India’s relationship with China would dominate its foreign policy but for one thing, Tim Marshall explains (in Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World) — the Himalayas:
A glance at the map indicates two huge countries cheek by jowl, but a closer look shows they are walled off from each other along what the CIA’s World Factbook lists as 1,652 miles of border.
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India’s response to the Chinese annexation of Tibet was to give a home to the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan independence movement in Dharamsala in the state of Himachal Pradesh.
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As things stand, Tibetan independence looks impossible; but if the impossible were to occur, even in several decades’ time, India would be in a position to remind a Tibetan government who their friends were during the years of exile.
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Another issue between them is the northeastern Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh, which China claims as “south Tibet.” As China’s confidence grows, so does the amount of territory there it says is Chinese. Until recently, China claimed only the Tawang area in the extreme west of the state. However, in the early 2000s, Beijing decided that all of Arunachal Pradesh was Chinese, which was news to the Indians, who have exercised sovereignty over it since 1955. The Chinese claim is partly geographical and partly psychological. Arunachal Pradesh borders China, Bhutan, and Burma, making it strategically useful, but the issue is also valuable to China as a reminder to Tibet that independence is a nonstarter.
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There are numerous separatist movements, some more active than others, some dormant, but none that look set to achieve their aims. For example, the Sikh movement to create a state for Sikhs from part of both Indian and Pakistani Punjab has for the moment gone quiet, but it could flare up again. The state of Assam has several competing movements, including the Bodo-speaking peoples, who want a state for themselves, and the Muslim United Liberation Tigers of Assam, who want a separate country created within Assam for Muslims. There is even a movement to create an independent Christian state in Nagaland, where 75 percent of the population is Baptist; however, the prospect of the Naga National Council achieving its aims is as remote as the land it seeks to control, and that looks to be true of all of the separatist movements.
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It is the world’s seventh-largest country, with the second-largest population.
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It has nine thousand miles of internal navigable waterways, reliable water supplies, and huge areas of arable land; is a major coal producer; has useful quantities of oil and gas, even if it will always be an importer of all three; and its subsidization of fuel and heating costs is a drain on its finances.
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For decades, India was suspicious that the Americans were the new British, but with a different accent and more money.
India and China are natural competitors, and they will always have a touchy relationship. But both are longstanding friends of Russia, both are in BRICS and the SCO. India is also tied into the North South Transportation Corridor and BRI. China and India also share a colonial past, and they are targets for American imperialism. So, on the whole, in the long term they will be collaborators. They already are working to subvert American sanctions on Russia, because they need Russia.
Pakistan is a separate issue, but the Indian-Pakistani conflict is driven more by the US than either Russia or China, both of which want that conflict to go away.
India has more than enough coal, oil and gas for its needs. But it has to import. Why, because since liberation India has always been socialist, and socialists couldn’t run a ****-up in a brothel.