Asia.
For example, India has spent over US$1.75
billion in grants and credit to Myanmar, a
major competition ground between the two
after democratisation led to a decrease in
China’s influence. Amid the ongoing bor-
der confrontation, New Delhi rolled out the
red carpet for Myanmar’s military chief Min
Aung Hlaing on July 8 – “with one eye firmly
on China,” according to Indian media.
The only regional project discussed be-
tween China and India is the Bangladesh-
China-India-Myanmar Economic Corri-
dor (BCIM-EC). The four countries have
formed a study group to push forward the
project. But even within the initiative, coop-
eration between China and India has been
complicated by a competition for leadership,
as India objects to China portraying the proj-
ect as part of the BRI. Instead, India argues
that New Delhi first formulated the concept
of the project, and that the four countries in-
volved should have an “equal” role.
In the meantime, India is growing closer to
the US. On July 10, India held a set of joint
naval exercises known as the Malabar series
with Japan and the US in the Indian Ocean.
With a focus on anti-submarine operations,
the exercise is widely seen as a warning to
China.
Earlier in June, the Indian Navy an-
nounced a plan to permanently station war-
ships to monitor movement through the
Strait of Malacca. The move is interpreted as
an adjustment to India’s policy of disengage-
ment from South China Sea issues.
As the developments coincide with per-
ceived provocation on the border area,
many Chinese analysts suspect coordina-
tion between India, Japan and US. India’s
army chief General Bipin Rawat’s assertion
that India can fight and win on “two and a
half ” fronts simultaneously, made less than
two weeks prior to the border standoff, also
alarmed Beijing.Defensive or Hegemonic?
According to Sudha Ramachandran, a re-
searcher and journalist based in Bengaluru,
India, India’s security concerns about China
stem from a “defensive” strategic mindset.
In a 2016 article published by the James-
town Foundation, Ramachandran said that
“India’s humiliating defeat in the 1962 war
with China left a deep impact on its national
psyche that is reflected in its defence and
nuclear policies.”
What many India analysts like Ramachan-
dran consider as a “defensive” mentality, Chi-
nese experts see as a “hegemonic” mentality.
In an article published in the People’s Daily,
Sun Hongnian, a researcher with the Chi-
nese Academy of Social Sciences said India’s
urge to impose “imperialist protection” upon
its neighbours in South Asia stems from a
desire to inherit Great Britain’s colonial heri-
tage and to maintain its “hegemony” in the
subcontinent.
In another editorial published by the Glob-
al Times on March 21, titled “India over-sen-
sitive on China’s engagement in South Asia,”
the paper criticised India for “treating South
Asia and the Indian Ocean as its backyard.”
“Whenever a top leader from those [South
Asian] countries visits China, the Indian me-
dia would hype the idea that India is losing
them or China’s emerging weight in South
Asia will be New Delhi’s new threat,” reads
the editorial, “Even if they are trying to bal-
ance between the two giant neighbours, New
Delhi still regards their neutrality as a pro-
Beijing policy.”
Stressing that “India’s peripheral countries
are also Beijing’s neighbours,” the article
warned that China will have to fight back
if India continues its hard-line policies. Un-fortunately, as sentiment runs high on both
sides, the situation has taken a turn for the
worse in the following months.
In early April, the Indian government ar-
ranged for the Dalai Lama to visit the dis-
puted territory on South Tiber / Arunachal
Pradesh in the eastern part of China-Indian
border. This was perceived as a major provo-
cation at the border region by Beijing, which
warned New Delhi of “retaliatory measures.”
Also around the same time, New Delhi
unveiled plans to build three railway lines in
the disputed territory and has commenced
survey work. The Indian government has
appropriated US$900 million for road con-
struction in the disputed area, a five-fold in-
crease from the previous two years. And for
much of 2017, Indian workers have been
building a 55-kilometre-long road to reach
the Chinese sides of the line of actual control
(LAC) in the disputed territory.
China’s recent road construction in the
Doklam region, to which New Delhi reacted
by sending its troops and criticised for posing
security threats to India may well be a tit-for-
tat reaction to India’s road construction in
the disputed area of South Tibet/Arunachal
Pradesh.
In a commentary published in the South
China Morning Post on July 15, 2017, Nev-
ille Maxwell, the author of India’s China War,
who covered the 1962 China-India border
war as the South Asia correspondent for The
Times, argued that a major problem for the
China-India relationship is that India has
never recovered psychologically from its de-
feat in the 1962 war.
With the “myth of an ‘unprovoked Chi-
nese aggression’ in 1962, Maxwell said that
there has been “a false sense of national op-
pression” by China among generations of the
Indian public, which has “fermented in India
a persistent longing for revenge.”