Source: Palgrave Macmillan

As President Xi Jinping presses ahead with his ambitious Belt and Road Initiative (BR), Delhi finds itself torn between the inviting prospects of modernizing India’s regional connectivity and the perceived negative political consequences of the initiative. Xi’s BR has come as a difficult moment in India’s relations with China. The effort to normalize bilateral relations that began in the late 1980s had lost momentum by the late 2000s amid renewed tensions on the border, deepening trade disputes, and friction arising from their expanding but overlapping regional and international footprints. Beijing’s connectivity initiatives have only sharpened the unfolding security dilemma between Asia’s rising giants.¹

Beijing is surprised by Delhi’s opposition—to BR projects in the South Asia/Indian Ocean region. In turn, Delhi views the initiative as undermining India’s regional security interests. While India was initially considering the benefits of the BRI, by mid 2017, Delhi’s opposition and concerns grew louder. The Ministry of External Affairs issued a statement highlighting Delhi’s concerns regarding the BRI. The concerns primarily were the need to “recognize international norms, good governance, rule of law, openness, transparency and equality…principles of financial responsibility to avoid… unsuitable debt burden [and] respects sovereignty and territorial integrity.”²

Long before Xi’s BR, India had to cope with China’s transborder infrastructure projects for more than half a century. Back in the early 1960s, India reacted quite strongly to Beijing’s construction of a friendship highway to Nepal. In the 1970s, it objected to China’s construction of the Karakoram Highway between Xinjiang and Pakistan. In the 1980s, it raised the red flag reports that China was developing the Cocos Islands of Myanmar for military purposes. China’s “Go West”strategy of the 2000s vastly expanded the scale of the challenge, as China built the Tibet Highway and pushed it to the Nepal border, modernized the Karakoram Highway; unveiled plans for the development of infrastructure between Yunnan and the Bay of Bengal through Myanmar; and began to develop new ports at Gwadar (Pakistran), Hambantota (Sri Lanka), and Kyaukphyu (Myanmar). If Delhi was anxious about these initiatives into its neighborhood, Beijing was irritated with India’s claims about an exclusive sphere of influence in the Subcontinent and the Indian Ocean, and asserted its right to unhindered economic and political engagement with Delhi’s neighbors.³

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This book chapter was originally published by Palgrave Macmillan.

NOTES

¹See C. Raja Mohan, Samudra Manthan: Sino-Indian Rivalry in the Indo-Pacific, (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2013).

²Official Spokesperson’s response to a query on participation of India in OBOR/BRI Forum, The Ministry of External Affairs, May 13, 2017.

³For a description of the origins of this regional dynamic between India and China, see John Garver, Protracted Contest: Sino-Indian Rivalry in the 20th Century (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2002), 12-15.