THE five day long two nation visit of Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh with stop in Tokyo has become strategically important for not only to india but also to japan and china in the light of recent events of tension between China and Japan and China and India.China is closely following the developments and has cautioned India against 'provocateurs'.Although India does not want to accelerate the border row yet there is no doubt that china cannot be trusted.This is the reason that India implicitly favours Japan in its claim over the disputed island.In this new triangular conflictual relation, India holds the thread which can keep the two ends in shape, but before it can exercise its option credibly it will have to assess the heat of drgon's fire carefully.
LET us have a look at the turn of events which makes this visit more important.
CONFLICT OF INTEREST BETWEEN CHINA AND JAPAN
The China-Japan dispute over the Diaoyu Islands seems to be moving nowhere.
The dispute has arrived at such a stage where finding a solution seems to be a difficult and distant enterprise. Besides, the US National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2013, which specifies that the Diaoyu Islands are subject to the Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security between the United States and Japan, has escalated the bilateral tensions.The US doesn't want to grant any legitimacy to China over the Diaoyu Islands dispute, and therefore openly supports the current Japanese control over the islands and endorses its bilateral treaty with Japan over security matters.Yet Beijing's claim that a war may break out if Japan seeks US support remains quite infantile.
True, the US-Japan understanding over security matters with regard to the islands has certainly made the issue more complicated. Yet, China must not lose its patience, and shouldn't overreact to the tense situation by threatening war.
Beijing can take a serious note that any aggressive stance over the island dispute will further escalate the tensions.
The current dispute needs more dialogue and engagement than anything else. Beijing must aim and plan for diplomatic efforts with Japan, which will make the dispute remain "bilateral" rather than become a regional or global issue.
China must take note of the fact that although the islands are currently under Japanese control, there is a wide acknowledgement of the Chinese claim at both the regional and international level.
If Beijing decides to carry out an attack against Japan, China would lose massive amounts of support, and it would fuel the "China threat" theory. Given China's troubled relations with neighboring Southeast Asian countries, Beijing must carefully articulate its view and claim, without really pushing hard for a war.
Beijing must also take note of the fact that a number of countries, including India, are watching the conflict seriously.
Given the rivalries in Asia, the dispute may encourage other regional powers to take an open stance over the issue. This will be an important development, given that other island disputes still persist between China and Southeast Asian countries.
In principle, India will restrict itself in taking any open stance or commenting much over the dispute.
Indeed, India's official stance is that the Diaoyu Islands dispute should be resolved "peacefully" between Japan and China. However, India's strategic and original posture over the issue is rather different from its officially stated views.
The predominant strategic view in India would like to see the dispute go in favor of Japan rather than China.
This is linked to the earlier Chinese reservation toward India's oil exploration in the South China Sea and, more importantly, the rising Indian interests in the neighboring Southeast Asian region.Though New Delhi will refrain from taking any position, India still favors Japan. This is primarily for two reasons. India-Japan relations are far better than India-China relations, and India doesn't want to lose Japan as a regional strategic ally by taking an "anti-Japan" stance.
China has been a problem for India and other Southeast Asian countries on the South China Sea issue. So India's pro-Japanese views can further endorse India's stake in the South China Sea, where Japan and Southeast Asian countries like Vietnam and the Philippines will back India and its interests in the region.
The island dispute is really a complicated matter, but it still remains a bilateral issue between China and Japan. China must think wisely and start a proper dialogue mechanism with Japan, to reduce tensions and try to find a solution.
India's principal stance is that the dispute should be kept a bilateral one, without interference from outside powers like the US, and can be ultimately resolved within the framework of international law.
CHINA'S LAND GRAB IN INDIA
Stoking tensions with Japan, Vietnam and the Philippines over islands in the South and East China seas has not prevented an increasingly assertive China from opening yet another front by staging a military incursion across the disputed, forbidding Himalayan frontier.
On the night of April 15, a People’s Liberation Army (PLA) platoon stealthily intruded near the China-India-Pakistan tri-junction, established a camp 19 kilometers inside Indian-controlled territory, and presented India’s government with the potential loss of a strategically vital, 750-square-km, high-altitude plateau.
A stunned India, already reeling under a crippling domestic political crisis, has groped for an effective response to China’s land grab — the largest and most strategic real estate China has seized since it began pursuing a more muscular policy toward its neighbors. Whether China intends to stay put by building permanent structures for its troops on the plateau’s icy heights, or plans to withdraw after having extracted humiliating military concessions from India, remains an open — and in some ways a moot — question.
The fact is that, with its “peaceful rise” giving way to an increasingly sharp-elbowed approach to its neighbors, China has broadened its “core interests” — which brook no compromise — and territorial claims, while showing a growing readiness to take risks to achieve its goals.
For example, China has not only escalated its challenge to Japan’s decades-old control of the Senkaku (Diaoyu) Islands, but is also facing off against the Philippines since taking effective control of Scarborough Shoal last year.
What makes the Himalayan incursion a powerful symbol of China’s aggressive new stance in Asia is that its intruding troops have set up camp in an area that extends beyond the “line of actual control” (LAC) that China itself unilaterally drew when it defeated India in the 1962 Chinese-initiated border war. While China’s navy and a part of its air force focus on supporting revanchist territorial and maritime claims in the South and East China seas, its army has been active in the mountainous borderlands with India, trying to alter the LAC bit by bit.
One of the novel methods that the PLA has employed is to bring ethnic Han pastoralists to the valleys along the LAC and give them cover to range across it, in the process driving Indian herdsmen from their traditional pasturelands.
But the latest crisis was sparked by China’s use of direct military means in a strategic border area close to Karakoram Pass, which links China to India.
Because the LAC has not been mutually clarified — China reneged on a 2001 promise to exchange maps with India — China claims that PLA troops are merely camping on “Chinese land.” Yet, in a replay of its old strategy of furtively encroaching on disputed land and then presenting itself as the conciliator, China now counsels “patience” and “negotiations” to help resolve the latest “issue.”
China is clearly seeking to exploit India’s political disarray to alter the reality on the ground. A paralyzed and rudderless Indian government initially blacked out reporting on the incursion, lest it come under public pressure to mount a robust response. Its first public statement came only after China issued a bland denial of the intrusion in response to Indian media reports quoting army sources.
To add to India’s woes, Salman Khurshid, the country’s bungling foreign minister, initially made light of the deepest Chinese incursion in more than a quarter-century. The garrulous minister called the intrusion just “one little spot” of acne on the otherwise “beautiful face” of the bilateral relationship — a mere blemish that could be treated with “an ointment.”
Those inept comments fatally undercut the government’s summoning of the Chinese ambassador to demand a return to the status quo ante.
With Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s corruption-tainted government tottering on the brink of collapse, there has been no official explanation of how India was caught napping in a militarily critical area where, in the recent past, China had made repeated attempts to encroach on Indian land. In fact, the government inexplicably replaced regular army troops with border police in 2010 to patrol the mountain-ringed plateau into which the PLA has now intruded.
Known as Depsang, the plateau lies astride an ancient silk route connecting Yarkand in Xinjiang to India’s Ladakh region through the Karakoram Pass.
India, with a military staging post and airstrip just south of the Karakoram Pass, has the capacity to cut off the highway linking China with its “all-weather ally,” Pakistan.
The PLA intrusion, by threatening that Indian base, may have been intended to foreclose India’s ability to choke off supplies to Chinese troops and workers in Pakistan’s Gilgit-Baltistan region, where China has expanded its military footprint and strategic projects. To guard those projects, several thousand Chinese troops reportedly have been deployed in the rebellious, predominantly Shiite region, which is closed to the outside world.
For India, the Chinese incursion also threatens its access to the 6,300-meter-high Siachen Glacier, to the west of Depsang. Pakistan claims the Indian-controlled glacier, which, strategically wedged between the Pakistani- and Chinese-held parts of Kashmir, served as the world’s highest and coldest battleground (and one of the bloodiest) from the mid-1980s until a cease-fire took effect in 2003.
India’s nonmilitary options to force a Chinese withdrawal from Depsang range from diplomatic (suspension of all official visits or reconsideration of its recognition of Tibet as part of China) to economic (an informal boycott of Chinese goods, just as China has hurt Japan through a nonofficial boycott of Japanese-made products)
WHAT NEXT
WHAT NEXT
Though it appears that china has moved back and india can brag about its diplomatic win yet the five kilometre road built by china in the disputed region(indian) remains a bone of contention and raises the question on the chinese credibility.Thus India very well understands that the dragon needs to be tamed by exploring new options in the east asia and Japan could be the one which has support from another big power vis United States of America.And perhaps this is the reason that China is more apprehensive about this visit.PM Manmohan Singh will also be visitng thailand for strengthening ties sending message to china to limit its 'butterfly' approach.Although in the recent visit of Chinese Premier to India both the countries downplayed the border row but it can be very well understood that India cannot exercise its military option keeping in mind the current political and economic condition and the past experience.thus this visit to Japan and Thailand is an oppurtunity to explore diplomatic options to counter the Chinese dominance both for India and Japan.