Perfect timing

As any journalist will tell you, timing is everything. Most of us who’ve protested when asked to do a quick ‘analysis’ citing lack of information/data have been told by our editors, at some point of time or the other, that while it is better if the piece can be both timely and informative, being timely is good enough.

And so it is with part-time commentator and part-time politician Jairam Ramesh’s latest offering; not only did it make it to the stands before Chinese premier Wen Jiabao’s visit to India, it is topical even as far as Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf’s visit is concerned—the book narrates how the Chinese got the Pakistanis to fall in line, beginning with President Jiang Zemin’s address to the Pakistan senate in 1996.

So is Jairam’s book just about timing or is it informative as well? Certainly, the book has information.

On China-Pakistan, for instance, Jairam says that while the Chinese may have got the Pakistanis to fall in line, since they helped it attain nuclear and missile technology, they aren’t going to give up their relationship either, and the nuclear reactor they’re building together and the deep water port at Gwadar are signs of this abiding friendship.

But the larger point is that, like all other collections of newspaper columns over a period of time, the book doesn’t do justice to Jairam’s considerable intellect and wide reading.

In the event, Jairam has some useful pointers, but doesn’t really elaborate on issues of substance.

So, in a column written on the eve of Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s China visit, Jairam talks of a constructive US-China-Pakistan triangle being in our interest and talks of a “more imaginative use … of the existing 1993 and 1996 Agreements to arrive at a delineation of the line of actual control without prejudice to the positions of the two sides on the contentious boundary question”— what that imaginative use could be is something Jairam doesn’t even bother to explore.

Jairam has clearly read each China expert there is to read (though the book has no bibliography, names of authors are littered all across the book’s 130 extra-thick pages), whether it’s a Macfarquhar, Tarun Khanna, Gordon Chang, Thomas Rawski, Nicholas Lardy, or even Morgan Stanley’s Andy Xie’s frequent China notes.

The problem, however, is that apart from providing readers bullet points of what some of these experts have to say, Jairam doesn’t really try and piece the China story together—for that, readers have to go to the original sources.

To give an example of what I mean, when you ask the CII’s former chief economist Omkar Goswami about whether the banking crisis will cause a collapse of the Chinese economy, he will tell you this is nonsense since China has enough reserves to recapitalise all its banks if need be— Omkar may be right, and I hope he’s not, but he gives solid reasons to back his arguments.

By the way, I don’t recall seeing the words bad loans, banking crises, or NPAs, anywhere in this book.

For those who’ve never really followed economic developments in India or China (Chindia, as Jairam calls it so inelegantly), of course, this book is interesting reading since it traces developments in Indo-US relations as a sort of bulwark against an expansionist China, but also points out that, thanks to its trade, China has integrated with the US economy in a manner India can’t even hope to imitate.

One of Jairam’s columns, which explores Sino-Indo-Pak relations, asks why the Chinese are nuancing their stand vis-a-vis Pakistan, and the answer is Islamic terror.

To quote him: “First, they are being hurt considerably by Islamic terrorism in Xinjiang where Uighur separatists trained by the Taliban and by Pakistan-based outfits are very active. Xinjiang is important to China not just geographically as a gateway to Central Asia but also economically since it is rich in natural resources like oil and gas.”

The book, of course, is a must-read for anyone, like diplomats (and I presume the older ones are Jairam’s sources), who has anything to do with China as, having read all the major China tomes and collected all the China stories there are, Jairam’s book has all the casual throwaways that help prove one’s familiarity with a country or a subject.

So, while we all know that Vajpayee went to Beijing as foreign minister in 1979, did you know that Brajesh Mishra was the Indian Charge d’Affaires in Beijing when on May 1, 1970, Mao turned to him at the podium of Tiananmen Square and said, “… Chinese and Indian people ought to live as friends, they cannot always quarrel.”

Or that Shiv Shankar Menon, our Ambassador during Vajpayee’s prime ministerial visit, was the grandson of KPS Menon “who was our Agent-General and Ambassador in China during 1943-47, the nephew of another KPS Menon who was Foreign Secretary at the time of Rajiv Gandhi’s truly historic December 1988 trip to China and the son-in-law of R D Sathe who had served in Kashgar and later been our Ambassador in Beijing in the very late 1970s.”

That’s on the diplomats. On Tansen Sen, who’s written what Jairam says is an absolutely fascinating book which challenges conventional wisdom during a period when you saw Islamic networks supplant earlier Buddhist ones and when Chola expansionism lead to the spread of Hinduism in east and southeast China, “this brilliant 35-year-old historian, who grew up and studied in Beijing, married a Chinese and now teaches in New York, is the son of N C Sen, himself a noted China scholar now retired in Kolkata.”

Like all Jairam efforts, the book has its share of Jairamisms; so there’s the new PRC which is not the People’s Republic of China but a new Peaceful Rise of China, there’s Mekong versus Metookong on India’s foray into the Mekong basin to counter the Chinese, and there’s Y2K (shows you how old some of the pieces are!) or Yunnan to Kolkata.

Jairam’s political affiliations also get highlighted when he makes fun of the BJP and says Sanskritic chauvinism is the wrong way to go about winning friends, about the foreign ministry’s website which says “Mekong” comes from Ma Ganga—in an earlier column, however, he talks of the common Buddhist legacy, “China’s not inconsiderable Islamic heritage that will impart an additional dimension to Sino-Indian political ties” (is this the Islamic terror he talks of in other places?), and “the presence of Sanskritic and Tamil culture in southeast China particularly is something waiting to be explored more systematically.” Hullo?