t r u t h o u t | Columnist
Monday 02 July 2007
A mural on a wall of the sanctum sanctorum of the Big Wild Goose Pagoda, at X'ian in the Chinese province of Saanxi, arrested my attention. It showed a Buddhist monk speaking to two Indian personages, with one of them followed by a lady in a sari-like drapery. "Master Xuan Zang," said the smart girl guide, "made peace between two warring kings in India. You see here the queen of one of them."
The other walls narrated the tale of Xuan Zang, better known in India as Hiuen Tsang, and his adventurous journey by the ancient Silk Route over the Himalayas to the land of the Buddha's birth. The travel both ways took him 17 eventful years. He brought home a whole library of holy scriptures and new faith that is the majority religion in his nation today.
We will return to the Master some other time, but the point that needs to be made now is not about any faith or philosophy.
Thirteen long centuries later, Jawaharlal Nehru, then India's freedom fighter, said that India needed to know China, "which can now be reached after a day's journey," more and better. China is today less than half a day's flight from India, but the gulf between the two countries has never been greater.
India and China discovered each other through other individuals, too, in those days when both were discovering themselves as nations deserving of freedom and independence. Chinese scholar Tan Yun-Shan found a home in Shantiniketan (the Abode of Peace), the world university founded by India's pioneering poet Rabindranath Tagore, who visited China in 1924 and had a Cheena Bhavan (the China House) in his creatively designed campus.
Dwarkanath Shantaram Kotnis found his home in China, where he went as a part of a medical team when the Chinese were fighting Japanese aggression. He stayed on to serve the cause of the Chinese Revolution led by Mao Tse Dong and to settle down with a family in his adopted land.
When Nehru visited China as free India's first prime minister in 1954, he found the popular reception "overwhelming." When China's Prime Minister Zou En-lai came to India the same year, he was greeted with the slogans of Hindi-Cheeni Bhai Bhai (Indians and Chinese are brothers)." Zou was to visit again a couple of times, but it was never the same.
It could not be the same after the India-China border skirmish of 1962. This ended in what has been projected as a debacle for India, but it was really a defeat for all those who had hoped and worked for India-China friendship. The victors were forces that did not want a future of Asian unity and all that it implied.
Their victory was so complete and lasting that the peoples of the two most populous countries in the world know very little of each other today. Two generations have grown up with no idea of the thousand-year-old ties to which revered leaders of both countries once used to make repeated references.
Speaking as an Indian at the end of his teens in 1962, I can recall how the political Right and the far Right seized upon the skirmish as an opportunity and, brick by propagandist brick, built India's own Great Wall to keep the people away from their neighbors and apparently natural allies. When the skirmish sufficed to inspire popular verse demonizing the Chinese as "snake-eaters" and worse, it was no surprise that school textbooks ceased all of a sudden to have a place for the past of a great civilization.
I don't know if anything similar happened across the snow-capped Himalayas. But I saw, during my ten-day sojourn, few signs of any popular Chinese awareness of India and its history beyond the days of Buddhism. "Indian Buddhism became Chinese Buddhism here," our girl guide and several others stressed, and somehow India seemed to have been left behind since then.
I must acknowledge, however, that I could espy not the least evidence of anti-Indian hostility among the ordinary people. Some of them recalled that Hindi films were popular in China until the seventies, but have ceased to be so now. This, however, does not seem to be the result of any political propaganda or policy, but because of greater popularity of films from Hong Kong (owned proudly by every Chinese as "part of our country").
Is it not time to remedy this situation? Why could we not start a campaign for promotion of people-to-people relations between India and China, like the one launched some three years ago between India and Pakistan, and carry it forward with welcome consequences? I put this question to my hosts, the Chinese People's Association for Peace and Development (CPAPD).
As I noted in these columns before, CPAPD Secretary-General Niu Quiang responded positively and with palpable enthusiasm. He agreed, especially with the argument that such a campaign could create an atmosphere conducive to a peaceful settlement of disputes between the two countries.
To me, as to many others in India's peace movement, an ulterior motive obviously lurked behind the official part of the India-Pakistan "peace process." Both New Delhi and Islamabad were striving to posture as "responsible nuclear powers" when they initiated the process. The movement's campaign for people-to-people relations here, however , elicited a popular response and created a popular pressure that has kept the process going.
India and Pakistan, of course, have not moved an inch towards even a semblance of talks on a reduction of their nuclear arsenals or a respite in the nuclear arms race. But even hardened cynics today do not expect an outbreak of hostilities between the South Asian neighbors who have gone to war with each other four times in 60 years. And there is even mention of talks on Kashmir, for decades a strictly tabooed subject wherever diplomats of the two countries were supposed to sit together.
In the case of India and Pakistan, the campaign for people-to-people relations struck millions of chords through symbols of shared heritage, ranging from Sufi poetry and classical music to succulent kebabs. It is not as if similarly evocative symbols cannot be found in the case of India and China, though special efforts have to be made.
There should be no need to explain why the peace movement should accord high priority to a peaceful settlement of India-China disputes at the current juncture. There should be no such need after repeated presentations by official US security think-tanks of the case for building India up as a "counterweight" to China and for inducting India into its missile defense program in Asia. The eagerly welcoming response to the idea from India's jingoists and nuclear militarists makes this need all the more urgent.
At a function in Beijing in 2005, where Mahatma Gandhi's statue was unveiled, a Chinese student of more than average acquaintance with India is reported to have regretted that his people did not know of the beauties of Bharatanatyam, a classical South Indian dance form. The statement showed a Chinese sensitivity to such beauties.
Talking of the Mahatma, Chinese scholars have pointed to the close similarity between his views and those of the great Chinese philosopher Confucius on the value of "filial piety" and various norms of ethics. Prospects for people-to-people relations between India and China are bright because the messages of Confucius, the Buddha and Gandhi have much in common.
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