India-China Relations #2: External Reasons
In this blog, I’ll go over Kanti Bajpai’s point from his book, India Versus China , that “power balancing” among actors not limited to India and China has meant that they’ve always been on “opposite sides”. By that, he means that the “India – China – US – USSR/Russia quadrilateral” has constantly “shaped Indian and Chinese choices”. Between 1947 and 1958, Bajpai says the two countries were busy with the task of learning to govern their own countries, and it was thus a period of entente. While India tried to remain non-aligned in the Cold War, China found the US at its doorstep thanks to the Korean war. And so they leaned on the USSR to keep the Americans at bay. By the late 50’s, China and the USSR fell apart – they disagreed on who was the leader of the communist movement, the Soviets had stopped supporting China’s nuclear weapons program, and they even fought a brief war against each other. During the 1962 war, the US sent its nuclear weapon armed aircraft carrie...