As the nation pays homage to Rajiv Gandhi, India’s sixth and the youngest prime minister on his 32nd death anniversary today (May 21), it may be befitting to recall his historic visit to China over three decades ago.
Though the Rajiv Gandhi era was cut short by his tragic assassination on May 21, 1991, his achievements as prime minister for five years have been outstanding. This is especially so in the field of foreign affairs and defence which, while ensuring peace with the neighbours, enhanced the image and prestige of India abroad as a strong, secular and self-reliant nation. Unfortunately, the ill-advised and thoughtless policies of the present government have shattered in a few years what took Rajiv Gandhi and his successors decades to build relations with foreign countries, especially with China and other neighbours.
Rajiv Gandhi concentrated his energies on five areas of foreign policy: the non-aligned movement, the African struggle and Apartheid, relations with big powers, nuclear disarmament and relations with neighbours, especially Pakistan, China and Sri Lanka. But it was his visit to China that stole the show and became a ‘path-breaking’ event, or as a writer came out with a catchy phrase ‘wall breaking’, obviously a pun on the Great Wall of China.
The details of Rajiv Gandhi’s visit were carefully crafted by his aides, both in the prime minister’s office and the ministry of external affairs. A thorough reappraisal on Sino-Indian relations was carried out one year earlier. Both sides had rigid positions on the border dispute, but the young prime minister took the initiative of settling the issue in an unconventional manner, something quite similar to the manner in which (Soviet) Russia had settled the border dispute with China a few months earlier when Gorbachev took over as the president of the then USSR.
Rajiv Gandhi’s five-day visit in December 1988 was one of the biggest events in the history of Asian relations in a quarter of a century. The expectations were not high till the second day of the visit. But the moment Rajiv Gandhi met the Chinese strongman Deng Xiaoping, who clasped the young prime minister’s hands for ‘what seemed like eternity’, it was crystal clear to the whole world watching the event on TV screens that it was the beginning of a new era symbolising the new spirit in India-China relations.
The moment has been recorded well by Bhabani Sen Gupta in his biography of Rajiv Gandhi: “When they converged on one another, Deng clasped the Prime Minister’s proffered hands for three minutes. Addressing Rajiv Gandhi as ‘my young friend’, Deng fired the first salvos of a new uncharted friendship. ‘Let us forget the past’, he said, still clasping the visitor’s hands, and went on to say, ‘You are young. You are the future. We are receding into history. There is a new generation of leaders now and a global desire to live in peace and end conflict and tension.’
Rajiv Gandhi was the first prime minister to visit China after a gap of 34 years. In 1954 his illustrious grandfather Jawaharlal Nehru had visited China when nearly a million people came out in the streets to have a glimpse of the ‘most admired leader of the world’. Hence, Rajiv Gandhi reminded his hosts, while delivering a lecture at Quinghua University on December 21, 1988: “Placed in the context of the epochal changes brought about in the world by the independence of India and the liberation of China, among the most important events of the mid-20th century, the friendship which Jawaharlal Nehru sought with China was a friendship that could fundamentally affect the destiny of humankind.”
After reminding the Chinese intelligentsia of the impact of Buddhism on the early exchanges between the two civilisations, Rajiv Gandhi went on to stress: “Now as the spirit of the mid-50s has been rekindled, the time has come to end our estrangement and make a new beginning. We must find an acceptable solution to the boundary question…this can be achieved in an atmosphere of mutual understanding and mutual confidence.”
Rajiv Gandhi’s visit broke down ‘the great wall ‘between India and China. The two sides agreed to set up a joint border commission headed by the officials of their foreign ministries. The border issue was separated from other bilateral issues; the relationship would no longer be hostage to the territorial dispute.
The impact of the historic visit, which received extremely wide global media attention, was aptly summarised later by a senior professor of Beijing University, Jin Dinghan, who had told Rajiv Gandhi, in Beijing: “In 1954, I had met your grandfather, in 1983 I met your mother. Now I am very happy to meet you.”
Soon after the tragic assassination of Rajiv Gandhi in 1991, the ageing professor wrote in his touching tribute: “The Chinese people were deeply shocked when they learnt the news that he had met with such a gruesome death. He was too young to die. He could have done much more work for India and for the people of the whole world. He made a brilliant contribution to the friendship between the Chinese people and the Indian people during his lifetime. In memory of him let us go forward hand in hand to promote the friendship between our two great peoples.”
The successors of the country’s youngest prime minister – P.V. Narasimha Rao, Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Manmohan Singh – did go forward rapidly and laboriously built upon the strong foundations laid by Rajiv Gandhi to rebuild India-China relations. But that was till 2014.
In 1993, under Narasimha Rao, India and China signed the Border Peace and Tranquility Agreement; in 2012 under Manmohan Singh, a working mechanism for consultation and coordination on India-China Border Affairs was inked. However, in the last nine years, especially after Prime Minister Narendra Modi got a renewed mandate in 2019, India’s relations with China, indeed with most of the neighbours, have deteriorated as never before.
China is reportedly occupying nearly 2000 kilometres of the Indian territory after the Galwan Valley clash on June 15, 2020. Despite 18 rounds of military to military talks, the Chinese have refused to vacate the territory occupied by them. It has adopted a could-not-care-less attitude with India and engaged in ‘salami slicing’ tactics in Eastern Ladakh. In Arunachal Pradesh, which they have the temerity to call South Tibet, the Chinese are renaming villages on our side at will.
If the Modi government is not able to get the Chinese back to the June 2020 position in Eastern Ladakh, it will pay a heavy price in 2024. Diplomatically, or militarily, the ball is in the prime minister’s court.
Praveen Davar is an ex Army officer, a columnist and author of Freedom Struggle & Beyond.
