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| Saturday, 8 November 2003 |
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Joint naval moves show Asian giants' desire to move past mistrust NEW DELHI, Friday (AFP) First-of-a-kind military exercises between China and India due next week show the Asian giants' desire to move past decades of mistrust and could herald a more active role in South Asia for Beijing, a traditional ally of Pakistan. The Indian and Chinese navies will hold a day of search and rescue drills November 14 off the Shanghai coast - manoeuvres that are militarily insignificant but deeply symbolic for countries still mending ties after a 1962 border war, analysts said. The joint operations come after President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan, India's rival neighbour, finished a visit to China Wednesday in which Beijing pledged to support Islamabad on territorial disputes and strengthen defence cooperation. An Indian diplomat here said the manoeuvres were another "confidence building measure" after Atal Behari Vajpayee made the first visit by an Indian prime minister to Beijing in a decade. Since Vajpayee's trip in June, China and India have redoubled efforts to finally demarcate their borders including between the northeastern Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh and Tibet, the scene of their war. "These issues are very complicated," the diplomat told AFP. "But various steps are being taken and the exercises are one of them." David Zweig, a political scientist at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, said rapid economic developments in China and India had prompted Beijing and Delhi to take symbolic steps at improving transparency. "Both countries recognise they are becoming very big players in the world economy. If they can settle border disputes, they know it's a win-win situation," he said. "They are compatable economies and both countries see massive trade opportunities. They need each other and this is a getting-to-know-you exercise." Jyoti Malhotra, the diplomatic correspondent of The Indian Express newspaper, said the joint manoeuvres showed Indian leaders wanted "to get over the negativity of the past". "Forty years after this little border war we had, India had in a sense been frozen in the past with China. These moves help to break out of the box," she said. Riffat Hussain, head of the defence and strategic studies department at Quaid-e-Azam University in Islamabad, said a China with warmer ties to India could "play the role of a truly honest broker between India and Pakistan." "The diplomatic symbolism is more important than the manoeuvre itself," he said of the naval exercises. "They send a very clear signal that China is now fully engaged in South Asian affairs," Hussain added. |
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