Posted on 11/22/2009 8:54:56 PM PST by cold start
The glancing reference to South Asia in the Barack Obama-Hu Jintao joint statement on November 17 in Beijing has raised a storm of comment in India, not least from the South Block which read it as insinuating a third party into what it insists must be a bilateral Indo-Pakistan relationship. We read the statement as insinuating a larger claim.
The statement says among other things: ''The two sides support the improvement and growth of relations between India and Pakistan [and] are ready to work together to promote peace, stability and development in [the South Asia] region.'' This can be read as a reversion to cold war practice when the two superpowers took it upon themselves to manage regional relations.
It is curious and disquieting to find the Obama administration on the eve of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's visit to Washington slighting India's security interests in South Asia. Was there adequate consultation and deliberation? Where are the voices in the Obama administration that know China is not a disinterested party in South Asia? China has a long history of helping Pakistan against India. And China has made strategic moves via Myanmar and Balochistan and territorial claims in India's north-east that are inimical to India's security and territorial integrity.
Where were the voices to remind those drafting the joint statement that the Clinton and Bush administrations had recognised India as a strategic partner and as a global as well as a regional power? The Obama team may have been right to pursue a policy of cooperation rather than confrontation with Beijing, but is China the country to be asked to promote peace and stability in the South Asia region?
As the Indian PM begins his visit to Washington, what should Obama's team be telling the president about India? Let's start with the China-India equation. In the short run, China is dependent on exports to the US to sustain its prosperity and political stability and the US is dependent on China for buying the debt, currently at over $800 billion, that sustains US government spending for economic recovery. But in the medium to long term India may be better positioned than China, politically and economically, to work with the US for global peace and prosperity.
India's population pyramid has a broad base of young people and a proportionately smaller peak of older people. If India can properly feed and educate its young population it will have a workforce better positioned to sustain a productive economy. China's one- child-per-family policy has produced an inverted population pyramid; proportionately fewer young people to work in the economy and to support an ageing population. China's spectacular economic growth has been based on low cost obsolescing industrial technology; India's impressive but less spectacular growth has been based on new technologies, particularly in IT services. India's economy is oriented to its domestic market, while China's economy is export-oriented, a condition that makes China more vulnerable to global economic shocks and to its bilateral relationship with its largest trading partner, the US.
India's political legitimacy seems more secure because it is rooted in a proven, stable democracy that periodically can and does ''throw the rascals out'' while China's seems less politically secure because the legitimacy of its authoritarian regime is dependent on high levels of economic growth. And India's income distribution, while leaving much to be desired, may be politically more viable than China's where burgeoning income inequalities have accompanied its rapid economic growth.
Finally, India has increasingly proved that it can influence the world via soft power, the power of its capacity to live peacefully and democratically with difference, the power of the modernity of its tradition, the power of its creative writers and popular films. Perhaps the Obama team should advise the president not to put too many of his eggs in the China basket so that enough go into India's.
The writers are professors emeriti of political science, University of Chicago.
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