Differences will not get in the way of economic ties

Amid all the gloom of the global economic slowdown, India has emerged as one of the few bright spots with robust growth of 7.5 percent in 2016. Yet even more notable is the explosive rise in China’s direct investment in the neighboring country, which reached $1.06 billion last year, a staggering fivefold increase compared with the previous year. Much of that capital has gone into the telecommunications, energy, steel and infrastructure sectors. By the end of 2016, according to reports, China’s cumulative investment in India reached $4.8 billion, double the figure recorded two years before.

This may shed light on how closely intertwined the economies of the world’s two most populous countries are becoming, especially as China is also India’s largest trading partner.

Yet these economic ties, as well as various elements that help to make them happen, have often been ignored in favor of the narrative that the two countries are adversaries in a zero-sum game, with China’s growing national strength interpreted as a development that has negative implications for India and its security.

In this narrative, India’s bids to establish partnerships with other countries, especially the United States and Japan, are viewed as attempts to counter the growing Chinese influence in the Asia-Pacific region.

Likewise India’s hosting of a delegation of women from the Taiwan legislature, which risks souring relations for a time, has been viewed as a response to the building of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, an early harvest of China’s Belt and Road Initiative.

While it is natural for there to be some rivalry between the two neighbors, the suspicions that accompany their rivalry are the legacy of the brief border war they fought in 1962, and the historical enmity it caused, something which still has the capability to define bilateral relations, even though it was the only war between them in their thousands of years of friendly exchanges.

The continuing sensitivity over the border dispute is also why the improvement in relations that has been achieved in recent years is still able to be held hostage by a lack of trust.

However, despite the blips, under the strong leadership of the two countries, relations between the two neighbors have constantly been moving forward in recent years and in so doing have continued to release more potential for cooperation.

Rather than complicating the differences that it has with China and being suspicious of the Belt and Road Initiative, India should look to the future and embrace regional developments that can only be to its long-term benefit.