EAST ASIA: China (Dialogue)

BRICS to IBRSC: India - China on opposite poles

The emergent powers of the world are casting themselves in the same imperialist moulds.
Last month Brazil proposed a meeting of the finance ministers of the BRICS bloc – Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa – to discuss ways in which they could help the European Union overcome its financial crisis.
Whatever be the validity of such exercises – we believe much of this is illusionary – it remains a potent sign of the new world as it is emerging, timed as it was with the annual jamborees of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, and the United Nations, to send a global message.
In a different part of the world, a few weeks before this media- focused affair, the navies of two of these BRICS countries had a spat
India’s naval assault vessel, INS Airavat, on a “friendly visit” to Vietnam apparently received warnings from the Chinese navy to stay away from what it claimed were the territorial waters of China. China claims the entire South China Sea as its waters, which has led to disputes with Vietnam, the Philippines, Taiwan and other south-east Asian countries as its claim conflicts with the internationally accepted position of territorial waters and exclusive economic zones.
India’s ONGC Videsh Limited (OVL) had, in its previous avatar, explored and discovered oil in two blocks in the South China Sea in partnership with the Vietnamese in the early 1990s. This was India’s first overseas petroleum “asset” and has been producing oil since 2002
While India has been active in the region, not only in Vietnam but with most countries of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, there has been a marked increase in military relations in the recent past.
India has emerged as a major military partner of Vietnam and in 2007 these two countries signed a New Strategic Partnership.
In the recent past India has gone on a major drive to expand its navy with reports suggesting a budget of Rs 3,00,000 crore over the next decade
“Strategic experts” now regularly talk about Indian “interests” in the Pacific and the Antarctic, while we in India are fed with scare stories about the Chinese strategy of a “string of pearls” in the Indian Ocean to surround us with military bases.
The rivalry between India and China is often overplayed, particularly by news-deficit journalists, but it cannot be denied. It is playing out not only in the Indian Ocean and South China Sea, or over stapled visas, flash floods and mysterious dams over Himalayan rivers and in “development” work in Pakistan-administered Kashmir, but also in Africa where these two countries are in a scramble to win friends and control resources.
It should also be remembered that South Africa remains the self-proclaimed dominant economic and military power in that continent and would sooner, rather than later, resent its “carving out” by these Asian powers. Former South African president Thabo Mbeki is on record having called China a colonising power in Africa. For India to earn that laurel is only a matter of time.