China's Loud Dismissals Of India Are Confessions
That India even manages to function at this scale, with this civilisational
depth, absorbing its contradictions with a democratic polity, worries
Beijing far more than it is willing to admit.
Anmol Jain and Swarajya Jun 11
About a fortnight ago, Vijay Gokhale, former Indian foreign
secretary, observed that China sees Indian democracy as a long-term
ideological problem. The Chinese commentary that followed went to lengths
explaining why India does not matter, why Indian democracy was a curse, and
why Indian aspirations exceed Indian means.
This vehemence itself is the story, because indifference does not produce a
dozen essay-length tweets of correction.
Stripped of theatrics, the argument is the one Chinese strategists and
think-tanks have refined for two decades. India, the line goes, has built
first-world aspirations on a third-world base. Universal suffrage in 1950
froze pre-modern hierarchies into governance and let identity-based
tribalism hijack reform. Democracy, the conclusion offers, is what makes
India unserious.
The diagnosis does carry some truth. The prescription is where it falls
apart. Beijing repeats it with the urgency of a country reassuring itself
rather than analysing another.
That India does not matter to China is, oddly enough, the most successful
Chinese narrative export to India, repeated by several CCP watchers in
Delhi. The record of CCP’s conduct says otherwise.
Beijing helped Pakistan with Nukes in the 80s and 90s and even today arms
it against India. It does something as petty as blocking the UN listing of
Masood Azhar as a terrorist before finally relenting in 2019. It backs
insurgent groups in India’s Northeast for decades. It dismisses Mao’s Five
Fingers doctrine while behaving otherwise in every border dispute. It keeps
prodding into the Indian Ocean. The current instrument of coercion is rare
earth magnets — where China commands 91% of global output — and other
supply chains.
So why is a neighbour considered irrelevant given this much attention?
What Beijing actually fears is far plainer than the rhetoric admits.
A billion-plus society of comparable civilisational depth, incomparable
internal diversity, and modest but growing resources is, every five years,
choosing its rulers, absorbing its contradictions, and continuing to grow.
Two decades of neutralising democratic experiments in China's near abroad,
from Hong Kong to Tibet, have not given Beijing a template for India. The
Party's case to its own people, that prosperity requires the suspension of
choice, becomes harder to sustain the longer India continues to hold
together.
The Indian economy crossed Japan’s in 2025. It has been the fastest growing
major economy while in the same period China has come dangerously close to
being a ‘Peaking Power’.
None of this requires Indians to argue with Chinese commentariat. India
only has to do one thing — keep functioning.
Swarajya has diagnosed the cost of Indian democracy before.
India democratised at 18% literacy, defying every comparable case, and has
paid for it. Still does. But that there was no other way for India is also
true. No way to be united in the 1950s except through democracy, no way to
be democratic except through universal franchise.
Even with hundreds of languages and identities, India had a strong
civilisational glue, but what about polity? Democracy gave it the polity
and a unified statehood. Even sympathetic Chinese commentary concedes, when
pressed and with some lament, that democracy has served as India’s safety
valve.
The Indian task is to be a hard state inside the democratic frame, building
industrial scale, human capital, and a private sector disciplined enough to
compete.
As for China, a country at ease with its own model would not spend this
much effort talking another out of theirs.
K RAJARAM IRS 11626
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