Alas, I topic I'm deeply opinionated on and have waited to discuss in depth. But in brief: I
strongly believe China needs to take a proactive, direct stance towards India and pull them to China's side even at great cost. Failure means India will become a threat that puts the combined West to shame.
Briefly, we need to understand India's current ruling party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), are very literally fascists:
In brief, the BJP was created by a member of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the oldest continuous fascist party in the world. Indian Fascism isn't about promoting a fictional "glorious nation" like European or Japanese fascists, it's about
becoming the colonizer. To really drive home the point. Mahatma Ghandhi's assassin, Nathuram Godse, was a Hindutva and member of the RSS:
.
That's right, the RSS wanted to become the oppressors so badly
they murdered India's liberator.
This isn't even getting into the direct ties from Hindutva with Nazism and Mussolini.
Before the BJP and Narendra Modi's rise to power, Indian views of China ranged from jealous admiration to open admiration. That's why you still see Indians pop up in forums like these and broadly agreeing with the sentiments. The BJP's specific targeting of China as a boogyman may be from Mao Zhedong's support for the Communist Part of India (CPI), who were a major force in keeping the RSS at bay at the grassroots level. Over time the CPI fractured, China dropped its support, and the RSS found new allies in the West.
To make matters worse,
who
to further the party's agenda. They're also responsible for one of the largest disinformation networks on the planet, spreading anti-China propraganda in the EU. From EU DisInfo Lab:
I could keep going with things like the RSS
(
) but I think you know where I'm coming from. It is not an exaggeration to say India is a young and fairly weak country that is being hijacked from within by Indian Fascists. Unlike Europeans or even Japanese fascists, they're not chasing fantasies of glory, but to crush other Indians under their boot while attacking anyone and everyone who stands in their way.
There is no version of this where China can just sit by and pretend the problem will solve itself. On a practical level, letting fascism take root in such a huge country on China's border
will be a problem in the foreseeable future. We're already dealing with the cancer of Japanese Fascism, but at least Japan is a stagnate country dwarfed by China in every metric. India may never become as wealthy or prosperous as China, but the Nazis weren't wealtheir than the British when they bombed London.
In a perfect world, I'd like to see China's relations with India mirror the US with Korea or Japan: unprecedented prosparity for fanatical loyalty in return. It is always better to have friends than enemies.