The other day, at the Beijing airport during a transit stop, I witnessed the ugly sight of a group of Vancouver-based Indian Punjabis hurling abuses at two smartly turned out Chinese airhostesses. Because they were slurring when they were not grimacing at their quarries it was not clear at first what the men were agitated about.
Someone explained later that they were demanding money from the women staffers of a Chinese airline in lieu of an offer of a hotel because of a flight cancellation caused by a fog over Delhi. These are recessionary times and so both sides may have had a point to press home. However, while one was loud and vacuously threatening, the other side was poised and efficient and eventually packed everyone off to the hotel!
It occurred to me that the men would not have behaved any differently with an Indian airhostess. In Beijing that day, however, they sought to mask their unacceptable behaviour with the ever convenient posturing of nationalism. (“You don’t talk to us like that…. We are full fare-paying Indians,” announced the self-styled leader of the pack, not realising that neither of the women had uttered a syllable in the strangely one-sided duel.)
The Chinese are a patient people up to a point. My mind drifted to a friendlier day in September 1993, when I was in Beijing to cover a landmark agreement between India and China to maintain “peace and tranquillity” along their ill-defined Himalayan borders.
That day the Indian media was allowed to take positions at a whispering distance from Premier Li Peng as he stepped out of his limousine. But a British photographer, whose mere toe had barely scraped past the yellow security cordon erected for other journalists, was made to feel decidedly less welcome.
The Reuters man was bodily lifted by a charging security man, and thrown out of the enclosure. His knees and knuckles were bleeding; we could only sympathise silently with the foreign colleague.
The understated confidence the Chinese have in their culture and their polity is noteworthy in its quiet assertion. They don’t brag. They do. And, for good reason, they don’t get easily impressed. After the Beijing Olympics we don’t have to ask why. The Chinese worldview is different from the South Asian one, in fact from any other in the world.
It will not make page one news in the China Daily, for example, if an American president and his wife ate out in a Chinese restaurant in New York or Beijing, as it would (it did) in India when a former first couple visited an Indian restaurant in Delhi and once again back home.
Particularly illustrative of the Chinese approach to a task at hand was the occasion when an American spy plane was caught loitering over their air space. Chinese pilots escorted it to a landing strip. The plane was neatly unravelled into its original components. It was closely photographed piece by piece, put in a box in its broken down condition and returned to the owners with a brief explanatory note.
A South Asian response to a similar situation would be undoubtedly obsequious. When an identical military plane intruded Indian airspace recently the pilots were given a few polite questions to answer and sent off. This was not the worst thing that Indian officials had done in their line of duty. They had allowed the key American suspect in the 1984 Bhopal gas tragedy to slip out of the country, quietly, surreptitiously. Whether it was an example of political servitude or a case of corruption we still do not know.
Therefore, when India’s army chief is quoted as urging his men to prepare for a future simultaneous war with China and Pakistan, there is a need to look at the sociology behind the political and military postures.
Apart from the fact that the three nations involved in Gen Deepak Kapoor’s mind-boggling scenario will have nuclear weapons, which is a global nightmare in itself, a fallacious assumption in the utterance is that India’s relations with its other neighbours such as Nepal, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka are exemplary in their smooth conduct.
Building an imposing structure on crumbling grounds is poor military strategy, and is probably no strategy at all. The description fits India and Pakistan as much as it eludes contemporary China. Anyone threatening to make nuclear bombs even if they had to eat grass, as Pakistanis were once told to do, must be prepared to defend a country of grass-eaters. Likewise, any grandiose Indian military strategy cannot remain divorced from the reality that it is premised on defending millions of starving compatriots and many more who earn less than a dollar a day.
If the Chinese exude a degree of racial superiority, which they sometimes do, China’s South Asian neighbours, it may be argued, have to contend with far deeper and more widespread prejudices, both amongst themselves as well as with others. The Chinese seem to know this reality all too well. But they generally desist from underscoring it because it is neither their priority nor their demeanour to rub their neighbours the wrong way.
On a rare occasion, a nondescript Chinese expert on India did evaluate in some obscure journal in Mandarin how it would not be difficult to break up India into small pieces given its troubles with caste, religions, languages and regional fissures. (The Telangana crisis had not yet erupted.) The entire Indian media rose up in arms against the “insidious Chinese plot” to dismember their country. No one considered it prudent to ask or to explain why or on what grounds the Chinese analysis was off the mark.
The Indian schizophrenia about China — not to be confused with the loutish behaviour of some NRIs in Beijing the other day — is probably rooted in the Nehruvian romance with its popular revolution and Sardar Patel’s aversion to the communists who led it. However, neither of them had the acumen of Pakistan’s leftist poet Habib Jalib, who considered the issue succinctly:
“Cheen hamara yaar hai, uspe jaa’n nisaar hai.
Par wahaa’n jo hai nizaam, usko dur se salaam.
Us taraf na jaaiyo.”
(China is my bosom pal, I will give my life for it. As for its system, I greet it from a distance, it doesn’t quite fit. Let’s not go that way)
On the way back from Beijing, partly to keep a discreet distance from the men from Vancouver and partly to apologise for their bad behaviour, I sat next to a Chinese businessman. I said to him that I liked the young and energetic Chinese men and women and the fact that Chairman Mao was able to pull them out of their opium-smoking servility and make them a major global player. The reply may have been backhanded but I realised it only after reaching home. “You have the Taj Mahal, which is very nice.”
Mohammed Abbasi 