An Indian fox for the Chinese dragon
National Security Advisor Shiv Shankar Menon has been surprising and shocking the Chinese by refusing to be bullied.
Menon speaks Mandarin Chinese fluently but he negotiates with Beijing in English.......
He is a sharp and complex individual who even the Chinese find it difficult to fathom. Since the day he took over as NSA from MK Narayanan in January, the India-China bilateral equation has undergone a perceptible change......
The fact is all NSAs, from Mishra, to JN Dixit, or to Narayanan, kept talking about drawing a boundary line between India and Tibet Autonomous Region of China. It is not that Menon is not interested in settling the border issue, but he and the UPA government have made it clear that they are not overtly eager if Chinese are not interested......
The previous NSAs were interested in maintaining status quo on the border dispute and they thought that fending off Beijing’s claim over Arunachal Pradesh was an achievement. Menon is made of different stuff. He turned the tables on China by asking Beijing to return Indian land lost in the 1962 war if it wanted to settle the border issue. ....
India last year cancelled an unprecedented 30,000 business visas issued during Nirupama Rao’s tenure as ambassador to China. New Delhi then raised the issue of China granting stapled visas to Kashmir and Arunachal Pradesh residents though Beijing had being doing so since 2008-2009. Beijing was flummoxed again when New Delhi suspended defence dialogue after China refused to give a visa to Lt General B S Jaswal, who was then Northern Army Commander, for a bilateral visit on the grounds that he was serving in Kashmir.....
India resumed the defence dialogue only after a Major General level officer serving in Kashmir was permitted to go to Beijing this year and China stopped issuing stapled visas. The next point of friction was India’s ONGC tying up with the Vietnamese to explore hydrocarbons in South China Sea, which China has claims comes under its sovereignty. China vehemently objected to Indian presence in South China Sea, but New Delhi quietly responded by saying that it was going as per international laws. The latest and strongest Indian move was India’s cancellation of the SR dialogue last November. China wanted New Delhi to cancel a Buddhist Conference, which was to be addressed by Dalai Lama, during the same period but India refused to bend. It is evident from all these events that New Delhi has decided not to diplomatically molly coddle the Chinese any longer but are prepared to deal with them on the same plane.
More at:
http://blogs.hindustantimes.com/insi...hinese-dragon/