734
27 }
Reassuring and Unnerving the Neighbors: India
The Piddling Success of the Quest for Friendship with IndiaIndia is the other great Asian power that, like Japan, has a history of diffi-
cult relations with China. China’s leaders have undertaken periodic efforts
to improve Sino-Indian ties and reassure India that China’s growing power
and influence in South Asia and the Indian Ocean Region (SA-IOR) does not,
and will not, constitute a threat to India. But these Chinese efforts have had
limited success. As with China’s policies toward Japan, with India one also
finds an oscillating pattern of friendship diplomacy interspersed with peri-
ods of Chinese anger and pressure. One key result of this pattern has been
deepening Indian apprehension over China’s rise and expanding discussions
of those apprehensions with other like-minded countries. First among these
has been the United States, but concerns over the recession of US power in
the twenty-first century alongside the sustained growth of Chinese power
brought India and Japan together in an incipient coalition to balance China.
Yet steadily deepening Sino-Indian economic interdependency parallels this
slowly deepening security dilemma.
The collapse of the USSR and the emergence of US unipolar dominance
circa 1991 was a deep shock to India. The Soviet Union had been India’s major
backer against China since the mid-1960s, while the United States had been
aligned with China, India’s nemesis, since 1971. The US deployment of the
Enterprise task force to the Bay of Bengal during the India-Pakistan war still
rankled Indian opinion. A strong strain of anti-US resentment characterized
India’s political and intellectual elite. Broadly speaking, India’s long-ruling
Congress Party had undertaken to emulate Soviet economic planning, com-
bining it with parliamentary democracy as in British Fabian socialism, and
this had generated sympathy for the Soviet Union. By 1991, India’s socialist
model slid toward national bankruptcy as Indian workers in the Persian Gulf
fled the upcoming war in that region, cutting off the vital flow of remittances
to India. Events compelled India to rethink its position in the world.