EAST ASIA: China (Dialogue): InChi - what makes the real difference

Getting past our colonial past

• India’s ambivalence about celebrating the founding of its capital, New Delhi, by the British Raj a hundred years ago today underlines the pathetic hypocrisy of our political class, which feeds off the empire’s legacy but is unwilling to acknowledge it.
• Consider in contrast the Chinese Communist Party, which by nature, is hostile to inconvenient history.
  
• It covers the period between 1843, when the Shanghai port was opened and 1949, when the Communist Revolution triumphed. This is precisely the era that the CCP routinely denounces as the “century of humiliation” for China at the hands of imperial powers.
• Unlike the petty posturing of Delhi’s current rulers, the founding fathers of the Republic were more pragmatic in dealing with the legacy of the Raj. Recall Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s decision to join the British Commonwealth immediately after winning independence from the Crown.
• The British Raj is part of our history and modern India can’t simply disown it.
• All the essential security structures of modern India — the armed forces, the police, the general administrative services, and the diplomatic corps — can trace their roots to the East India Company that made Calcutta the first capital of British India.
• The history of our Foreign Office, for example, dates back to 1783, when the Secret and Political Department was formed by the East India Company to deal with the sensitive political communication with the various kingdoms within the subcontinent and on its periphery. The Secret and Political Department was run by the “Persian secretary” (all inter-state communications in the subcontinent were then in Persian), the oldest predecessor to the current “foreign secretary”.
• The geographic imperative is by far the most enduring influence on the foreign policy of a nation. And modern India’s political geography is indeed a legacy of the Raj.
• Equally enduring has been the notion in Delhi that India’s security interests are not confined to its borders but extend from “the Suez to the South China Sea”. Independent India did not have the power of the Raj to enforce this doctrine, but never gave up the objective.
• A third legacy of the Raj has been independent India’s vigorous contribution to international peacekeeping under the flag of the United Nations. This is rooted in the “military surplus” that the Raj had created in the subcontinent.
• A rising India will find that her emerging foreign policy priorities are not entirely different from those of the Raj, when King George V announced the shifting of the imperial capital at the Delhi Durbar held on December 12, 1911.