The Dalai Lama at American University in October. China regards the Buddhist leader's November visit to the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh as a provocation.  (Photo by Jonathan Ernst/Reuters.)

NEW DELHI — This week, when the Dalai Lama addresses the world's largest Buddhist monastery outside of Tibet, in Tawang, Arunachal Pradesh, he will deliver a message of peace and serenity. But in the lead up to the Buddhist leader's visit to the northeast Indian state, New Delhi has had to endure a nail-biting onslaught of provocations from Beijing.

Towards the end of the summer, the Indian media reported that China’s military had launched almost daily cross-border incursions, though China disputed their accuracy. Citing Indian military sources, Indian media claimed a Chinese military unit crossed into Kashmir and painted “China” on some rocks to provoke Indian troops, and that China has begun building military structures across the border from Kashmir for the first time since the 1962 war between India and China. Meanwhile, Beijing has taunted New Delhi by issuing visas to residents of Kashmir on a separate sheet of paper rather than in their Indian passports, flaunting the disputed sovereignty over the state. And the People's Republic has ramped up its attacks on the Dalai Lama, who has lived in northern India since his exile from Tibet in 1959.

Frightening as the rhetoric and incursions may seem, Indian security experts say China is not preparing for a military attack, nor is this really the outpouring of anger over the nationhood aspirations of a few monks.

“It's true that in the overall sense, China is militarily far superior to us,” said former Indian foreign secretary Kanwal Sibal. “But in Tibet they're overextended and Arunachal Pradesh is a long, long way from their bases.”

So what does the saber rattling mean? As undiplomatic as it may seem, the provocations toward India's border forces and the propaganda casting the Dalai Lama as a liar and “wolf in monk's robes” appear to be Beijing's grand strategy to counter the growing ties between India and the United States — and to distract its own population from the fading legitimacy of the one-time communist regime.

“Their legitimacy came from ostensibly being good communists, but now China is anything but communist,” said former Indian ambassador G. Parthasarathy. “So in the absence of ideological legitimacy they are turning to nationalism bordering on jingoism.”

China and India fought a minor war over the border between Kashmir and the Chinese province of Xinjiang in 1962, and India's offer of refuge to the Dalai Lama has always strained relations between the two countries. But outside the press releases from Beijing's ministry of propaganda, times have changed dramatically. Today, China's economic integration with the rest of the world forces it to be more cognizant of world opinion than ever — though it sometimes hardly seems so. And China has had 47 years to observe India's careful shepherding of the Dalai Lama and Tibetan refugee community. No top Indian leader has met with the Buddhist religious leader, and Tibetan protests have been rigorously controlled.

In this respect, China's otherwise perplexing official statements about the Dalai Lama take on new meaning. The intended audience is not India or the international community, but the Chinese people themselves. And their persecution complex makes them ready listeners.

China's provocations also have more practical aims, at least according to Indian foreign policy experts. In the wake of India's ballyhooed nuclear pact with the United States — which some see as laying the groundwork for New Delhi to take a larger role in international affairs beyond its immediate neighbors — China seeks to bog India down in South Asia to thwart what Beijing continues to see as an effort at containing its own growing economic, military and diplomatic might.

“It's a strategy designed to keep India off balance,” said Sumit Ganguly, professor of political science at Indiana University. “The whole strategy is to remind New Delhi that it should not dream of playing a role beyond South Asia.”

So far, it's working. While China plays chess, India labors at checkers — scrambling and guessing at every turn. Every minute that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh devotes to understanding and placating Beijing is time he cannot spend in international arenas. And every penny that India devotes to building up border defenses in preparation for a war that will never come is money drained from the greater project of speeding the country's economic growth and modernizing its infrastructure.

“The Indians have never been able to forge a long-term strategy for dealing with the PRC,” said Ganguly.  "There are perhaps half a dozen people in the MEA (Ministry of External Affairs) who can even speak the language. And their knowledge of history, strategy, domestic politics, is extraordinarily limited.”

But slowing India's rise to international prominence could have serious costs for China, too, especially if Beijing relies on the bellicose propaganda of the Cold War years to score points with its own restive population. “Even the United States and the Europeans would have to start redoing their calculations about what the rise of China means,” Sibal says.

If Beijing isn't careful, that could make China's prophesy of a U.S. containment strategy self-fulfilling.
 

http://www.globalpost.com/passport/foreign-desk/091105/its-not-about-the-monks