That would be the obvious conclusion to come to after reading his latest op-ed in the Hindustan Times
Why India must view its neighbours through its own strategic lens
The answer is that all countries must view other countries through their own strategic lenses. India should do things which are in the interest of India, not Nicaragua.
Allowing the Chinese firsthand exposure to India’s intellectual currents is irreplaceable for understanding each other better
India has no intellectual currents. This is because intellectuals are shit and shit gets flushed down the toilet. The sewer may have its currents but we prefer them to flow far from our eyes & noses.
It is a common trope in Indian diplomacy to speak of an age-old relationship between China and India.
It is common for diplomats- Indian or otherwise- to fart. But it is not polite, or politic, to dwell too much on the subject.
But, as Sinologists from Krishna Prakash Gupta to Rudolph Wagner have pointed out, for much of their history, China and India interacted “silently”.
There was no direct interaction after the Buddhist holy places in India were lost to Turkic Muslim invaders.
Embassies from littoral powers in the Indian ocean ceased after it came under first Muslim and then European domination.
The East India Company started expanding trade with China using Indian opium. This lead to two Opium Wars. The Chinese should have taxed their own Opium which is what they later did so as to finance re-armament.
Monks, merchants, scriptures, commodities, and stories crossed the mountains and seas, but there was no sustained, detailed understanding of the other, with the Chinese especially keen to limit the reach and influence of “things from abroad”.
They had no problem receiving embassies from maritime powers- e.g. Cholas, Vijaynagar- but there had also been alliances against the Tibetans in an earlier age- e.g. Bhaskaravarman of Kamarupa in the 7th century. Wang Xuance was the Tang dynasty envoy to Kanauj. I suppose, the Indians should have paid more attention to Chinese claims to Tibet and parts of North East India dating back to that period.
This distance, born of geography and fostered by policy, meant that when China encountered India in the modern era, it had to understand it afresh.
No. It had to understand the Brits (who had taken Hong Kong & who would expand into upper Burma & the French (who took Indo-China). These were territories which the Chinese considered to be their own vassals.
But by this point, India had already succumbed to the British,
Hindus preferred British rule to Muslim rule. But Muslims weren't that keen on Hindu rule either. Moreover, nobody was keen on the rule of their own son or nephew because such rule was likely to be achieved by the fellow stabbing you or getting your Mum to poison your food.
who were beginning to press against China as well. Fatefully, this meant, as Wagner has noted, that contact between China and India was “brokered” by the British,
In the late 18th century, following the Sino-Nepalese War, Nepal accepted a tributary status with the Qing Dynasty of China from roughly 1792 to 1865. Some Nepalese (& Sikkimese & Bhutanese) territory came under East India Company rule. Hunza was a tributary to both the Dogra dynasty in Srinagar and the Chinese sending token payments to Beijing till the 1930s. Ladkh, thanks to the Sino-Sikh war of 1841, was never a tributary. But all this was well understood in New Delhi before I was born.
Contact between Indian and Chinese nationalists was not brokered by the Brits, the Japs or even the Bolsheviks. But little came of it. Intellectually, it must be said, Christian missionaries played a big part. To some extent, one may say that they 'brokered' interchange of a cultural type. Paradoxically, this fostered nationalistic feelings.
with famed Qing officials like Wei Yuan relying on British sources, such as Hugh Murray’s Encyclopedia of Geography (1834), for their knowledge of modern India.
High Imperial Commissioner, Lin Zexu, commissioned translations to gather foreign intelligence and educate the Qing government on Western affairs from about 1839 onward. His team translated international news, drafted diplomatic ultimatums, and translated books on Western history, geography, law, and military technology.
These sources informed the Chinese that Indians were prone to “regular and constant subjection to a foreign yoke”
i.e. the Hindus had come under a Muslim, Turkic, yoke whereas China had absorbed its conquerors.
because they were “divided into castes
China (unlike Japan) had gotten rid of untouchability a thousand years previously. However, there was a hereditary element to the supposedly 'meritocratic' Chinese bureaucratic class.
and addicted to abstruse philosophy” and were “strangers to public feeling”.
They also lacked filial piety- perhaps because there was no well established tradition of collective punishment.
That the Marathas nearly felled the East India Company
No. They were disunited. Most Princes were happy enough to do a deal with John Company
— such inconvenient facts were passed over silently.
They didn't matter. What did matter was that the British Navy kicked ass. British rule in India and elsewhere yielded a sufficient profit to enable the British Amry to conduct limited military operations even against China so as to secure commercial advantages.
The consequences were profound. Works like Wei’s Illustrated Treatise on the Maritime Kingdoms (1842)
Apart from Lin Zexu, we may mention the ill-fated Mongol nobleman Qishan.
went on to shape the worldview of Qing officials who
were so utterly corrupt and stupid that the Taiping rebellion might easily have succeeded. China faced external predators but the source of its weakness was internal self-predation.
made pioneering expeditions to British India in the latter part of the 19th century. These officials came expecting a “negative example”— and so they found one. Consider what the litterateur Wu Guangpei,
previously posted in Japan
who accompanied an official Qing mission in 1881,
it was led by the Chinese imperial cartographer Huang Maocai. The goal was to survey land routes between Sichuan, Tibet, and India, and to gather intelligence on British colonial rule.
had to say in his Diary of My Southward Journey. Having interacted principally with British officials during his stay, Wu came away believing, the Chinese historian Lin Chengjie observes, that Indians accepted their subjugation “with equanimity, as if nothing has happened.”
Would the Chinese be better off under benevolent British rule? 'Chinese' Gordon had defeated the Taiping rebels some 17 years previously. Was the Indian Mutiny of 1857 similar to the Taiping uprising? No. It was worse- presaging either anarchy or a return to despotic Islamic rule.
Ironically, this was precisely the period in which associational life in India was gathering steam, most notably in the form of the Indian National Congress.
Led by British Mandarins with names like Alan Octavian Hume & William Wedderburn.
A still more striking example is provided by the celebrated Chinese scholar Kang Youwei,
exiled to India by the Dowager Empress. The dude hoped the Western Powers would suppress the Boxer Rebellion. He had some peculiar ideas and is currently considered a shithead with delusions of grandeur.
whose writings on India have recently been translated by Kamal Sheel and Ranjana Sheel. Influenced by the Chinese edition of Robert MacKenzie’s The 19th Century, Kang came expecting to find a “subdued” people. He too found what he had been expecting to find.
He was saying- 'lets have Western rule under a puppet Emperor. It works for India, why not for China?' Consider what would have happened to Puyi (whose restoration Kang supported) if Lord Curzon or Kitchener had been in charge in Beijing. He and his pals would have lived long, prosperous and totally secure lives- just like the Indian Maharaja or Nawab.
Having witnessed the humiliations being heaped on natives in George Curzon’s time,
like Princes being forced to live in big big palaces and fuck lots of concubines?
he declared in a famous letter, Discussing India (1902), sent to his protege, Liang Qichao, that India was a “dead country”, adding that he was “confident that the Indians have no way to restore their country in more than 1,000 years”.
Hindus are shit. Not Nepalese Hindus. Bengali Blabberjees.
Ironically, this comment was made at the very moment when radicalism was about to break the surface in British India.
The Chinese Boxer rebellion was as crazy as the East African Maji Maji rebellion which occurred at around the same time. The fact is, magic can't make you bullet proof. Even Mahacrackpot Gandhi was less stupid.
Not every Chinese visitor was at the mercy of mediators. Take, for example, Lu Ying, a Qing-era official sent to study India’s tea sector in 1905. As the Chinese scholar Zhang Ke has pointed out, a Chinese compatriot living in Calcutta introduced Lu to Bengali elites
i.e. people who knew less about India than the ICS officers who ruled over it
from whom he obtained a nuanced understanding of contemporary events, especially Indians’ increasingly outspoken opposition to British racism and their resurgent pride in their past.
Till they remembered how shitty that past had been.
Reflecting on the encounter in his Journal of the Journey to India and Ceylon, Lu could ask the obvious question: “How could a people civilised for thousands of years, numbering three hundred million, be forever relegated to the realm of slavery?”
The Brits abolished slavery. It is better to be ruled by nice guys than to suffer anarchy- in which case you may actually be enslaved.
India will, he concluded, “surely achieve independence in the future”.
The Brits will abandon that shithole sooner or later.
The lesson this century-old contrast imparts is that firsthand exposure to intellectual currents is irreplaceable.
It was and is wholly useless.
Where will the Chinese draw their impressions of India from if they cannot visit the country?
Movies. TV channels. Cartooons. Anything but shite this cunt pulls out of his arse.
They will, in all likelihood, rely on western sources.
There are no 'western sources'. The last one I can recall was Indiana Jones & the Temple of Doom which was foundational to intellectual and cultural exhanges between India and China in the mid-Eighties.
And what will these sources teach them? Consider, for instance, the recent report in The New York Times
which is blocked by the Great Internet Wall of China.
entitled “India’s Hindu Right Has a New Hero”. This “new” hero is Shivaji, whose statues apparently mark the “dismantling” of the “secular and democratic principles India was founded on”. One such statue, the Times ominously adds, now stands by Pangong Tso, “sword out, as if ready to attack”.
Statues don't matter. What concerns military analysts is the balance of forces & prevailing logistics.
Let us recall what the Times will not. As it happens, one of the very first instances in modern times when the Chinese came to see Indians as comrades was
when they escaped to Hong Kong and felt more secure seeing Indian soldiers stationed there?
at a commemoration — for Shivaji. The key figure in this story was the Chinese revolutionary Zhang Binglin. Reporting on the commemoration, which was organised by Indian students in Tokyo in 1907, Zhang explained in the influential revolutionary journal Minbao that, like the founder of the Ming Dynasty, a peasant who rose to overthrow Mongol rule, Shivaji symbolised “defiance” against foreign oppression.
The Mughals were of Turkic origin. But it was the fact that they were Muslim which created the problem.
Moved by the “unyielding spirit” of the Indians he encountered in Tokyo, Zhang went on, as B. R. Deepak has noted, to make the Chinese aware of “Indian unrest”. Among those affected was his compatriot in Tokyo, the litterateur Su Manshu, who wrote A Record of Seclusion on Sal Beach (1908), an evocative short story depicting Indians “rising up”, like “the great King Shivaji” once had, against the “bandits” from Britain. Su’s work, Gal Gvili observes, presented a telling “alternative to the popular late Qing depiction of India as stagnant and at fault for its own demise”.
Neither mattered. It soon became obvious to even the most deracinated intellectual from the Chinese diaspora that China would have to be reconquered by Chinese people. But this would be done in imitation of the Bolsheviks in Moscow.
With this history in mind, what does it mean for Shivaji to have travelled from Tokyo to Pangong Tso?
Nothing.
This is a discussion worth having.
No.
But where? In Singapore or London, where delegations measure out their words?
Nobody will pay for 'delegations' to talk bollocks. They need to at least pretend to be talking about money or military security.
On X, where algorithms prioritise controversy? The forces that animate India’s slow-motion transformation are elusive.
No. Shivaji was Hindu. India has a Hindu majority. Connect the fucking dots.
They are found in the recesses of civil society
e.g. the anus of this tosser
where ideas collide, interests are articulated, and identities are reworked. It is to spaces such as these that the Chinese must be invited back so that they can observe for themselves the unfolding of our history.
Rahul is welcome to invite Chinese intellectuals to observe his anus.
This includes witnessing up close the flowering of a defensive religious nationalism where statues that point outward speak inward. Let there be no illusions: Contact does not guarantee sympathy or compromise. But without it, others will set the terms of engagement.
Trump will tell Xi not to enter Rahul's anus. He will cry and cry. Shivaji had very long sword. What it points to externally is urgent need for Chinese dicks to re-arrange Rahul's internal organs. The boy may be as stupid as fuck but that doesn't mean he is unworthy of 断袖之癖 cut-sleeve sodomy
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