Himalayan Challenge (India, China and The Quest for Peace)

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In September 1978, at the invitation of the prestigious Chinese People's Institute of Foreign Affairs, Subramanian Swamy, then a Lok Sabha Member of Parliament of the ruling Janata Party and an elected member of the Party's National Executive, travelled to China as an envoy of the then Prime Minister, Morarji Desai, where he met senior leader Ji Pengfei. This led to the first contact, since 1962, between the ruling parties of both countries. Later, in April 1981, Swamy, the then deputy leader of the Opposition, was invited to meet China's Supreme leader, Chairman Deng Xiaoping. In this historic 100-minute meeting, Swamy successfully persuaded Deng to reopen the Kailash Mansarovar route for Hindu pilgrims. In August that year, he also led the first delegation to the holy site, which he revisited as a guest of the Chinese government in June 2016.

It is this vast, first-hand experience that Swamy combines with a provocative exploration of historical sources and fascinating new insights to create Himalayan Challenge-the most compelling and definitive account of India-China relations. From uncovering the perfidy committed by the British vis-à-vis the McMahon Line in 1936 and the circumstances leading to the folly of war in 1962, to the current fluid situation at the border, this seminal work effortlessly blends meticulous scholarship and memoir-style writing in an intellectually rich fashion. Swamy breaks new ground when he suggests a middle path-grounded in pragmatism, and not carried out over fear or overreaction-that India must take in her interactions with China.

Filled with vivid personalities and declassified material, Himalayan Challenge is, without question, the most important book written about the rise of China by one of India's most interesting and original thinkers.

DR SUBRAMANIAN SWAMY is an economist with a PhD from Harvard University. He worked with Nobel Laureate Simon Kuznets and jointly published research with Nobel Laureate, Paul A. Samuelson. For several years, he taught graduate-level courses at Harvard University. He returned to India to be Professor of Economics at ITT, Delhi, but his scathing criticism of socialism and communism as being inapplicable in a democracy, invoked the ire of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi; and his professorship was terminated in 1973. However, in 1991, a Delhi court held the termination as null and void. But he resigned from this post after resuming his Chair for a day in order to participate full time in politics.

Dr Swamy has been elected six times to the Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha, three times each, respectively. As a Cabinet Minister twice in 1990-91 and 1994-96, he helped Prime Minister(s) Chandra Shekhar and Narasimha Rao to launch economic reforms. He is well versed in law and has successfully argued a large number of public interest litigations in the apex court and in several high courts, resulting in the prosecution of certain notable public figures, and for restoring Hindu temples and historical sites. His most recent book Reset, published in 2019, about regaining India's economic legacy, is a national bestseller.

Today, India's perspective on China is that of an aggressive and expansionist threat at one end, and that of it being an ancient sister civilization at the other extreme. Most Indians, however, carry in their minds both caricatures. This causes wild and erratic mood swings in the Indian public perception, fuelled further by media reports of Chinese 'unfriendliness' or alternatively of superficial `warm gestures, such as Chairman Mao's famous smile at an official May Day reception in Beijing in 1970. This causes the cyclic movements in policy towards China that we have seen over the last five decades, and has sown confusion in China and the world about India's stance on a China policy, as well as destabilized our relations with that country. Further, India-China relations have been frequently destabilized by extraneous forces, which have only exacerbated these irrational wild swings.

This can be corrected only if we have a consultative committee of genuine Chinese studies scholars, current and retired military personnel, retired civil servants and senior journalists, all cleared by security agencies. The findings of this committee should be debated in elite institutions such as the International Institute for Strategic Studies in the United Kingdom (UK), or foreign relations bodies as in the United States of America (US). China has to be decoded by such a body, and not by currently serving civil servants-dominated committees in the government.

In a world that has dramatically changed for India from 1962 (the year of the humiliating border conflict between India and China) to the diabolical terrorist and religion-driven events in the US of 2001, India has yet to live down the loss of its global status caused by China since 1962. The ideal 'cooperative competitiveness' in world affairs vis-a-vis China has eluded India, and thus our nation has been robbed of its due place in the global structure of realpolitik. India has been denied the veto-holding, permanent seat in the United Nations Security Council (UNSC), which is its due, and it has remained excluded from the Group of Seven Nations (G7) despite being a durable and stable democracy.

Now, in 2020, India again risks losing further stature internationally, because the Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA) has clandestinely and illegally occupied Indian territory by taking undue advantage of the coronavirus pandemic and crossed beyond the mutually agreed upon Line of Actual Control (LAC). As of now, India has held firm its ground, but the Chinese troops have not pulled back to their side of the LAC. The events, as published in the Indian print media in July 2020, of euphoria seem eerily similar to what was published in the same print media in July 1962. However, sadly on 20 October 1962, Indian people were shocked to find that the PLA had invaded Ladakh and Arunachal Pradesh (then known as the North East Frontier Agency [NEFA]) in a synchronized move. India's so-called reputation of the 1950s parity with China was in dust.