Why India Must Stand up to China

India's response to the harsh Chinese crackdown on legitimate
Tibetan protests in Lhasa and elsewhere has been dispiriting. In
parliament the seasoned politician and foreign minister Pranab
Mukherjee could only express distress at the plight of the hapless
Tibetans. Worse still, Indian security forces swooped down on
nonviolent Tibetan protestors at Dharamsala, the principal refuge of
the Tibetan diaspora, and incarcerated them for 14 days using
India's preventive detention laws, a colonial relic.

India does itself a disservice by not standing up to China over its
treatment of Tibet. If India wishes to be considered a great power,
it needs to display a greater degree of independence and not kowtow
to Beijing. With rapid economic growth, a substantial military
establishment and robust political institutions, India should stop
behaving in a subservient fashion and forthrightly stand up and
defend certain inalienable rights of the Tibetan minority in its
midst—rights that should obtain in any humane and democratic state.

New Delhi's reluctance to challenge China over Tibet goes back to
Beijing's brutal repression of the Khampa revolt 50 years ago, when
the Dalai Lama, the spiritual and temporal head of the Tibetans,
fled to India. Although China sharply reproved India for providing
refuge to the Dalai Lama, India stood its ground. Shortly
thereafter, following a breakdown of negotiations over a disputed
border, China attacked and defeated India in October 1962. Even
though India's army has since been modernized and prepared for
mountain warfare, the memory of this rout still haunts Indian
military planners and policymakers. That's why, when the Chinese
army periodically crosses the border, India responds with anodyne
criticism. And why India has been willing to publicly and abjectly
reassure China that the Tibetan exiles will not be allowed to engage
in any meaningful political activity.

Appeasement might not be a bad policy if it actually succeeded in
keeping Beijing satisfied, but it doesn't. There is not a shred of
evidence that it has ever moderated Chinese behavior. Whenever
Tibetan exiles have engaged in minor protests, Beijing has sternly
rebuked India for allowing them to engage in political activities.
Faced with Beijing's continued expressions of discontent, New Delhi
has rarely missed an opportunity to genuflect before the Middle
Kingdom. The Tibetan crackdown is only the latest example.

This humiliating deference undermines India's national interests as
a rising Asian power and corrodes its credentials as a liberal
democracy. If China can so easily cow Indian policymakers, then
India's claims to great power status in Asia, let alone beyond,
appear utterly hollow. It shows that Indian policymakers have been,
to use a term from the cold war era, Finlandized—constrained by a
foreign power. Some policy options cannot even be considered for
fear of offending China. India, for example, has had little to say
about China's penetration of much of Burma and its ongoing quest for
military bases in that country. India has also exercised great
caution in pursuing any significant commercial ties with Taiwan for
fear of incurring the wrath of the mainland. What does it say about
India as a democracy if the authorities harass law-abiding Tibetans
who are only engaging in peaceful protests? Such actions are
fundamentally contrary to the principles of a liberal democracy that
enshrines the right of public political dissent.

It is all but certain that the heavy hand of the Chinese state will
successfully crush the demonstrations that have swept across much of
Tibet. China is well aware that the great powers will issue some
predictable communiqués demanding an end to repression and calling
for political dialogue. They are most unlikely to bolster these
pious sentiments with any viable actions that would prove costly to
the regime in Beijing, such as the imposition of sanctions or the
boycott of Chinese goods. India has long, albeit fitfully, sought to
uphold human rights both at home and abroad. Today, when it has
aspirations of regional and global leadership, it needs to
demonstrate the self-confidence to condemn China's repression of its
Tibetan minority and to provide comfort to the Tibetan diaspora. Any
policy that falls short of these steps amounts to an abetment of
China's abject treatment of a disenfranchised minority. If India's
political leadership wishes to be seen as the exemplars of a major
democratic state with global aspirations, at a minimum it should
grant the Tibetans the right to peaceful protest. It should also
consider deferring the mostly desultory border talks, which have, in
any case, moved at a glacial pace.

Ganguly is a professor of political science at Indiana University in
Bloomington and an adjunct fellow of the Pacific Council on
International Policy.