Soft balancing China: India’s evolving strategy
IAN HALL |
In June 2020, high in the Himalayas at Galwan in Ladakh, twenty Indian soldiers and an unknown number of Chinese troops were killed in the first bloodshed on the disputed Sino-Indian border in half a century. This incident led to a prolonged and tense armed standoff along the frontier and a rupture in the bilateral relationship.
After the Galwan clash, faced with a serious military threat to India, Narendra Modi’s government was forced to revise its China strategy. Up to that point, New Delhi had hedged, seeking a robust economic relationship with China and mutual respect for each other’s interests, while strengthening a strategic partnership with the United States. Now, however, it appeared to the Modi government that Beijing was willing to set aside earlier understandings and openly coerce India into accepting a subordinate position in Asia and an effective Chinese veto over New Delhi’s relationships with other partners.
India could not afford to risk a war to regain ground or respect. Two decades of Chinese investment in military power have left India’s capabilities lagging. Important parts of the Indian economy, such as the pharmaceutical industry, are dependent on trade with China. Nor could New Delhi cut off diplomatic relations altogether, as it did after the Sino-Indian border war in 1962, partly because India is now entangled with a series of minilateral and multilateral groupings that the Modi government values and of which China is also a member.
Instead, as I argue in a new article in International Affairs, India began to use these groupings – including the BRICS, the Russia-India-China (RIC) trilateral, the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), and the India-Brazil-South Africa forum – to frustrate Chinese agendas and undermine Chinese interests. This “soft balancing” aimed to offset China’s power and influence in these groupings and to enhance India’s relative position. It also aimed to signal to Beijing India’s deep unhappiness about what had happened at Galwan and earlier, when Chinese troops had moved in force into territory that India considers its own.
The article traces the actions taken in each forum, as India delayed the expansion of BRICS, championed by Beijing, and denied the RIC to China by refusing to convene meetings. Additionally, it trivialised the SCO’s agenda and excluded China from conversations on Global South cooperation by reviving the IBSA forum. It argues that this behaviour was a rational response to the threat India faced from a far stronger China, where other forms of balancing and pushback might have led to serious adverse consequences.
Professor Ian Hall is a member of the Griffith Asia Institute.