NEW DELHI: Ahead of the first visit to Delhi on Sunday by Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi, when he will hold meetings with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Foreign Minister Sushma Swaraj, the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS) has cautioned the government on ties with both countries.

Writing in the Indian Express on Saturday, RSS central executive member and occasional spokesman of the Hindutva fountainhead, Ram Madhav, spoke of Delhi’s chequered relations with Islamabad and a less than fair chance that Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif offered for delivering on major issues for he was not secure enough to pursue an India policy independent of the army.

Mr Madhav suggested that China was a bigger challenge for India to be watchful of.

“India and Pakistan have had chequered relations from day one. Moreover, the BJP is seen as a hardline party when it comes to relations with Pakistan. Given that scenario, it is natural that a lot of discussion took place on whether Modi and Sharif would kickstart a new era in vexed bilateral ties.”

He said the media enthusiasm over Mr. Sharif’s recent visit could be explained by the fact that many Indians have, for several decades, been obsessed with Pakistan.

“For them, the benchmark of success of our international relations is our relationship with Pakistan. They fail to appreciate that India is miles ahead of its failed western neighbour. They also fail to realise that Sharif is not the right man to deliver anything.”

He quoted a senior Pakistani journalist as writing that “while Manmohan Singh took 10 years to fail, Sharif may need just two years to collapse.”

Mr Madhav claimed that the Pakistan army and the ISI are baying for Mr. Sharif’s blood. “As Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai pointed out (to Indians), the attack on the Indian consulate in Herat by ISI cronies on the very day of Modi’s swearing-in was more a warning to Sharif than to India,” Mr Madhav wrote.

The Modi government should, however, realise that the real foreign policy challenge comes not from Pakistan but from China.

“On the eve of the visit of China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi, the Indian government should revisit its China policy. The Indian leadership should understand one basic truth. It hardly matters in China’s context as to how many times our leaders have visited China or vice versa. The notion that diplomacy is all about proximity doesn’t hold any water in China’s context. Nehru to Nixon had good experience of it.”

LACK OF KNOWLEDGE: Mr Madhav criticised India’s China policy for “the utter lack of knowledge about the Himalayan neighbour in our country. With Pakistan, our obsession is security, whereas with China we are overawed by the talk of development there. Ordinary individuals and ministers alike look at China only through the prism of its development and fail to appreciate the complex civilisational traits of that country.”

He recalled that in 1954, India and China proclaimed Panchsheel as the basis of relations with India.

“Successive Indian leaders, including A. B. Vajpayee, never missed the opportunity to refer to Panchsheel and ‘peaceful coexistence’ as enshrined in it in bilateral talks. No wonder, if the present leadership is also forced to continue the ritual by (foreign ministry) mandarins. But we forget that the obituary of Panchsheel was written by Mao in 1962 itself when he told Zhou Enlai that India and China should practise not “peaceful coexistence” but “armed coexistence”, Mr Madhav said.

Another important aspect of China to be borne in mind is that, as in Pakistan, the military plays an important role in China too, he said.

In the unusual public critique of state policy by an RSS official, Mr Madhav said the Indian government “enjoys one advantage in India-China relations, that of the ignorance of the masses in India about the complexities involved in it. In the case of Pakistan, the people of India are very aware of the sensitivities, forcing government’s options to a limited few.

However, in the case of China, no such constraint in the form of popular backlash is going to happen.

“The very fact that, while there were animated debates over whether Nawaz Sharif should have been invited to the swearing-in ceremony, there is no such commotion with regard to the phone call or proposed visit of the premier of China within the next few months proves this point.

“But the government must understand that this popular approval, born of a lack of knowledge, can be dangerous if it decides to take things easy with China.”

Published in Dawn, June 8th, 2014