikkim was a part of India.
#
So that was something that was part of relations.
#
Imagine that it reacted the same way that it would if Ladakh was made a Union territory.
#
So that's sort of the same pitch of the reaction that India is unilaterally changing borders
#
and unilaterally changing the status quo.
#
So that's something that's very important that happens in the 1970s.
#
As you sort of move towards the 80s, even under Indira Gandhi, you have sort of the
#
first visit of the Chinese foreign minister in 1981.
#
And then you have five rounds of border talks.
#
And these are important because 20 years after the original crisis is when both countries
#
begin to agree that they actually have a problem on their hands.
#
And they both took very different views to it.
#
China wanted to shelve the border issue and it wanted to focus on other things like trade.
#
And India wanted to resolve the border issue first.
#
So the other thing that was important to note in these border talks is that India wanted
#
a sector by sector approach, which China really didn't want.
#
What a sector by sector approach essentially is, is that the Indian border, the LAC in
#
the Indian imagination is divided into three bits.
#
You have the eastern sector, which is at natural Pradesh and Sikkim.
#
You have the central sector, which is sort of near the border of Nepal, all the way to
#
where the Siddhi Valley of Himachal Pradesh is.
#
And then you have the western sector, which is Ladakh.
#
So what India wanted was to say, hey, let's talk about where you think the border is on
#
the eastern sector and where we think the border is in the eastern sector.
#
And we can look at it from that point of view.
#
The Chinese, on the other hand, wanted a quid pro quo.
#
They said, no, Akshay Chen is ours, Tawang Nefa is yours.
#
And we will agree to that.
#
We will not agree to a sector by sector approach.
#
And this is something that really held up border talks for a couple of years.
#
So just moving ahead to what happens with Rajiv Gandhi essentially is that I think you
#
have to remember that the 1980s in both India and China are very, very important, right?
#
China for the first time liberalizes its economy.
#
You have Deng Xiaoping who comes up and says, you know, it doesn't matter if a cat is black
#
or white as long as it chases the mice.
#
And China really wants to set aside its ideological biases that it had been carrying forward for
#
the first 20 years in its foreign policy.
#
And you see this in a lot of reflected in all of Chinese foreign policy.
#
Actually, the 1980s is a really interesting time to study in China.
#
And India is also sort of the stirrings of liberalization, if I might call it that.
#
But I think a couple of important things also happened during this time.
#
And the first is in 1986, Arunachal Pradesh was granted full statehood.
#
And this was something that really pissed the Chinese off because it was India unilaterally
#
In 1986, you have clashes along the Sundaram Chu, which is basically military exercises
#
of India in Arunachal Pradesh, which finally lead to escalation.
#
People don't really lose lives, both sides manage to de-escalate the issue and then go
#
back to their respective sides of the border.
#
But this crisis essentially turns the tide in India-China relations, because after this
#
is when Andy Tiwari suggests that India and China expand cooperation in other fields like
#
it's a completely new idea.
#
And this is when the Chinese finally, supposedly understood for the first time since 62, that
#
the Indians didn't go to vote.
#
So until this time, the Chinese claim that they didn't really get a sense that the Indians
#
wanted peace along the border, they only understood that Indians were being extremely aggressive
#
So finally, a year later, Rajiv Gandhi goes to China.
#
And this trip is the first time in 30 odd years that an Indian head of state has visited
#
So this is an important moment in India-China relations.
#
But Rajiv Gandhi faces a lot of criticism for it within India.
#
And this is because a lot of people point out that he was the one who recognized that
#
Tibet was a part of China, but he did this unilaterally.
#
The Chinese didn't really offer anything in return.
#
They didn't recognize Sikkim, they didn't recognize Arunachal Pradesh.
#
And so Rajiv Gandhi was really criticized at that point in time by the opposition that
#
he was giving away a lot of the Indians standing on the issue.
#
So a sort of a couple of thoughts, one is I'll actually object to your characterization
#
of those years as the early years of liberalization because I do, I think that's a post-facto
#
narrative that people are trying to give the family some credit for the good that came
#
out of liberalization and I am not sure how much truth there is to that.
#
But quite apart from that, what I sort of kind of see happening is that one obviously
#
den moving towards more of a market economy within China also signals a fundamental mindset
#
shift which impacts everything, not just economics locally, but also foreign policy because a
#
mindset shift is one of positive some growth where you trade and everybody benefits and
#
And it seems to me that that approach starts showing off in other domains as well, possibly.
#
One, would you agree with that, is that true?
#
And true, with India, there is an increase of assertiveness in the region, for example,
#
the nonsense that Rajiv Gandhi gets up to in Sri Lanka, for example, and does that sort
#
of play a part where they are trying to balance China's influence and how is the thinking
#
developing on the respective roles of the two countries within South Asia at this point
#
I would sort of object to your saying that the moving towards market economy is a fundamental
#
shift for the same reason why you object that I call it stirrings of liberalization, right?
#
Because China also, you know, now when we look back, we look at it as this one long
#
But at that point in time, it was just the end of the Cultural Revolution, it was the
#
fall of, you know, the fall, and therefore people were also really scared to experiment.
#
No one knew if anything that was going to happen in China was going to continue for
#
or forget a long period of time for even a short period of time, right?
#
So there is this shift that occurs, but I would say it occurs in the latter half of
#
the 1980s rather than the first half, because the Chinese government at that point in time
#
also starts only with policy experimentation, it doesn't do these big sweeping reforms
#
that it now claims that it's done, you know, and we can argue about this till the cows
#
come home, there are different views about this, but at least my take on this is that
#
the shifts in foreign policy, the shifts in the economy are still small, there is a marked
#
difference in what happened earlier, which is, you know, a personality cult driven, ideologically
#
minded foreign policy, which essentially looked at expanding, you know, the revolution across
#
I think what China wanted by this point in time was to not open up those are at the end
#
of the day, not the words that they use, but they wanted to focus on improving the quality
#
of life, they wanted to focus on just becoming richer.
#
And the way the only way that they could see this happening was to have some semblance
#
of stability in the economy.
#
And you can't have any semblance of stability in the economy if your foreign policy is constantly
#
denouncing other countries or getting into tips with them.
#
The other thing I think we need to remember with respect to your second question, you
#
know, about whether there's an increase in assertiveness in the region.
#
I think it's important to remember that during this time, particularly in the late 1980s,
#
there's a lot of worry about the Soviet Union because Gorbachev had made some speeches about
#
Glasnost and Perestroika, but it was still difficult to read those signals.
#
No one knew that the Soviet Union was going to fall at this point in time.
#
But I think at least from what I've read is that Rajiv Gandhi wanted to also diversify
#
And when I mean him, I don't mean him as a person, but rather the foreign policy administration
#
that he was commanding is that the establishment at that point in time wanted to go ahead with
#
non-alignment and realize that if they would lose the Soviet Union, then they needed to
#
be on better terms with the Chinese because that balance that Shivani had mentioned a
#
couple of years ago would be lost otherwise.
#
What do you think Shivani?
#
You're absolutely right.
#
I think India was aware of the association that it had with the Soviet Union, had a negative
#
impact on India's image because of the Soviet Union's involvement in Afghanistan.
#
And it wanted to sort of keep Soviet Union at a distance.
#
And that's why in the 80s, you see there's a push to sort of build relationships with
#
But most of the energies went towards the Indian subcontinent.
#
So you have Pakistan, Sri Lanka, like Amit pointed out, as well as Nepal.
#
And that's what's occupying most of the time for the Ministry of External Affairs.
#
And Shivani, I'll turn to you now as we kind of take the narrative forward.
#
But before that, we'll take the narrative back briefly.
#
My sense of the sort of when the economics of China kind of started shifting is also,
#
you know, the late 70s was an important time where they made a move away from collectivist
#
farming and a slightly deeper recognition of property rights at that level.
#
But I mean, leave that aside, it's obviously a process which takes many years.
#
So Shivani kind of like moving forward and coming all the way to sort of eventually to
#
the 2000s and Hu Jintao.
#
And China's really changing through this period.
#
And equally, their foreign policy is really changing.
#
And these shifts are really interesting.
#
The shift to sort of Hu's approach towards foreign policy and the world in general and,
#
you know, how he internally looks at China, and then later, the much more aggressive authoritarian
#
tone that she has taken since.
#
So you know, so take me through this sort of historical shift and what's happening here.
#
So in the last 20 years, a lot has changed.
#
But if we go back to the 2000s, at this time, Deng's philosophy of hide your capabilities
#
and bide your time is still very important for Chinese foreign policy.
#
Beijing has made a pragmatic accommodations and is learning to live with the hegemon, which
#
And so policy adjustments are made according to this reality.
#
What happens in 2001 is 9-11, US is now concentrating all of its efforts to against international
#
terrorism, it becomes obsessed with Iraq, and this gives China somewhat of a window
#
to start being assertive, and to be a little more vocal about its interests, which it hadn't
#
been doing so far, at least internationally.
#
And you know, China uses the 2000s to signal its intent as a rising power.
#
And what are these aspirations?
#
The Chinese leadership slowly includes more and more controversial issues and expands
#
this list of China's core interests.
#
So the pursuit of foreign policy becomes this, we are just China is just pursuing its core
#
interests, and it becomes a little more assertive, so you have the South China Sea being mentioned,
#
territorial disputes with Japan coming, being mentioned, there are certain things being
#
talked about with the Southeast Asian countries, etc.
#
And so China is growing increasingly confident.
#
And unfortunately for China, there's a moment of frustration with the 2008 economic meltdown.
#
So after the 2008 economic meltdown, China has to calibrate all of its efforts and ensure
#
the socio-economic makeup of China is not damaged significantly.
#
And suddenly it has to sort of balance wanting to be a great power, but also, you know, being
#
responsible for towards its domestic audience.
#
So it's in this, under Wu Jintao, China is in this middle state where it wants to, you
#
know, eat at the table with the big kids, it's ready to do that.
#
But also there's a lot of stuff happening back home that it needs to pay attention to.
#
And there are questions about whether China is ready to be to take on the responsibilities
#
of being a world power.
#
And it's interesting that, you know, you referred to those years as a middle state, you know,
#
the middle state of the Middle Kingdom, that could be the title of your first book.
#
And that also then seems to indicate that there is a transition happening here, that
#
you have China, which is kind of, it's a rising power, it's asserting itself, it's looking
#
at, you know, itself vis-a-vis the US.
#
And then gradually what happens is you have the 2008 shift and China is, you know, you
#
know, telling the US that, you know, what the hell we were following you and, you know,
#
what is this that you've done?
#
And then under Xi, you have this sort of a much greater assertiveness where, like, would
#
it be fair to say then that this is no longer a middle state?
#
Now China has said that, okay, we have arrived and we are going to compete with everybody
#
and we are going to cocker-snook at you and, you know, we are taking a place.
#
Is it fair to say that that's the change in approach that has happened?
#
So one of the things that changed with Xi coming to power is earlier, while China was
#
being assertive, there was not a very strong link between its global power aspirations
#
and what it was doing towards achieving them.
#
That's what Xi has been able to do very successfully.
#
And there's a very decisive leadership style that he follows.
#
And also, like, when you think of Xi coming to power, the first few things that come to
#
your mind are the anti-corruption campaign that he ran, President for Life.
#
But there has been a very calculated and gradual move that has been facilitated by events that
#
took place in the 2000s, which are allowing Xi to sort of reap the benefits of an assertive
#
China in the international stage.
#
Robert Blackwell and Kurt Campbell, when they write about Xi's foreign policy, say that
#
one of the things that make him different or this foreign policy different is this phase
#
of foreign policy different is Xi's willingness to use every instrument of statecraft, from
#
military assets to geoeconomic intimidation, as well as economic rewards, which we see
#
in the form of the Belt and Road Initiative, to pursue the geopolitical objectives that
#
And I would also like to point out that Xi's policies exhibit a continuity.
#
So a lot of scholars argue that this is new and it's different, yes, but it's not new.
#
It's just an increase in assertiveness on, say, territorial matters and in the East China
#
Sea and South China Sea.
#
But Deng's hide your capabilities and bide your time have naturally expired now.
#
This is the right moment.
#
Xi happens to be in the moment.
#
If there was anyone else, the results would probably have been the same.
#
Yeah, so that kind of repudiating the great man theory of history and saying that this
#
is how foreign policy and geopolitics was evolving anyway.
#
And what's also interesting in the last few years is that just in terms of coherence of
#
geopolitical policy, America has completely fallen apart with Trump at the helm.
#
And you have all these insane trade wars, which would have been unforeseeable, I think,
#
years ago, because they just make absolutely no sense.
#
It's a negative sum game against the world.
#
And at the same time, it seems to me that what China has done is very focused, very
#
cogent in terms of the Belt and Road, which in fact, I'll ask you to kind of expand on
#
because it seems to me to be a very good sort of illustration of how they are using their
#
economic power to enhance their standing in the world and their influence over other countries.
#
So tell me a little bit about Belt and Road and what's happening there.
#
And it also seems to me and tell me if you guys agree with it, that, you know, Indian
#
foreign policy towards China doesn't or towards the region doesn't seem to have any of the
#
same cogency where, you know, we are following the reflexive patterns of the past, in a sense
#
and doing the same old, same old, while China actually has like a focused vision on how
#
to deal with the region and how to deal with India.
#
Hamsari, would you say that that's?
#
OK, this is a couple of different things at play, right?
#
What I wanted to point out earlier to you, Amit, is that you talked about how US foreign
#
policy with Trump at the helm seems to be falling apart.
#
And I think one important thing in what Shibani was talking about is also other countries'
#
reactions to China, right?
#
And Hu Jintao and like much of Chinese foreign policy in the 2000s is devoted in telling
#
people that China is going to rise peacefully, that China is not a hegemonic power like the
#
United States or any other imperialist country because China has gone through, you know,
#
the century of humiliation and has emerged to the other side.
#
So their rise is not going to be the rise of any other country.
#
But what happens with the 2008 crisis and 2008 is also important, well, at least in
#
Beijing's history, it sees it as important because 2008 is the year that Beijing hosts
#
And this is supposed to really mark the year that China arrives.
#
And I think what happens around this time, 2010-11, when Obama comes to power, you have
#
Hillary Clinton talking about the Asian century.
#
You have a lot of people across Australia and Singapore starting to talk about the Indo-Pacific
#
century and, you know, the idea and the reason why the Asia-Pacific, the Indo-Pacific really
#
come into parlance and really come into the spotlight is because India and to a greater
#
extent China at that time faced fewer effects of the 2008 crisis.
#
And this is the point where you have a lot of reform that is being called for, right?
#
This is when BRICS and the AIIB and all of these ideas really come to the fore, the G20,
#
because now it's being seen as, oh, the world is no longer just the US and perhaps Russia.
#
It's all of these smaller countries in Asia that are going to take over.
#
And I guess over the last decade, we've seen that change as well with Xi.
#
And I think what Shibani has pointed out is very, very important with respect to how assertive
#
But I would say that there's often a fallacy, Amit, that when you're outside China, what
#
China is doing seems to be like a concerted effort that they have a vision that they know
#
And I think for the most part, they don't.
#
I'm not going to discount what China is doing, but I think that this is part of Chinese strategy,
#
that they want to convince the world that they do have a vision for it, that all of
#
this is going towards the great socialist society, whatever that might be.
#
And I would really question our biases in thinking about all of China's foreign policy
#
as following a single file narrative in that sense.
#
But that does not mean that India is not middling through its foreign policy in the neighborhood.
#
Shibani would be a better person to talk about that.
#
But I do believe that perhaps Indian foreign policy with China is still reckoning how to
#
deal with this country that a decade ago we were being compared to, but not really anymore.
#
So it's clear that the gap that India and China had at one particular time has now widened
#
to the point that China is definitely a player who you can't ignore on the world stage.
#
Whereas India, perhaps you can still ignore it on the global stage.
#
Shibani, what do you think about the neighborhood?
#
So to your point about how India is dealing with China, I think I completely agree both
#
sides are trying to figure out how to cope with the other.
#
There is a significant power asymmetry between the two.
#
I think there is an acknowledgement of that existing unless India is able to catch up
#
with the economic development and growth that China is seeing, that power asymmetry is going
#
That said, how India is approaching China is trying to see what are the issues where
#
India and China can cooperate, what are issues that they will always have competition or
#
conflict in and what are the some of the areas where they will just coexist.
#
That seems to be my understanding.
#
Shibani, I was just thinking while you were talking about this.
#
I'm not sure India will ever be able to catch up with China in that sense.
#
The Chinese style of growth is simply not possible here.
#
One of the reasons why I say that is because China doesn't have to ever worry about things
#
like land acquisition, because there is no concept of property rights.
#
So if your land gets taken over by the government, oh, too bad, here is a payout that the government
#
might or might not award you and that's it.
#
Whereas in India, if you look at development projects or something like that, which often
#
gets talked about with the one belt, one road, particularly in South Asia, there's often
#
a lot that's talked about about, oh, India doesn't do these projects really quickly.
#
And if you look at a lot of these projects, particularly in the neighborhood and even
#
developmental projects within India, land acquisition is a huge problem in any society,
#
which is not centralized or which the government does not play a huge hand in.
#
But but you know, Hamsini, I'll just say that that's just one aspect of I agree with you
#
will never catch up with them.
#
The reason for that, that not just is that China is too authoritarian, but also that
#
India is too authoritarian in another direction.
#
China is too authoritarian in the direction of sort of, you know, all of the things that
#
you pointed out that there is no friction between getting things done, so to say, India
#
is too authoritarian in the way of in the sense of standing in the way of free markets.
#
You know, starting from Nehru, soft socialism to Indira Gandhi and to Modi today, where,
#
you know, given the fact that given our population, which was a great strength, we, you know,
#
we could have dominated labor intensive manufacturing from the 70s onwards, before China got into
#
the game and got serious about it.
#
And we missed all of those opportunities.
#
So while I agree with you that we won't catch up with them, it's not just because they are
#
doing something wrong, and we can't do that wrong thing.
#
We are also messing up really massively in terms of the economy.
#
The other sort of, you know, when you were talking earlier about how we can often, you
#
know, commit the narrative fallacy, I think the urine use those words, and assume that
#
hey, China has a cogent vision, and they don't necessarily do.
#
And it was sort of interesting that, you know, to my mind, firstly, if you have a vision
#
for communicating what your vision should be, then you could argue that you actually
#
And secondly, the thing is that even if you, regardless of what your intent or vision might
#
be, if your actions are cogent and moving in a certain direction, and it seems to the
#
outsider that you do have a vision, then in a de facto sense, it doesn't really make a
#
difference of what your original intent was.
#
So I'll go back to the question that I kind of asked earlier about, you know, for those
#
of my listeners who are kind of not aware of the Belt and Road Initiative, and what
#
a big deal it is in geopolitical terms, and, you know, how it is both changing the game
#
and a reflection of how much the game has changed.
#
You know, Shivani, would you like to chat a little bit about that?
#
The Belt and Road Initiative, if you break it down to simple terms, is a trade network
#
that spreads across the entire world, allowing China access to a lot of markets.
#
But also giving it opportunities in terms of the BRI thing.
#
So it's a trade network giving China access to new markets across the world.
#
It is a very important foreign policy initiative of the Chinese government.
#
And what you see, India is not on board with the BRI.
#
And that's because it feels that it's a little impulsive.
#
It doesn't want to give China the kind of control that BRI agreement sort of allow for.
#
And we see that increasingly in the Indian subcontinent, a lot of states, including Pakistan,
#
are a part of the BRI, and that is adding to the insecurity that India feels towards
#
And there is also, you know, a dual sense of BRI, where one is that, look, it's a trade
#
network and it's positive some, but there is also the fear that they are sort of building
#
these dependencies so that all of these nations, including Pakistan and nations in the region,
#
sort of become more and more dependent on China and kind of have to listen to them.
#
And what is India's approach to this and what should be India's approach to this?
#
Just a couple of things.
#
So the One Belt One Road by Shivani is right in saying that, you know, it's exploring new
#
And this is why I was saying that a lot of this is the narrative fallacy or even a confirmation
#
bias, Amit, is because the Belt and Road now includes projects that were started in the
#
You know, and it just subsumes a lot of these projects under what was launched three, four
#
And, you know, repackages all of this under nice new branding.
#
You're making she sound like Modiji now.
#
No, but it is what it is in the sense that a lot of the projects that are now claimed
#
by the Belt and Road didn't start out as Belt and Road projects, they just started out as
#
development projects and then became part of the Belt and Road.
#
And I agree with Shivani in that earlier we were talking about Xi's assertiveness and
#
the Belt and Road really fits into sort of China's giant strategy, perhaps.
#
But a lot of things really don't add up for it.
#
And you can see it just in the way that the Belt and Road unfolds, right?
#
I was at an overland port in Chengdu, near Chengdu, which is supposed to be where a train
#
starts from Chengdu and goes all the way up to Poland.
#
And it was very interesting to be there.
#
Also because when I was there, we noticed that Nepal was not part of the world map.
#
Basically it was indicated as part of China, borders were wrong, and a lot of people raised
#
objections to what was happening.
#
And to my mind, I would just think that if you're starting an international project that's
#
communicating your vision to the world, you wouldn't want to offend a small country that
#
is already very easily offended.
#
So anyway, that was sort of just my tangential experience into what the BRI could sometimes
#
look like on the ground.
#
But I think one of India's reasons for staying away from the BRI is a very real issue of
#
Now, the biggest project off the Belt and Road is the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor.
#
And this is a corridor that passes from China through Xinjiang, through the Pakistan-occupied
#
Kashmir border, all the way down to Qatar.
#
So this is not just a highway.
#
These are pipelines, electricity grids, internet, fiber optic cables, anything and everything
#
that you can think of has come under this project.
#
And why India objects to it is because at the end of the day, India does not accept
#
that the China-Pakistan border is valid, because India still believes that this goes against
#
And that is the main reason why India cites, at least that's the main reason that India
#
cites for not being part of the Belt and Road Initiative.
#
China has tried to get India to be part of the Belt and Road Initiative for many years.
#
And I honestly, you know, particularly now don't see that happening because of, you know,
#
the Indian government has recently been announcing that all Chinese investments are going to
#
come under additional scrutiny.
#
About a month ago, the Ministry of Corporate Affairs actually passed a new law which said
#
that some sort of Chinese investments were going to come under additional scrutiny.
#
And we know that bureaucracy is a pain.
#
So a lot of things are happening, at least to indicate that India does not definitely
#
want to be part of the Belt and Road Initiative.
#
And I think that is something that is set to continue.
#
This is at least my reading of the Belt and Road.
#
And you know, coming back to the present time and listeners have kind of stuck with this
#
episode for so long, wondering that, but what about the Galwan Valley, why did they attack
#
So, you know, give me a sense of what is China thinking now, like, of course, they do things
#
when the rest of the world is distracted, as we know, from the 62 war itself, because
#
the Cuban Missile Crisis is going on.
#
And yeah, okay, the big boys are busy.
#
And let's, you know, end the Tawar Mamla with India in the meantime.
#
But now you would imagine, you know, the whole world is kind of struggling with the pandemic,
#
So what is China's game here?
#
You know, it would seem to me that whatever little gains that you want to make in terms
#
of borders, you know, minute gains in territory at best, they don't have imperialistic ambitions.
#
So you know, so what's going on?
#
What's what's happening?
#
So my reading of the current crisis and what's happening is that, you know, through this
#
whole podcast, I also spoke about this when we were discussing the 1980s, that China wants
#
it to separate the issue of border and other things that we could have in common.
#
And that's sort of the pattern that our cooperation over the last 20 years has formed, right,
#
particularly in the last couple of years, you have informal summits that are happening,
#
you have more trade and so on.
#
But with the current crisis, India is the one that's keen for the border to be resolved.
#
Because this, at the end of the day, is something that occupies Indian imagination a lot.
#
And this is India's largest border.
#
So it's no wonder that India that it's India's largest occupation, right.
#
For the Chinese, on the other hand, this is something that they've shown in the past in
#
the South China Sea, as well, is that they're very content to play the long game in this,
#
you know, to construct a couple of small islands, someone will protest, they will retreat and
#
then they will construct a couple of more islands, someone will protest until status
#
So I think at least my reading of what is happening currently is that we spoke about
#
M. Taylor Francis in the first half of the episode, and his thesis that China is more
#
willing to compromise when there is an internal crisis, and more willing to go head to head
#
on over a confrontation whenever there's an external crisis.
#
And I think that is particularly telling now.
#
I think China feels that the world is distracted enough, which is why you have a national security
#
law that is being passed in Hong Kong.
#
It is why you have some tensions with Vietnam in the South China Sea.
#
The other thing that I think is quite important to remember is that when India made Ladakh
#
a union territory last year, China again registered protests, like we'd spoken about multiple
#
times, and this really seems to have pushed China's buttons somewhere.
#
And so this aggression could also be a reaction of what happened with Kashmir and the abrogation
#
Hamzani made some really important point about China playing the long game.
#
And I completely agree with that the sort of scuffles and minor conflicts along the
#
LSE are not something new.
#
Even if we look back just the last decade, this is sort of status quo for both India
#
There'll be like an occasional crossfire and stuff like that.
#
The public claim over Galwan Madi is new, but the territorial dispute as we have discussed
#
And I would also agree with Hamzani that it's not just China taking an assertive position
#
There are other conflicts that it's bringing up, Taiwan, Hong Kong, all of these are in
#
It's all happening simultaneously.
#
What Hamzani spoke about is one school of thought that this is opportunism.
#
The world is distracted by the coronavirus, so China is just looking at this as a chance
#
to create some trouble because governments are distracted with a public health emergency.
#
The other argument is that it's again acting out of deep insecurity.
#
And that is just a continuation of the strategic objectives that China has.
#
It just seems like the timing of it is extraordinary because we have a pandemic.
#
But for China, it's regardless of that, it's continuing on its sort of...
#
So those are the two broad positions that people are taking about this.
#
So two points that Hamzani mentioned about the BRI that I wanted to add to.
#
First is that not everything is going well with the Belt and Road Initiative.
#
Last month, the Chinese foreign ministry said that projects under the BRI had suffered significantly
#
during the pandemic because a lot of the infrastructure development had to be shut down and it was
#
incurring a big financial cost.
#
So while they have accepted that this is a huge economic cost for China, I'd also like
#
to point out a lot of the infrastructure projects that China is investing in.
#
It is not sure whether it will get the return on the investment that it's making.
#
There is no guarantee that these projects will bring back all the money, at least all
#
the money that's going into them.
#
You have the question of Afghanistan, China really wants the BRI to sort of take off there,
#
but there are concerns about terrorism and the safety of the Chinese people staying in
#
So it's trying to get Pakistan to sort of mediate that discussion.
#
And the other point I wanted to make about India's opposition to the BRI based on sovereignty
#
of the BRI going against the sovereignty of the country.
#
This is the same argument that India uses to convince other nations in the Indian subcontinent
#
to be careful of China.
#
There's constant reminders to what, you know, you keep going back to the Sri Lankan example.
#
Remember the debt trap, remember Hambantota.
#
Be careful about what your engagement is like with China when it comes to the BRI.
#
And we see that sort of Bangladesh is listening.
#
We know that there was some renegotiation of the loan terms with China.
#
Maldives has also asked for renegotiating those terms again.
#
So yeah, those are the two things I had to say.
#
I think Shivani, one thing that you've raised a very important point is that these countries
#
And I think, you know, the sort of the good thing about China being in the neighborhood,
#
and I don't know if we can characterize it as a good thing, but is that for the first
#
time in a very long time, countries in the Indian subcontinent have an alternative, right?
#
And what happens with smaller powers is that they generally hedge bigger powers against
#
each other and then sort of scramble for what's left.
#
And it's perfectly understandable.
#
And I think a lot of countries are renegotiating the terms of the BRI because they don't want
#
to be stuck in debt traps.
#
And I think they're very aware of the threats that could come with it.
#
The other thing I think is that it really betrays the failure that India has in terms
#
of delivering on some of these projects in the region.
#
And this is also forcing them to revise deals with India.
#
And I guess this would now then be up to India to provide better projects.
#
And that is something that we ought to be able to do.
#
I sort of like your phrasing here of it's a good thing that China is in the neighborhood
#
as if we have an option that hey, China moved away one day.
#
China is now between US and Canada and let them deal with, you know, the big guy.
#
That's kind of a great point that you raised that, you know, it's really a good deal for
#
all the smaller nations that both China and India are trying to bangle influence and spend
#
their money and kind of doing all of that.
#
And they can play this competition off and they can play India China off against each
#
other and some good can come out of it.
#
And because all trade is a positive something, it could be good for China and India as well.
#
But is India as focused towards all of these like one, of course, you would argue that
#
this is an important lever that we have, that if we engage more deeply and try to increase
#
our influence among all of these nations, where China also wants to play a big role,
#
then that's a sort of a lever we have to keep China at bay and to sort of balance that.
#
But my question there is one, are we doing enough of that?
#
And two, do we really have like what are the levers that we really have?
#
Because one of the things that became obvious in this whole Galwan Valley thing is that
#
regardless of how China looks at it, we can't afford for this thing to escalate because
#
any kind of war nuclear or otherwise, it's just going to be bad for us.
#
And the point we can't let it escalate.
#
So then the question comes up, what are the levers that we have by which we can influence
#
I would say that India is not doing enough in the neighborhood.
#
And to a certain extent, it just underestimates the allies that it has, you know, right around
#
And that is because the efforts to build relationships with the neighbors has not been consistent.
#
And I would say that the states in the neighborhood see India as only if it moves too close to
#
China will India get involved.
#
Otherwise India doesn't have a stake in the country, which is very unfortunate.
#
I think India as a country needs to make consistent efforts to ensure the neighbors that it is
#
a presence, it is there for support, it is going to balance out the Chinese influence
#
because the Chinese influence is also not something that all neighbors are very happy
#
Both India and China seem to sort of interfere with the internal politics of the smaller
#
states and that is not appreciated by these countries.
#
But talking about the Indian side, it seems like sometimes India doesn't care like you
#
have, I can't recall the name, but there was an Indian publication that got the name of
#
the King of Bhutan wrong.
#
So they use the picture of the current king, but use the name of his predecessor.
#
And these are small things, I mean, they appear to be small things for India, but it is a
#
big deal for Bhutan, it is going to impact your relationship.
#
That said, the neighbors also are very aware of the leverage that they hold both against
#
India and China and they're not afraid to use it to balance the two.
#
The other part of my question was, what can India do now?
#
Like if you put yourself in the Prime Minister's shoes, what are the options he had on the
#
day that the news about Galwan Valley broke?
#
Like, okay, so many of our soldiers have been killed by the Chinese, but what can we do?
#
And I guess it's a two part question.
#
One is what can we do in terms of controlling sort of the domestic fallout of this, which
#
they are trying to sort of manipulate through, where they are trying to sort of build this
#
narrative of, oh, nothing really happened, but we taught them a lesson at the same time
#
But apart from that, what are the realistic options that are on the table?
#
What could Modi have done?
#
The way I see it is that there is no one right answer to this.
#
There have to be multiple approaches that have to be used simultaneously as India engages
#
The first is external balancing, which I think India does well with the bigger powers, but
#
fails to do with the allies within the neighborhood.
#
So I would say building institutional relationships in the Indian subcontinent that are not driven
#
just by personalities or the heads of state, because that is temporary.
#
But if you are able to establish institutional relationships that go beyond personalities
#
and administrations, I think that would be more fruitful.
#
And the second approach, I think, is again, continuous engagement with China.
#
We can't just frown and say, I'm not going to talk to you.
#
Dialogue has to go on engagement in areas where you can cooperate with one another is
#
necessary because there is an economic dependency that India has with China and any move that
#
will harm India economically.
#
I don't think it makes sense because you're trying to prove a point, but you're also harming
#
So yeah, I don't think there has to be engagement.
#
It has to be done in a wise manner.
#
And I think that's what when people use the term economic warfare, they don't get it.
#
The point is that anything you do against the economy of the other country also harms
#
the people of your own country.
#
You know, banning Chinese products, for example, would actually be hurting your own people
#
more than anything else.
#
So I'm not sure people who don't use TikTok much would kind of agree with that.
#
I'm just going to borrow an analogy from Manoj Kevalramani who wrote this in the Hindustan
#
He said, if you are going to spit on someone else, make sure you don't cut your own nose
#
That's mixing metaphors, actually.
#
Manoj needs to attend my writing class.
#
So our final China spoiler, but I'm not sure if this particular sentence has already be
#
Just make sure you aren't so close to him that it bounces back on you, which would have
#
But oh my God, why have you put that picture in my head?
#
Hamsari, you were saying something.
#
You know, in Tamil, we have a saying that says, if you throw a stone into the gutter,
#
it will splash back at you.
#
No, so a couple of thoughts on what you were saying on what we could do, right?
#
And I think this apart from the policy options that are on the table that I will leave to
#
our extremely qualified bureaucrats to get to, I think there are some fundamental institutional
#
problems within the Indian government that we need to address, Amit.
#
And I think the first is that the economic moves that we're talking about, right, is
#
I've argued against this app and for various reasons and the smallest ones being that consumer
#
choice will be limited.
#
And this is going to backfire on India's tech scene, which desperately needs investments.
#
But the other thing is that India needs to realize that its whole bargaining power on
#
the world stage comes from its economy.
#
No one wants to deal with a large poor country.
#
Amit, those exist, we want to have nothing to do with them.
#
And we cannot afford to be them.
#
So your economic policy is not fungible as your foreign policy, your strong economy needs
#
to be the basis for you to have a strong foreign policy.
#
Even with the coronavirus, there's been so much talk about how global supply chains are
#
going to shift at the end of this.
#
What has India done to actually take advantage of this shifting of the global supply chains?
#
We talk about ease of doing business and so on, but I really don't see a lot of that extending
#
beyond Mumbai and Delhi.
#
And we can see that, you know, countries like Vietnam, countries like Bangladesh are getting
#
a lot of industries that are now moving out of China.
#
China, because it is developing, is shifting some of its more labor intensive industries
#
to its poorer regions and to other countries in Southeast Asia.
#
So this is something that at the end of the day, we should have considered.
#
The other thing that I would say is that, you know, we talk about India's soft power
#
in terms of Bollywood and yoga, but I remember Brookings recently having a report out that
#
talks about how South Asian students, not Indian, South Asian, are now flocking to China.
#
And earlier, a lot of these students would come to India, but we no longer have globally
#
competitive educational institutions.
#
And even when we do, our society is xenophobic to students from all around the world.
#
And therefore, India is not an attractive place to come and stay.
#
I think the other thing is that, you know, Indians fundamentally want to take a strong
#
We should be ready to stand up to a bully at any point in time.
#
We should be prepared to escalate crises.
#
However, I think we need to fundamentally assess if that is the only line that we should
#
Whenever something with China happens, this is something that I hear that we need to take
#
a strong line against China.
#
I was actually hearing some intellectuals who were saying we shouldn't have Indian students
#
who go study in China, and I'm opposed to this for personal reasons as well.
#
But I think, you know, they were saying if Indian students go study in China, they will
#
not take a strong line for India.
#
And I think a lot of this goes back to Indian scholarship about China.
#
And this is something that I'm very passionate about because bread and butter.
#
But we have a fundamental lack of Indian scholars who are working very deeply with Chinese issues.
#
We have very few scholars in the country who can speak the language fluently.
#
We have very few scholars who've lived in China who understand China.
#
Now, I've had a lot of people say, you know, this is foreign policy.
#
All states are the same.
#
Why do you need to have exposure to China?
#
Why do you need to have to live there?
#
You know, your foreign policy against China should be the same as your foreign policy
#
towards South Korea, if that's who you're bordering.
#
I can understand that argument, but I think that we still have a fundamental lack of primary
#
knowledge about Chinese systemic thinking and Chinese foreign policy.
#
Everything that our policymakers depend on seem to come from American scholarship or
#
best-earned scholarship.
#
And therefore, I would actually argue that this is where we should be nationalist.
#
We should be more nationalist about having knowledge systems that would inform our policymakers.
#
So I think when you say what can we do whenever we have a crisis, we can present our policymakers
#
And the way we do that is to build domestic structures and systems of knowledge that provide
#
the best policy solutions.
#
Yeah, I mean, I'm taking three thoughts away from that.
#
One is, of course, as you said, and I completely agree, the importance of economic growth for
#
You know, your ex-colleague, Nitin Pai, once wrote a piece which had the headline, India's
#
best foreign policy is 8% economic growth.
#
And I couldn't agree more.
#
And you said it very well when you said that, you know, economic policy is not fungible.
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Foreign policy may, but in terms of economics, we just have to aim for that kind of growth.
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And I completely agree with you that homegrown scholarship with experience within China is
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Yes, you can look at all states as rational actors and therefore draw whatever conclusions
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But the granularity of your understanding of, you know, the nuances of how a particular
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people might think about a particular problem or about, you know, what the popular imagination
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within the country is, which will also shape what its leaders think and, you know, create
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the incentives that they respond to, that is also incredibly important.
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And you know, the third point on which you expressed yourself so strongly, and I agree
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with you, is that we need to build intellectual capacity on these matters.
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I think in a lot of matters in our policy, not just foreign policy, but other policy,
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there is my sense from the outside that we are ruled by inertia, that there are these
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practices of the past, some bad practices, some perhaps not so bad, but they just continue
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out of inertia because that's the way things have always been.
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And we need to build intellectual capacity on the outside of these institutions, but,
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you know, within our country and engaging deeply with China in this context so that
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we can take those learnings kind of in a crisis like this.
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And if we had that intellectual capacity and we see the stirrings of it among the two fine
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scholars who are with me on the show right now, thought experiment I would post to them
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and therefore I will post for you, is this, that, okay, we are sort of assuming that these
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are sort of the things that we should do in the long term, we should have 8% economic
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growth, we should have greater engagement with all our countries in the region, we should,
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you know, as Nathan keeps saying, maybe also show some involvement in the South China Sea
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so that that also becomes a lever where, which we can use against China.
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But the thought experiment is that supposing they are far more belligerent and they want
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everything now and they want every dispute settled in their favor now, and they are acting
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with men coming across the border in tanks and whatever, supposing, you know, that is
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How are we to handle it?
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Supposing, you know, Mr. Modi does get that communicate that they have crossed the line
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of control and they have said that X area is ours.
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How are we to, are there realistic ways of tackling it?
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Do we sort of get into a conflict where enormous damage could be caused?
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Do we just roll over and sort of give them what they want?
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How would you think about that?
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So suppose China is more belligerent, suppose they cross the border tomorrow.
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I think something that we haven't really discussed a little is the role of nuclear weapons, right?
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At the end of the day, India and China are both nuclear weapon states.
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And therefore, if there is a war like scenario, there would be a threshold of escalation after
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which one of the countries would choose to go nuclear.
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Now, theoretically, before this threshold is reached, a lot more international actors
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will be concerned that this could lead to mutual annihilation.
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And therefore there will be the escalation.
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But I think if there is aggression from the Chinese in blatantly marching through India's
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territory and claiming large chunks of land, India is not the India of 1962.
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We can sort of compare militaries and things like that.
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But I think India would be in a position where at that point in time, they could provide
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a reaction that leads to escalation.
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What I'm saying is that I think India would be willing to escalate.
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And that's a little bit of what was seen in the Garland crisis as well.
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And I think it's important to note that a lot of our military structures do exist and
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are prepared for escalation in this manner.
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But I would, at the end of the day, discount a huge war happening because we are nuclear
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I mean, that's assuming both people are rational actors and treat each other as rational actors.
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Because if we sort of go back to game theory in the game of chicken, for example, about
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who is more irrational or who can sort of show themselves to be more irrational.
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And it's clear to all concerned that at some point, Modi has to back down, that if things
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start escalating, she knows that Modi has to back down at some point.
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There will be more international pressure on India than on China, you know, given the
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levers that other nations have and we are far weaker.
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And there is sort of this fog of uncertainty about how China's actors think and what they
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will do, at least relative to India.
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But anyway, maybe I'm just analyzing a thought experiment too much.
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But I'm just doing that because it just seems to me that anybody in on Modi seat just has
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really difficult choices before him.
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My view is that should sort of China be aggressive, India will act in a manner that displays its
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military capability to take China on, but be careful enough not to escalate.
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And that's a very fine balance.
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But I think that is that is going to be the objective of the Indian side.
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Wasn't that Nehru's forward policy?
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Yes, but I don't think India would, the cost of going to war is something that that the
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Indian side realizes the financial, the social, the political cost of going to war, which
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is why it would sort of restrain from escalating.
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From the Chinese side, I mean, you were saying that, you know, India would face a lot more
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international pressure than China would.
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But my understanding is that China is not ready to face the isolation that would come
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from, you know, such an escalation.
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And maybe that is one of the considerations that the Chinese side will have.
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Realistically, do you think anybody would isolate them?
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You can't afford to isolate yourself from China.
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I mean, even we haven't done it despite banning a few apps, but we can't really do it because
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otherwise, you know, a lot of our electricity comes from machines made in China.
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You know, Vivek and I did an episode of Econ Central on this.
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If Indians want to really boycott China, they'll have to stop drinking milk in many places
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because your dairy production equipment comes from there.
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Amit, I was actually thinking about this and just because it's a thought experiment, right?
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If you look fundamentally at the history of wars across the world, you will see the weaker
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power as acting more irrational, right?
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If there was going to be a fight between North and South Korea, you would expect more pressure
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on South Korea than on the North, right?
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And therefore, I would actually argue that if there is a showdown between India and China,
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then India can afford to act more irrational than China.
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I know that then I'm in a sense arguing for being more irrational than the Chinese is,
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you know, essentially going to leave the whole world blind.
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You can say that with a veil of ignorance, but we know that Modi is in charge and I don't
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mean this as a knock on Modi, but whoever the Indian Prime Minister is, we know that,
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you know, what Shibani said very wisely is that we have to show our military strength,
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but not actually escalate.
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Now, the thing is, they know this.
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They know that no matter what happens, there won't be a war because we have to back down.
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Now, it's a different matter that fortunately China is outside of the thought experiment.
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They are not quite as belligerent, but thinking aloud from my possibly naive view, it would
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seem to me that they can basically get away with anything.
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You know, Amit, in the international system, the strong will eat and the weak is meat.
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But again, I'm going to say that just because now during this thought experiment, we can't
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come up with definite reasons for what we can do apart from backing down.
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Maybe what we need is an extremely crazy Prime Minister who is willing to signal absolute
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Maybe that is something that our policymakers should consider.
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You know, that's a thought that struck me the other day, that if Yogi Adityanath was
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PM, then the Chinese would have to be more wary.
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But then the problem is that solves your geopolitical problem.
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But what about your internal domestic governance problem?
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You know, you'll have Encounter Raj all over India and not just in U.P., but so leaving
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that aside, that was an amusing thought experiment and both of you have given me this fascinating
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trip through history and perspective.
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And I'll also link all my other episodes on China in the show notes.
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So thank you so much for coming on the show and giving me so much of your time.
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And before I sort of before we wrap it up, you know what I'm going to ask, isn't it,
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which is the sort of the staple question of all my sort of episodes and whatever subjects
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And I'll turn to Shivani first and then Hamsini, which is that if you are to sort of if I ask
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you to look at the year 2030, as far as India-China relations are concerned, what's the best case
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scenario and what's the worst case scenario?
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2030 best case scenario is that both sides, that the memory of war is strong on either
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side and that is why they don't enter into war with each other to avoid the cost that
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If the memory of war is strong on both sides, that means there's been a war between now
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No, I'm speaking from, you know, the history of India and China.
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That memory from the history of India and China carries forward to that time and it's
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not a new generation that thinks bombing the hell out of the other is the way to go.
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And what's the worst case scenario?
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Worst case scenario is that there's a generation that forgets the cost of going to war.
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And I would also think, see, one of the things that I wanted to point out earlier about nuclear
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weapons in the India-China equation is while both sides have nuclear weapons, the relationship
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in that domain has been stable.
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The use of nuclear weapons in any conflict between India and China has not been mentioned
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when you compare that with India and Pakistan, where as soon as there is some sort of conflict
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immediately someone somewhere will mention, we'll use nukes.
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In 2019, there was talks from the Indian Ministry of Defense that, you know, India is willing
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to review its position of no first use of nuclear weapons if that is required.
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And that was in context of what was happening between India and Pakistan at the time.
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But with India and China, that's never been the case, India saw China's acquiring of nuclear
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weapons as its claim to, you know, being a global power, never felt threatened by it.
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And China has understood India's, you know, growing nuclear arsenal as a security against
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Pakistan and that, you know, the insecurity within the Indian subcontinent is what is
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Yeah, I think your worst-case scenario is that we end up in a conflict which is brutal
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for both sides because of a generation that forgot the memories of war, right?
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Hamsini, you are part of a generation which grew up well after the last war.
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I mean, actually, yeah, I would, what are your memories of the narrative around China
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when you were growing up, Amit, before I answer my question?
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Yeah, there were the narratives around Pakistan all the time and they are still pretty much
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And thankfully, the narrative around capitalists has changed a little bit.
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But apart from that, you know, I don't remember narratives around the Chinese.
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But we Indians as a people have always been so xenophobic and racist, frankly, but leaving
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So, Amit, best-case scenario is that the border between India and China is like the border
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between Russia and China.
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And what this essentially means is that the border is settled.
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It's resolved amicably, whatever amicably could mean.
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I'm not going to get into the nitty gritties of who gave what to whom.
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But you have a border with border ports.
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You can cross into from one side of the Himalayas to the other and walk into Yunnan from Arunachal
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That would be best-case scenario for me.
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Because I think if you resolve this, then a lot of other things may possibly take off
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Worst-case scenario would obviously be conflict.
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But conflict could also lead to the resolution of these borders in some way or the other.
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I think what I would be very afraid of is an India that wants to catch up with China,
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that wants to posture aggressively, indulges in building up its arms and over drawing the
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Indian economy to signal strength.
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I'm afraid that India would repeat the mistakes of the Soviet Union in that sense, the Soviet
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Union of the 80s, essentially.
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That is what I would be even more scared of, because it's very easy for us to think in
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terms of foreign policy and what India should do.
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But I think it's the work at the background, particularly what's happening with the economy
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that fundamentally worries me in a short-term 10-year scenario.
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Unsurprisingly, you have packed in a profound thought, which I'll unpack in my own words,
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which is basically people often look at narrative and reality as a binary, and they will look
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at a government as a government that can construct a narrative that has nothing to do with reality
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as if it is a harmless thing.
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But the point is narratives can shape reality.
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And if we build this narrative where we are this macho, aggressive nation state that takes
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no shit from others, then that narrative could shape our reality in ways that might lead
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to your worst-case scenario.
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Hamsini and Shivani, you've both been extremely patient, so thank you for coming on the show
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and for your time and your insights.
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Thanks for having us, Amit.
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If you enjoyed listening to this episode, you can follow all of us on Twitter, Hamsini
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is at HamsiniH, Shivani is at Mehtasaurus, that's M-E-H-T-A-S-A-U-R-U-S, and I am at
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Amit Verma, A-M-I-T-V-A-R-M-A.
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You can browse past episodes of The Scene and the Unseen at www.sceneunseen.in.
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Thank you for listening.
