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Wang expressed China’s desire for improved relations and invited foreign
minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee to visit China.
Unfortunately for Beijing, this initial effort at rapprochement did not go
well. Vajpayee arrived in Beijing on February 12, 1979, for a weeklong visit and
discussions with Premier Hua Guofeng, Vice Premier Deng Xiaoping, and
Foreign Minister Huang Hua. Vajpayee’s visit was the first by a high-ranking
Indian official since a 1958 visit by India’s vice president, and the first
ministerial-level exchange since Zhou Enlai’s fateful 1960 visit to India. Six
days into Vajpayee’s visit, on February 17, while Vajpayee was sightseeing in
Hangzhou, Chinese armies attacked Vietnam. Vajpayee immediately broke
off his visit and returned home. Vietnam was India’s close friend. The two
had drawn quite close during Hanoi’s war against the United States.^21 When
Beijing sought to isolate Hanoi after the latter’s invasion of Cambodia, India
again stood with Hanoi. India maintained robust, friendly interaction with
the SRV. In the UN, India voted with Hanoi on the Cambodian issue. New
Delhi did not look favorably on possible re-establishment of Chinese influ-
ence in Cambodia. From New Delhi’s perspective, Southeast Asia consti-
tuted the flank of India’s security zone in the South Asian–Indian Ocean
region, and the growth of Chinese influence there was not desirable. From
New Delhi’s perspective, a Hanoi-aligned Cambodia was far preferable to a
Beijing-aligned one. Between December 1978 and January 1986, there were
nineteen ministerial-level or higher exchanges between India and the SRV.
Prime Ministers Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi were among the visitors to
Hanoi, while the SRV premier, president, and VWP secretary general were
among those who visited India. India supplied the SRV with US$70 million
in aid between 1978 and 1985. In short, Foreign Minister Vajpayee found him-
self in China while China was literally attacking India’s close friend. China’s
1979 attack on Vietnam also roused Indian memories of 1962. China was once
again trying to bludgeon its neighbors into submission, or so it seemed to
many Indians.
All this added up to great political embarrassment for Desai’s coalition
government. That government’s Congress Party critics, including Indira
Gandhi, seized on Vajpayee’s embarrassment to criticize the putative naiveté
of Desai’s foreign policies. Some of Desai’s and Vajpayee’s critics even asserted
that Beijing had invited Vajpayee to Beijing as a way of camouflaging the
upcoming assault on Vietnam. This may or may not have been the case; we
simply do not know. In any case, it seems that Vajpayee’s presence in China
caused Hanoi to drop its guard at that juncture,^22 and it is entirely possible
that Beijing’s invitation to the Indian leader was, in fact, an effort to achieve
tactical surprise. Hardly less reassuring to New Delhi was the other possi-
bility: that Vajpayee’s embarrassment was merely the result of bureaucratic
oversight. That would indicate how low on Beijing’s foreign policy agenda
India ranked. In any case, charges of Chinese duplicity reflected the depth