Wang Yi, the Chinese foreign minister, landed in Delhi on Thursday evening. This comes literally within 48 hours of some extremely hostile statements he’s made about Kashmir at the OIC meeting in Pakistan. Specifically, he’s reported to have said: “On Kashmir, we have heard again today the calls of many of our Islamic friends. And China shares the same hope”. Now this begs several questions: Did he intentionally make these remarks? Why are we even hosting him after these remarks? What can India do about it?
The first thing we need to understand — and indeed much of the Indian commentariat makes this mistake — is that China’s foreign minister and foreign ministry are running jokes within the Chinese Communist Party. It won’t be an exaggeration to say that the Indian foreign ministry (despite its generic uselessness) has a greater impact on Chinese foreign policy than their own foreign ministry. As a rule, the persons and ministers staffing the Chinese foreign ministry are courier boys, employed to telegraph and record messages for accurate transmission back home.
The decisions are usually taken by the politburo in which the military had a traditionally outsized role. Of course, given Xi Jinping’s destruction of the checks and balances within the Chinese system and his destruction of much of the military hierarchy, the decision making power now rests with him alone. But what hasn’t changed is that the Chinese ministry of foreign affairs and its minister remain, dutifully, just courier boys.
There are, of course, some exceptions — like the trusted ambassador to Nepal who by all accounts is acting like an imperial viceroy, but this has more to do with her intelligence background, personal equations and allotted task. Mostly, the ministry houses folks like Muhammad Lijian Zhao — former deputy chief of mission in Islamabad — an ethnic Chinese Hui Muslim, who had to drop Muhammad from his name once China banned all Arabic names — the quintessential soypoy.
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So now that we know that Wang Yi is just a powerless and irrelevant courier, the question is who wrote his speech and why. The writing part is quite straightforward — clearly it was Beijing groupthink, some low down foreign ministry officials who then got approval from the military, too low level to even pass through Xi Jinping’s desk. As for the ‘why’ — well when you have the sheer irony of the foreign minister of a country that 1) bans Muslim names 2) force feeds Muslims pork within the penal system 3) holds around two million Muslims in concentration camps based on just one criteria — their religion and 4) has gone on an all-out campaign to wipe out Uyghur culture. Addressing an “Islamic” grouping, obviously, he has to deflect attention elsewhere. In many ways this isn’t unlike being caught in an elevator with a severe bout of flatulence and blaming it on your co-passenger. Far from being an aggressive challenge to India, it was the pathetic squeak of a mouse in a clowder of cats.
Now the question arises, as to if India should have hosted him at all. Well, yes and no. No, because his remarks did cross a line, even if they were a sign of weakness. But we did need to talk to him to get some essential messages telegraphed across. Specifically, we do need today more than ever to understand what China’s game with Russia will be over the next decade. After all, a China-Russia block is the strategic nightmare that India had tried to either break up or avoid over the last 70 years. Today with Russia facing more sanctions than any other country in history, this mission has become more crucial than ever before.
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The second message that India is telegraphing is to the US and its NATO allies — that it doesn’t appreciate being shoehorned into Western, Eurocentric priorities and has both the capacity and will to de-escalate any situation that arises with China on its own terms. In effect, this has to be balanced off against two developments that happened with the Quad earlier this week: the arrival of the extremely unwelcome Victoria Nuland who bears no small responsibility for the Ukraine crisis. And the pressure and hectoring of the US to fall in line over Russia within the Quad.
Ultimately, we need to understand that we’re balancing off against some very primal and powerful forces that seek to straightjacket and realign our foreign policy. In that scheme of things, for us to ignore the pathetic squealing of a powerless joke, is just smart policy. It does come with a small price in terms of pride but as the cost-benefit goes, a price well worth paying.
The writer is a senior fellow at the Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not represent the stand of this publication.
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