How China gained from Partition: 

How China gained from Partition: 

Context

• The sundering of the political space in the Subcontinent gets a lot less attention in the narratives of independent India’s international relations than the sentimental accounts of Delhi’s non-alignment and moralpolitik.

India and China since the mid-20th century

• India was divided in 1947 and China was united in 1949. The Subcontinent’s great partition locked the successor states India and Pakistan in a perennial conflict. China overcame an era of fragmentation to come together as a strong nation.
• If the British Raj emerged as a powerful state by generating a measure of political and administrative coherence to the Subcontinent, its dissolution accompanied by division resulted in the strategic diminution of its successor states, India and Pakistan.
• The combination of British power and the massive resources of an undivided Subcontinent created what came to be known as the “India Centre” that dominated the geopolitics of Asia and the Indian Ocean.
• Indian capital and labour, its armies and administrative systems were central to political stability, economic globalisation and the spread of modernising ideologies in the eastern hemisphere.

Before Partition

• Before Partition, India’s energies economic and military radiated outwards.
• Post Partition, the Subcontinent’s energies turned inward in defence of the new political borders
• The Anglo-American initiatives to replace the India Centre with such new regional security structures as SEATO and CENTO flopped.
• To make matters even more interesting, the communist giants, Russia and China fell apart at the turn of the 1960s and opened the door for the American strategic partnership with China that would contribute enormously to Beijing’s rise as a great power.
• China was not only good at exploiting the great power conflicts to its own benefit, its leaders also clearly saw the strategic implications of Partition.
• They also saw the opportunities to probe independent India’s limitations in sustaining primacy in the Subcontinent and the Indian Ocean that it had inherited from the Raj.

Early decades after partition

• China seemed relatively marginal to South Asian geopolitics.
• India’s energies were focused on opposing the Anglo-American co-option of Pakistan into the Cold
• War alliance system and the supply of Western arms to the Pakistan military. India bet that it could manage the inherent contradictions with China through a conscious befriending of Beijing. But the outcomes abound in paradoxes.
• Given the anti-Communist orientation of CENTO and SEATO, you would have thought China would view Pakistan with suspicion and embrace an India that chose to remain non-aligned and refused to support the Cold War alliances.
• For China, Partition is a gift that continues to give. After years trying to limit Western influences in its neighbourhood, India now finds halting China’s penetration of the Subcontinent will need a lot more political will and strategic purpose.