A commentary on Sino-Indian relations that might be of interest to some :

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Asia.view
Himalayan grumbling

Jun 20th 2007
From Economist.com

China and India demarcate an uneasy friendship

AS THEIR economies swell, China and India are being transformed. Yet in their bilateral relations, Asia’s emerging giants have looked worryingly old-fashioned of late. Recent months have brought sharp reminders of the disputes that linger across their disputed Himalayan frontier, over territory and control of the great rivers that rise there.

China has been the most obvious cause of this. On May 29th its foreign minister, Yang Jiechi, asserted that the “mere presence” of Indian settlements would have no bearing on China’s continuing claim to Arunachal Pradesh, an Indian state bordering China and Bhutan. This was a surprise to India. Its officials had understood the presence of the settlements to be precisely one of the “political parameters” that in 2005 the two countries agreed would help resolve their dispute.

It was not the first Chinese provocation in recent months. Last November—on the eve of a maiden visit to India by Hu Jintao, China’s leader—the Chinese ambassador in Delhi reiterated China’s claim to Arunachal Pradesh. Last month an Indian official was denied a Chinese visa on the grounds that he was from Arunachal Pradesh, and therefore Chinese.

After Mr Yang’s needle, India issued a slightly more petulant response than has been its wont. On June 18th its foreign secretary, Pranab Mukherjee, said India would not allow any “outstanding differences” between the two countries to spoil their recently improved relations. But he also noted: “Any elected government of India is not permitted by the constitution to part with any part of our land that sends representatives to the Indian parliament.”

Naively, it now seems, senior Indian officials had hoped to have left such bickering behind. After its unpromising beginning, Mr Hu’s visit to Delhi was a friendly affair. So was the meeting this month between Mr Hu and Manmohan Singh, India’s prime minister, on the fringe of the G8 summit in Heiligendamm. And trade between the two countries is improving; it was worth $11.4 billion in the first four months of the year, an increase of 57% on the same period last year.

But it is clear that such indicators reveal only a part of Sino-Indian relations. China may harbour little realistic hope of getting its hands on Arunachal Pradesh—which China overran (and swiftly withdrew from) in the countries’ brief but bloody war in 1962. Yet it is nonetheless unready to settle the border issue and thereby lose a possible source of leverage over its southern rival.

In a similar vein, China has been obstinate in dealing with the two countries’ shared water concerns. India fears China’s rumoured plans to divert the course of the Brahmaputra, one of several rivers that rise in Tibet and cascade down into South Asia. In an important thawing in their relations, in 2005 the two countries agreed to form a joint committee of experts to co-operate on this issue. It has not been formed, for which China is mostly to blame.

Such sparring should not be exaggerated. On the whole, relations between the two countries are as good as they have been in decades. For its part, India remains distrustful of China, traditionally an ally of Pakistan, yet it seems earnestly to want to make friends. Why should China be more reluctant?

Perhaps because it is less sure than India of who will be its allies in a changing Asia. India wants genial relations with China but also a strong alliance with America. Thus, for example, the military partnership it agreed on with America two years ago. As a result of this, a large portion of the $30 billion-worth of arms that India is expected to buy in the next five years will be American-made. While many potential sources of contention remain across the Himalayas—above all, in a burgeoning competition for energy—it is not clear to China that India’s twin aims are compatible.

Source: - http://www.economist.com/daily/columns/asiaview/displaystory.cfm?story_id=9357067