Although the indian intelligentsia has not yet acknowledged it, the bonhomie displayed by presidents Vladimir Putin of Russia, Xi Jing Ping of China and India’s prime minister Narendra Modi at the SCO (Shanghai Cooperation Organisation) Summit which concluded on September 1 in Tianjin, China, presages the rise of a new world order.

The post World War II global order shaped by the victorious Anglo-Saxon US-UK alliance dominated by the US, is nearing the end of its life cycle after emergence and maturity of free and independent nation states of Asia — India, China, Vietnam, Indonesia, Cambodia, Thailand and rapid resurgence of Japan — following WWII. It’s only a matter of time before the 21st century transforms into the Asian Century, an inevitability accelerated by America’s foolish decision to install a wrecking-ball president in the White House.

However this necessitates an urgent national consensus on the issue of starting fresh border demarcation negotiations with China to settle this issue unresolved since India attained its freedom from British rule in 1947. It is pertinent to recall that the communist government that assumed power in Beijing in 1949 when Chairman Mao famously declared that “China has stood up”, had ab initio protested border lines drawn by the British government of India in Aksai Chin and Tibet on grounds that they had been imposed upon a then weak  China through “unequal treaties”.

In retrospect, post-independence India’s Congress government and prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s neglect and failure to negotiate mutually acceptable border lines in the era when Sino-Indian bonhomie (“Hindi-Chini bhai-bhai”) was at its apogee, was an egregious error. It provoked the Sino-India border war of 1962 in which the under-prepared Indian Army was overrun and humiliated. Since then there’s been an uneasy military stand-off along undemarcated border lines for over seven decades with large annual defence outlays severely debilitating India’s national development effort. 

Against this backdrop, the muscular stance adopted on the Sino-India border issue by the BJP/NDA government in Delhi which has inherited this mess from the Congress party, is foolish. The plain truth is that people-to-people Sino-India ties are strong, as indicated by the unhesitating willingness of Indian industry and trade to import goods and merchandise from our neighbour nation.  The value of Sino-India bilateral trade in 2024-25 aggregated $128 billion with India’s deficit of $99 billion, indicative of our heavy reliance on Chinese goods, including critically important intermediates and components.

In the circumstances continued failure to iron out peripheral boundary issues and build strong durable ties with our northern neighbour nation is tantamount to dereliction of duty and poor statesmanship, especially in light of the radically altered global geo-political situation. It is delaying dawn of the Asian century.