True value of Sino-Indian ties

During the recent standoff between Chinese and Indian troops on the non-demarcated Sino-Indian border, the dominant reaction in India was: the government must confront China and show it its place, accompanied by all the blahs, blahs that Sino-hawks never tire of peddling.

That was the bad news. The unmitigated good news was that all this customary white noise was emanating mostly from the usual suspects: so-called policy wonks safely ensconced in their "think" tanks, a vastly inapt appellation; media anchors, and, yes, as usual, the audiovisual commentators led the charge of the flyweight brigade; and some political parties - no prizes for guessing that the ultra-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party was right there in the ruck, contributing the highest decibels to the ruckus.

The even better news, again expectedly, was that the Indian government, especially the External Affairs Ministry, led boldly and assuredly by External Affairs Minister Salman Khurshid, refused to be browbeaten. Backed unambiguously by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, it just ignored the jejune, if not infantile, call to arms, repeating ad nauseam that this was a localized problem and would get sorted out in due course. All that was needed, the Indian government repeated in a manner that was reassuring to all but the Sino-fundamentalists, was that the two sides should sit down and have a purposeful dialogue.

Khurshid refused to cancel his impending visit to Beijing, which in turn was meant mainly to work out the details of Chinese Premier Li Keqiang's visit to India, now just concluded. That was, indeed, Li's first official foreign trip after assuming office. Needless to say, the Cassandras can take a long vacation in cooler climes to "de-escalate" their own internal tensions because by all reckoning the trip was a success, if one goes by how these kinds of bilateral exchanges are supposed to pan out. And, yes, before the exchange of visits, the border standoff was indeed settled. A lot of Sturm und Drang to no visibly productive end.

At the end of his talks with the Chinese premier, the Indian prime minister did refer to the unacceptability of any incursion into the border - but that was only to be expected. It was couched, on both sides, by references to the need to upgrade the mechanism for dealing with border disputes, though the two sides inflected their statements in different ways. While Li seemed to make more of a technical point, Singh appeared to raise the larger issue of the need for "peace and tranquility on our borders" as the basis for expansion and growth of bilateral ties.