EDITOR’S NOTE: In this thoughtful address at the launch of the book Is This the Time for the Indian Elephant & the Chinese Dragon to Dance Together?, Dr. Shashi Tharoor draws on his chapter “The Return of Chindia” to examine the cautious thaw in India-China relations. He explores the deep historical ties between the two ancient civilizations alongside persistent challenges such as the unresolved border dispute, trade imbalances, and strategic mistrust, arguing that true progress depends on sustained, substantive cooperation rather than mere symbolic summits. Read the full transcript of the address below:
Opening Remarks
Dr Shashi Tharoor: Good evening, everyone, and thank you, Surendra, for those extremely generous words. I have to say that I feel bad to see you all squeeze into this tiny space, but Surendra has launched books here before. And I think it’s a reflection of his relationship with the IIC that we all squeeze into this intimate forum and have an opportunity to share ideas — perhaps in a context in which they sort of germinate more easily across this close, tight, and intimate surrounding.
But anyway, I’m very happy to have had a chance to launch Is This the Time for the Indian Elephant and the Chinese Dragon to Dance Together?, which is a question on which I have a number of thoughts myself. But I must say, Surendra, that getting 14 foreign ambassadors, generals, ministers, and academics to agree on a title is itself an achievement.
Achievement. And getting them to agree on anything else — as this book very cheerfully demonstrates through its contents — was clearly never the objective. Now, I should declare at the outset that I’m not an entirely neutral observer, because I’m one of the 14 contributors to this volume. And I have, in the piece that I wrote now more than a year and a half ago, made the case that the recent movement from confrontation towards conversation deserves to be taken seriously, though not uncritically. Of course, the question posed by the book is much larger than mine — mine is probably the shortest contribution to it.
A Book of Many Voices
There must be very many substantive answers that you can find between the pages. But the real question that comes to all of us gathered today is: what kind of relationship with China is actually possible? And obviously, the books that Surendra mentioned have already come out in the fairly recent past, in the last couple of years. You mentioned half a dozen distinguished authors have written books on India and China. This one, of course, is not the view of a single author.
He’s brought together diplomats who’ve served in Beijing. He’s brought together soldiers who’ve dealt with the realities of the frontier. Economists who’ve examined the formidable asymmetries in the relationship, and strategists who’ve considered where those realities may lead. And so you get very many different vantage points in the book, and, of course, you get very many different answers.
Several of the contributors may well disagree with each other, and, of course, others will disagree with parts of theirs or ours — and that’s not a weakness of this volume. I think it’s the strength of Surendra’s compilation here. India-China relations are far too consequential and far too complicated to admit of easy answers or manufactured consensus. So we don’t have a chorus here with one particular theme. We have an argument, and that’s perhaps exactly where our own discussion should begin — with the realities on which we can agree, before confronting the rather more difficult question of what India should do about them.
Reading from a Recent Op-Ed
And, of course, Surendra was kind enough to mention my more recent piece, just about three weeks old, from The Hindu, which was written in reaction to a number of conversations I was having — both with members of the business community who had been talking to me a lot on this, and with those from, shall we say, the small commentariat writing about foreign policy, some of whom are represented in this room, who’ve been arguing that now, because Washington is not perhaps the lodestar that some may have imagined, the time has come to move in the direction of a greater accommodation with China.
I’ll just read a few paragraphs from this article, because it was written much after the one that’s in the book, just to update my thinking in this particular context. And I quote:
“By advocating a return to the pre-2020 status quo, these suggestions choose to selectively forget a dozen years of relentless, unprovoked aggression by the PLA — the People’s Liberation Army — and the Chinese Communist Party across our Line of Actual Control. The list of Beijing’s hostile acts against Indian sovereignty is not a series of isolated border skirmishes, but a coherent strategy of containment and humiliation — from Depsang in 2013 and Chumar in 2014, to Doklam in 2017, and then the fatal clashes in the Galwan Valley in 2020, which killed 20 of our soldiers.”
China has systematically — every one of these was initiated and provoked by them — attempted to alter the Line of Actual Control through salami-slicing tactics, unilaterally violating decades of border peace protocols. Beijing continues to aggressively assert absurd claims over the entire state of Arunachal Pradesh, renaming geographical features in places it does not control but would like to, and issuing stapled visas to residents of Jammu & Kashmir and Arunachal Pradesh to weaponize India’s internal geography.
And then there’s the economic coercion. China has routinely used its manufacturing dominance as a political weapon, abruptly withholding critical machinery and industrial inputs, even weaponizing its monopoly over rare earths and tunnel-boring machines during bilateral disputes, simply to inconvenience Indian industries and signal its leverage — knowing fully well that India has none to exercise in return.
China’s Support for Pakistan and the UN Veto
Most alarming has been Beijing’s overt, coordinated military support for Pakistan during Operation Sindoor in May 2025, by providing Islamabad with real-time tactical satellite data and intelligence.
China transformed itself from a mere military supplier of Pakistan into an active, hostile participant in Pakistan’s security architecture against India. To ignore this track record in pursuit of cheaper components to import is not pragmatism — it is strategic blindness.
And, of course, the counterargument that some of my business friends make is that if India relaxes its economic guard, China will reciprocate with geopolitical goodwill — which I don’t have any basis to agree with. Beijing does not view New Delhi as a peer, nor does it desire India to become one.
And for over a decade, in addition to what it’s been doing on the LAC, it has also weaponized its veto at the UN Security Council to shield Pakistan-based terrorist organizations from international sanctions and condemnation. It has blocked India’s legitimate aspirations for permanent membership in the Security Council, and membership in the Nuclear Suppliers Group.
If India opens the floodgates to Chinese capital, investment, and market access — without any fundamental movement, let alone resolution, of the border dispute, or a halt to Beijing’s hostile behavior — it effectively subsidizes its own encirclement. Pouring billions of dollars into Chinese coffers as a compliant consumer market merely expands the asymmetrical trade deficit. Currently, we have a $100 billion-plus deficit against us.
And more dangerously, it hands Beijing an economic kill switch over the Indian economy. I go on at some length, but I will read one more short paragraph:
“Advocates of a reset argue that easing economic tensions could pave the way for a permanent demarcation of the border. In reality, the opposite is true. China respects power and exploits vulnerability.”
If India surrenders its economic leverage and signals that it cannot sustain a prolonged standoff, Beijing will conclude that its strategy of multi-domain pressure is working. China will simply bide its time, allowing India to grow comfortably dependent once again. When Beijing eventually decides it’s ready to discuss a permanent border settlement, it will dictate terms from a position of absolute dominance.
I’m afraid that is my somewhat pessimistic reading. I know that I haven’t served in China, unlike many of those in this room and many of those who have contributed to this book, and I’m perfectly prepared for pushback.
Trust, Disengagement, and the Limits of Normalization
But I think we can’t entirely disagree that since Galwan — which came at the end of that string of other incidents that they provoked — political trust has deteriorated sharply. Economic ties have inevitably come under greater scrutiny. And the basis for the kind of modus vivendi we had with China has obviously become very difficult to sustain. Now there is a disengagement agreement from October 2024. There’s even been some gradual resumption of high-level contacts, but disengagement is not normalization.
And tens of thousands of troops are still deployed on both sides of the frontier. The status quo ante, of course, has not been restored by China as far as the pre-Galwan situation was concerned, and we just can’t imagine returning to that unless there is progress on all these issues.
But at the same time, I acknowledge that there’s a limit to how much I can take my argument. China is, after all, our largest neighbor. It is still a major trading partner. It’s a fellow nuclear power. It’s a permanent member of the UN Security Council. And, of course, it’s an increasingly consequential player on the world stage.
So, as I’ve said, there are very fundamental divergences between us, but neither geography nor geopolitics can permit us the luxury of pretending that permanent confrontation is viable either. So, of course, we can’t retreat to the sentimental goodwill of “Hindi-Chini Bhai-Bhai” of the 1950s.
Toward a New Equilibrium
The challenge, of course, is to find a relationship that accommodates our genuine competition and rivalry — spelt out to you — without allowing every disagreement to become confrontation. Shyam Saran, in his essay, calls it “a search for a new equilibrium,” and the phrase is apt. What India requires is neither romanticism nor hostility, but a framework in which we can manage peace on the border while maintaining military preparedness, economic interests, and, of course, the strategic competition we can’t avoid.
Now I say that while recognizing that the imbalance between the two countries has grown enormously. China’s economy is now five times the size of India’s. In 1990, it was about the same. Its defense expenditure is substantially greater. Its manufacturing depth, as I said earlier, gives it forms of leverage that statistics alone cannot capture. So we can’t afford to have illusions either.
Strategic autonomy, after all, can’t just mean a problem. It has to involve preserving our capacity to make choices in India’s interests, wherever the pressure comes from on us from others. And I think we need to clearly come up with a solution. As I suggested in the last line of my op-ed: we needn’t tilt either way — we need to walk straight. The argument is that we have to possess sufficient economic strength, sufficient military preparedness, sufficient diplomatic room for maneuver, that our engagement with China will remain a choice rather than a compulsion.
The Civilizational Relationship
And that is common sense, I’d like to think, and I hope it squares the circle amongst the different points of view in this book.
I do want to acknowledge — and I know some scholars here would particularly appreciate — the civilizational relationship, and the knowledge that throughout most of our history, India and China encountered each other not as adversaries but through ideas, faith, scholarship, and trade: Buddhism traveling from India to China, Chinese pilgrims coming to Nalanda, which I’ve been to, in search of Buddhist learning, and Bodhidharma carrying Buddhist teachings from India to China. And, of course, that proves that there were good relations at one time, and you could always argue it’s not impossible to recreate such a relationship.
But at the same time, one has to accept that not only that civilizational history, but even the common anti-colonial spirit of Bandung — the talk of Asian solidarity itself — came a cropper in the 1962 war.
And though we painstakingly — and many of you contributed through your own services there — rebuilt the relationship over many decades, trade expanded dramatically, diplomatic engagement deepened, and we were cooperating and even jointly participating in forums like BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, even while the boundary question remained unresolved. But the points I read out from my op-ed in The Hindu, I think, have demonstrated the limits of that accommodation. And it doesn’t mean that we don’t recognize that, despite all our problems in the past, we found ways to engage with each other.
Resurrecting “Chindia”
And there has been a fairly decent level of exchange at various times. How do we manage to maintain both — acknowledge our differences without permitting those differences to consume the entire relationship? In this essay, I resurrected that curious and now completely unfashionable term, “Chindia,” but I did so with caution, not sentimentality. I certainly don’t think that India and China are destined for some grand civilizational partnership anymore. I don’t think, as you heard me say, that the disputes can be wished away.
They are a reality. I think: how do we manage, nonetheless, a modus vivendi? How do we manage to live together without something unthinkable happening between us? And that requires a number of things, because for us, peace and predictability on the border are essential, and the Chinese are not giving us either, for some time now. And I don’t think, personally, that the boundary question can indefinitely be quarantined from the wider relationship.
So, yes, we want disengagement. Yes, we need dialogue. But more important, we need arrangements that reduce the possibility of another confrontation and restore some stability to the frontier. Yes, we need open channels of communication. We also need open eyes — maybe on both sides of our head, or three sides, like Brahma.
Deterrence, Trade, and Self-Reliance
Credible deterrence, of course, is one of the things that makes serious engagement on peace possible. We cannot afford to come across as too weak to do that. Then trade — I’ve already mentioned that, and what I read about. But the fact is that interdependence becomes a strategic vulnerability when our dependence runs overwhelmingly in one direction. So we must do much more to strengthen domestic manufacturing, to diversify supply chains, to build capacity in sectors where we cannot afford to remain dependent on them.
It’s very striking that up to about 1990, we actually produced about 75% of active pharmaceutical ingredients ourselves. Today, we are the world’s largest exporters of generic pharmaceuticals, but 75% of those pharmaceuticals are made with active pharmaceutical ingredients from China. We have created a dependence we never needed to. And these are the kinds of things we need to fix. We certainly value strategic autonomy, but that only has any real meaning if it enlarges our choices.
It cannot be a phrase that, in this particular relationship, imprisons us into a situation where we find that we are locked into a logic we can’t break out of. I would argue very seriously that we certainly don’t want to allow our choices or options to be dictated by anybody else’s rivalries, anybody else’s geostrategic interests — and you know what I’m talking about. But at the same time, we must have some room for cooperation with China, in places like BRICS — the BRICS Summit is next month here — or on issues affecting our mutual interests: compete where our interests diverge, resist where our security is threatened, and just be strong enough to deal with China as it is. That, essentially, is the answer for me.
The Kathakali Metaphor
And I think the best metaphor for it in this book is my friend Dhruva Rao’s essay, where she turns not to the language of geostrategics or theory, but to Kathakali.
Kathakali. Imagine, she suggests, two accomplished performers sharing a stage, each conscious of the other’s presence, each guarding its own space, each reading the other’s movements with care. They do not need to embrace. They do not even need to trust each other completely, but they must understand the choreography well enough to ensure that rivalry does not become collision. And there’s something very, very apt about that image for India and China.
Kathakali does not demand affection between the dancers. It demands discipline. It requires each performer to know his or her own position, to understand the other’s movements, and, above all, to recognize the boundaries of the stage they share. That’s perhaps a more useful ambition for India-China relations than either the exuberance or the fatalism of assuming that the two countries are destined for confrontation and “Hindi-Chini Bye-Bye.” We need not mistake coexistence for friendship, nor competition for enmity.
Closing Remarks
What matters is whether both countries can establish enough predictability, restraint, and mutual respect to prevent their differences from overwhelming even the small interests that they share.
So, to return to my dear friend Surendra Kumar’s deliberately provocative title, I do not think the elephant and the dragon are quite ready to dance. There is too much mistrust, too much unfinished business on the border, and too considerable an asymmetry between them for such an image to be taken literally. And the problem with dancing together, Surendra, is that if the elephant steps on the dragon’s foot, she can at most cause a minor fracture. But if the dragon breathes fire, he can incinerate the elephant.
So I think let’s establish the rules, recognize each other’s space, cooperate where interests coincide, and compete without allowing competition to become conflict. “We cannot choose our geography,” in Vajpayee’s famous phrase, but we can choose our choreography in this Kathakali dance.
And that’s why I congratulate you on this volume. It’s particularly valuable at this moment. It does not offer the comfort of a single prescription, because none exists. Its contributors disagree about the pace of the thaw, the possibilities of economic engagement, the weight that India should attach to American policy, even the degree of optimism with which we should approach Beijing. Ambassador Kumar’s achievement as editor is not to have ironed out those disagreements, but to have placed them in conversation with one another.
And, of course, China is too consequential — to our security, our prosperity, our place in the world — for this exercise not to be undertaken. We all know the relationship demands clear-eyed engagement. We need a multiple set of points of view within our country to focus our approach.
We need preparedness at the border. We need greater resilience at home. And we need confidence in India’s own strategic choices. And that, I think, is amply laid out in the many contributions in this book.
So let’s welcome the disagreements the volume contains, recognizing that they should be welcomed rather than resolved — that there is no world of certainties in the field that many of you have worked in, that of foreign policy — and that the complexity this volume invites us to engage with and argue with is actually extremely valuable. Some readers may finish the book persuaded that the dragon is extending a hand. Others may conclude it’s merely adjusting its claws. But either way, they will emerge with a clearer understanding of the choices India confronts.
And those choices extend well beyond the Himalayas. The two of us together account for a third of humanity, and whatever we end up doing — or not doing, or doing badly, or doing well — will shape not only the future of Asia, but the balance of power in a world already marked by conflict, uncertainty, and geopolitical transition. We do not need to imagine an improbable friendship to recognize the value of a stable peace. We don’t need to surrender our interests in order to pursue cooperation.
What we need, I would argue, is the confidence to engage without illusion, compete without rancor, and disagree without allowing disagreement to become destiny.
So congratulations to Surendra Kumar and all my fellow contributors to this volume on this timely and thought-provoking book. I hope it provokes the debate that I have tried to ignite this evening with my own remarks.
I must apologize to all of you in advance — I’ve already apologized to Surendra that I must leave now for two other engagements that loom ahead. But I do want to say very much, I wish you could have stayed, because I respect very much the distinguished speakers on the stage and many in the audience, as I know they have many contributions to make. But I hope you’ll enjoy a wonderful discussion. Thank you very much.
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