[Text/Observer Network Columnist Drunk Lying on the Battlefield]
Recently, Indian Foreign Minister S Jaishankar has been extremely active, and his main job is to fan the flames at home and abroad. From 23 to 27 March, he visited Singapore, the Philippines and Malaysia. During this period, he made a strong response to the territorial dispute between China and India in southern Tibet (known as "Arunachal Pradesh" by the Indian side). In the Philippines, he made it clear that India recognizes the arbitration results of the so-called South China Sea arbitration case in 2016 and firmly supports the Philippines in safeguarding national sovereignty.
This round of territorial controversy between China and India stems directly from Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi's visit on March 9 to inaugurate the opening of the Sera Tunnel in Arunachal Pradesh. China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Ministry of National Defense have expressed their resolute opposition to India's move, stating that southern Tibet is Chinese territory, that it does not recognize the existence of the so-called "Arunachal Pradesh," and that India has no right to develop China's southern Tibet region without authorization.
Subsequently, India's foreign ministry called China's "absurd claims" to Indian territory, saying that "Arunachal Pradesh" was "an inalienable part of India." The next day, the US State Department found that this was a good time to drive a wedge, and changed its usual practice by clearly siding with India, saying that the United States recognized "Arunachal Pradesh" as Indian territory, and its geopolitical intention of inciting the escalation of the Sino-Indian dispute was fully exposed.
Against this backdrop, on March 30, China's Ministry of Civil Affairs released the fourth batch of supplementary maps of publicly used geographical names and distribution maps in southern Tibet. In response, Indian Foreign Minister S Jaishankar criticized "there is no point in changing the name" because "if I change the name of your house, will it become my house?"
In fact, every year when the Indian high-level officials make trouble in southern Tibet, as a countermeasure, the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs will express its opposition, and the Ministry of Civil Affairs will announce a number of places in southern Tibet that are openly used in southern Tibet, which has become a regular interaction. In April 2023, India's Home Minister visited southern Tibet, and China did the same. However, this time, the Indian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the foreign minister have a stronger sense of strength in both their statements and the wording of their responses.
Of course, Jaishankar's more recent work has been to continue to attack Jawaharlal Nehru's foreign policy in India, especially Nehru's China policy. The core content of his attack can be summed up simply: Nehru undermined India's relations with the United States, and was too "idealistic" and "romantic" toward China, pursuing a set of erroneous policies of "China first, India second". He believes that today, under Modi's leadership, India's diplomacy is pursuing an "India first" policy and adopting a "realist" attitude towards China.
As foreign minister, it seems understandable that Jaishankar has taken a tough line against the territorial dispute between China and India in southern Tibet. However, it is more confusing to criticize Nehru's diplomacy and then pull China to back his back. However, to understand his series of tough remarks about China, it is necessary to grasp them in the context of India's general election.
India's Founding Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and India's current Foreign Minister S Jaishankar
Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party won 282 and 303 of the 543 seats in the lower house in two Indian general elections in 2014 and 2019, respectively. Over the past few years, Hindu nationalists have been preaching that Muslims, who make up 14 percent of India's population, pose a serious threat to the security of 80 percent of the population, and that Hindus and Hindus are protected under the "protection" of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Modi enjoys high political approval ratings at home because of his persona as a "protector" of Hinduism.
In the upcoming general election, the BJP made it clear that it would win 370 seats, and said that Modi no longer cares about the 2024 general election, but takes a long-term view and plans for the 2029 Indian general election. It is even more puzzling, why does the Indian foreign minister keep showing strength on a foreign policy that has hardly any internal political controversy, given that he has won the election so well?
Obviously, he still has selfish intentions. Perhaps the biggest selfish motive is to stay in office after India's general election.
Jaishankar is the second to move from career diplomat to foreign minister in India, the first being former Indian Foreign Minister Natwar Singh. Jaishankar's promotion to foreign secretary during Modi's first term and his appointment as foreign minister during his second term are entirely due to Modi's personal appreciation.
Of course, this is partly due to Modi's strength among his cabinet colleagues. Consider that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh intended to extend the term of office of Foreign Secretary Shyam Saran for a year in 2006, but was forced to stop after facing opposition from India's powerful bureaucratic system in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In fact, Jaishankar does not have much mass base in the BJP and does not have his own support faction, on the contrary, because he has been in the limelight on the diplomatic front, many people in the BJP are quite "envious, jealous and hateful".
More importantly, his extremely "pro-American" approach to diplomacy has caused private dissatisfaction among many people. His current strategy is to "extinguish" any objection to Nehru's diplomatic line by fiercely criticizing his "non-American" diplomacy, and thus add points to his own diplomacy.
Neither is Jaishankar's expectation that he will remain India's foreign minister. In India's election, the influence of the United States and the West is looming. Recently, India's national security adviser Doval told friends that he is 79 years old and that it is time to spend his old age with his grandchildren. The curtain call on Doval's political life seems to be more or less what India needs to consider its relationship with the United States and the Five Eyes countries. Doval's retirement has only increased the chances of Jaishankar being retained.
Public opinion in the United States and the West is also quite friendly to Jaishankar and has given him a high evaluation. The US media has never labeled him "wolf warrior diplomacy," and his love and concern can be seen. An article in Foreign Policy, "Indian Foreign Minister S Jaishankar, Implementing Modi's Tough Diplomacy" Jaishankar, India's Foreign Minister, Executes Modi's Strong-Willed Foreign Policy) has adopted a neutral expression, describing its diplomatic style as assertive, assertive, proud, and showing unabashed nationalist sentiments.
Jaishankar is aware of the good intentions of Modi and the BJP government over the years, and his book "Why Bharat Matters" is clearly helping to forge a new Indian "orthodoxy". The writing of Indian history after independence has always been linked to the Congress Party and the Nehru family, which has virtually established the legitimacy of the Congress Party and the Nehru family. After the Modi government came to power, it reshaped and reconstructed the "legal system" of the entire country through various methods such as revising textbooks. In particular, by exalting Subhash Chandra Bose to offset the contribution of Gandhi and the Congress Party in India's struggle for independence, and in particular to promote British Prime Minister Attlee's claim that Britain allowed India to become independent not because of Gandhi's "non-violent non-cooperation movement", but because of the uprising of the Bombay sailors.
Indian External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar and Prime Minister Narendra Modi present their new book "Why Bharat Matters"
However, since Bose was cooperating with the Japanese Nazis, it was not appropriate for international "orthodoxy". As a result, Modi's government has repudiated Nehru through the pro-Congress party's Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel. Nehru and Patel were representatives of the left and right wings of the Congress Party at that time, respectively, and the Bharatiya Janata Party, as a right-wing party, naturally liked Patel and used him to erase Nehru.
Jaishankar does the same, recounting the great disagreement between Nehru and Patel in November 1950 over a letter exchange between Jaishankarl, mainly about how to understand the nature of communist New China and what policies India should adopt. He concluded that the Sino-Indian border war of 1962 showed how prescient Patel was, and how naïve Nehru's understanding of China was and how "idealistic" his diplomacy with China was.
In order to remove Nehru's "sacred halo", Jaishankar told a lot of non-existent historical stories. For example, he said that in 1955, in order to support the new China's entry into the UN Security Council, Nehru announced that India would abandon its membership in the UN Security Council, and Nehru pursued a "China first" policy. It is indeed inconceivable that such an unscrupulous historical and civil science story told in isolation from the historical background should come from the mouth of the foreign minister of the world's most populous country.
However, this is the current state of public opinion on China in India. After the retirement of many senior Indian diplomatic officials in China, they suddenly turned into "rich and rich" scholars of Sino-Indian diplomatic history, and their appearance as China experts is also quite confusing. The history books they wrote and the stories they told all had the same conclusions: first, how stupid and naïve Nehru was back then, and second, how "ungrateful" China was. On the contrary, the work of rigorous historians, who write on the basis of a large number of historical archives, is not well received in India.
After 1962, the Indian elite was inferior to China, and now it is widening as the power gap between China and India widens. In the case of the Indian foreign minister, the "1962 complex" of the Indian elite is fully embodied. As long as we carefully study Nehru's diplomacy toward China, it is obvious that we will not think that Nehru was idealistic in his China policy. In 1950, in order to prevent New China from liberating Tibet, Nehru provided more than 10,000 guns to the local government of Tibet at that time, tried every means to prevent and delay the local negotiators from entering Beijing for negotiations, and even took advantage of the opportunity of the change of troops stationed in Gyantse to increase the number of troops stationed in Beijing by 1,500, and secretly threatened the local government of Tibet to accept India's demand for territorial occupation by force. Even during the so-called Sino-Indian friendship period, Nehru was not naïve at all, secretly occupying Tawang Uzhe and other places, revising the map of India, imposing an embargo on Tibet in an attempt to force out the PLA, and so on.
If Jaishankar genuinely believes that Jawaharlal Nehru pursued an idealistic policy toward China, it means that his historical research needs to be improved. If he was trying to highlight his diplomatic skills while revising history and belittling Nehru in line with the BJP government, he had completely transformed from a career diplomat to a traditional Indian politician. In fact, India's diplomacy in recent years, under the command of Jaishankar, has received a lot of "false fame" and praise, but it has planted a huge strategic bane for the country. Cao Cao once said that "you must not admire a false name and deal with real disasters", and Soviet-style diplomacy has admired false names, and real disasters are not far away.
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