A few days back, the US Secretary of Defence received a classified 130-page document prepared by his analysts called Indo-US Military Relationship: Expectations and Perceptions. This report has been made available to the influential Jane's Foreign Report which carried excerpts very recently. The analysis is based largely on interviews with 82 senior Indian and American officials, 50 of whom are military officers, both retired and on active duty. The conclusion is blunt: "China represents the most significant threat to both countries' security in the future as an economic and military competitor. One US officer is quoted as saying: "We want a friend in 2020 that will be capable of assisting the US militarily to deal with a Chinese threat". Indian sources are quoted as having pointed to the reality of China supplying nuclear and missile technology to Pakistan, weapons to Bangladesh, making deep inroads into Myanmar, building the deep-water Gwadar port in Baluchistan and resuming the supply of arms to various insurgent groups in the northeast.

The Pentagon report comes close on the heels of John Garver's The China- India-US Triangle: Strategic Relations in the Post-Cold War Era that was published some six months back by the Seattle-based National Bureau of Asian Research. Garver who teaches at Atlanta's Georgia Institute of Technology is America's foremost academic on India-China in a comparative strategic perspective. Two years ago, his book Protracted Contest: Sino-Indian Rivalry in the 20th Century, a work of meticulous analysis and formidable scholarship. Garver's belief is that India and China share a fundamentally antagonistic and competitive relationship in which conflict is inherent. According to him, " Rather than allowing the new Sino-Indian-U.S. triangle to evolve toward an ever-shifting, flexible, three-cornered minuet, continuation of Beijing's abrasive policies of the 1990s may well move the new triangle in the direction of a fairly stable combination of India and the United States against China". Forging a new India-US relationship will, he says, "have triangular consequences regardless of U.S. intentions".

There are many in this country who will undoubtedly welcome a Washington-New Delhi informal axis to "spook and unsettle" Beijing, if not create "shock and awe". But thanks largely to the pragmatism of Chinese leaders who suggested that the boundary dispute be set aside to foster an economic relationship, there has been dramatic upsurge in commercial links between India and China. During January-December 2002, two-way trade amounted to $ 4.9 billion. If Taiwan and Hong Kong are also included, this figure is close to $ 9 billion, not all that critical for "Greater" China no doubt, but almost a tenth of India's international trade volume. China's entry into the WTO is opening numerous market opportunities for India. Now that the bogey of Chinese goods swamping India has been buried, Indian companies are shedding their diffidence and fear. Companies like Ranbaxy, Tisco, SAIL, Bharat Forge, JK Tyres, NIIT, Essel Packaging and TCS already have a growing presence in Chinese markets and TCS is on the final shortlist of three for the prestigious computerisation of the Shanghai stock exchange. Other firms like Sundram Fasteners, Apollo Tyres, Samtel, Asian Paints and Infosys will soon make their presence felt. Our foreign office is, no doubt, wary of China and in January 2003 Mr. Jaswant Singh set diplomacy aside and pooh-poohed Chinese statistics. The Chinese feel that India is being unnecessarily obstructive in the matter of granting business visas and in approving Chinese FDI and contracts won in public tenders. The Chinese networking major Huawei Technologies has a sizeable presence in Bangalore and wants to expand, much to the discomfiture of Indian security agencies.

There is simply no substitute for dialogue between the two Himalayan neighbours tied together by their common legacies spawned by Buddhism. This interaction has to be sustained at a variety of levels-political, military, academic, media, sports, culture, etc. Sub-regional cooperation involving, for example, India's northeast, Bangladesh, Myanmar and China's Yunnan Province has great potential-but while others are keen, official Delhi is suspicious. To be sure, we have differences on a whole host of regional issues. A permanent boundary agreement, that must necessarily involve both India and China giving up territory, is a distant prospect. China's ties with Pakistan have a logic, disturbing as it may be, of their own that we are unable to appreciate. India cannot dilute its relationship with the Dalai Lama, just as it encourages a direct Sino-Tibetan dialogue and as it hopes that eventually he would return to Tibet to a life of dignity, safety and freedom. Even so, we cannot allow ourselves to be mesmerised by the Americans and their encomiums to us in the hope that we will be an ally in their China policy that has a definite adversarial basis. We must continue to engage the US intensively and extensively-and in this, we have to learn much from China. But this should not be at the cost of a deeper relationship with China. Without being romantic, we can still be realistic. As a nation, we have to invest more in creating the intellectual capital to understand and deal with China more effectively. India's acquiring "big power" status on the world stage depends critically on this, apart from making peace with Pakistan-and the two are not unrelated.