National security adviser, Shivshankar Menon, is heading to Beijing this weekend to explore the prospects for a more predictable and productive relationship with China.
Menon, who is traveling to Beijing as the special envoy of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, is looking for a new conceptual basis for the Sino-Indian relationship that has become at once expansive and turbulent in recent years.
Finding ways to insulate the Sino-Indian relationship from frequent political disruptions is said to be Menon?s main objective in his exchanges with the Chinese leaders during the next few days.
Over the last decade, the Sino-Indian relationship has widened significantly to cover a broad range of exchanges and acquired a deeper economic content. When Menon went as India?s ambassador to Beijing in 2000, the two-way trade between the Asian giants was barely $ 2 billion. This year it is expected to touch $60 billion.
Rapid growth in bilateral ties, however, has come with increased instability. The fragility of the relationship came into sharp relief when old tensions on the boundary issue and Tibet as well as new problems on market access for China rocked Delhi and Beijing during 2008-09.
The improved atmospherics between the two nations since they cooperated at the climate change summit in Copenhagen last December have provided Delhi the opportunity to step back, take a deep breath and review the basic political premises of the bilateral relationship.
Although India and China had agreed to establish a strategic partnership, their mutual suspicions have intensified, especially over their relations with third parties such as Pakistan and the US. As rising powers with growing influence, India and China have often rubbed up against each other in their shared Asian periphery and circled each other in chasing natural resources around the world.
Delhi watches warily as the Chinese navy makes its presence felt in the Indian Ocean and Beijing wonders what the Indian navy is doing in the waters of the Pacific. Delhi and Beijing have also quarreled over market access to each other.
Now, Delhi and Beijing are said to be looking forward to a comprehensive review of the basics of the bilateral relationship during Menon?s visit to China.
After he was appointed the national security adviser at the end of January this year, Menon was also designated the empowered special representative for the boundary negotiations with Beijing.
Menon?s focus during this visit is not the resumption of the boundary talks, but to nail down a new political template for the bilateral ties. His emphasis on the conceptual foundations of the relationship comes amid the extended stalemate in the boundary negotiations, 15 rounds of which have been held since 2003.
After an initial breakthrough in 2005?when the two sides agreed on a set of guiding principles for the resolution of the boundary dispute?there has been little progress in defining the mutual territorial concessions so vital for settling the boundary dispute.
Worse still, the two sides began to quarrel over the interpretation of the principles agreed upon in 2005. Both Delhi and Beijing recognise that without a sustainable political reconciliation, they will find it hard to move forward on the boundary dispute.