The Mirage of the Global South – 01/20/2023 – Demétrio Magnoli

April, according to UN estimates, is the month of overcoming. At the end of 2023, India will have 1.428 billion inhabitants, against 1.426 in China. More than a number, it’s a flag. The Chinese population will soon begin to decline, while the Indian population will only reach its peak (1.7 billion) in 2064. China faces the “4-2-1 phenomenon”: a single child for two parents and four grandparents; in India, on the contrary, the share of the working-age population is expanding.

Demographic trends give India an advantage over a decades-long horizon. Immediately, overtaking gives him a symbolic triumph, with psychological impacts on a chronic geopolitical rivalry.

Back in 1955, the “Bandung spirit” of the Non-Aligned Movement’s inaugural conference heralded a Sino-Indian rapprochement. It was short-lived: the 1962 border war opened a deep wound, shifting India towards economic and military cooperation with the USSR and sealing the Sino-Pakistani alliance.

Three decades later, after the end of the Cold War and the implosion of the Soviet state, an ephemeral rapprochement took shape. The movement, however, was interrupted by the US military operation in Afghanistan. The overthrow of the Taliban regime, an ally of Pakistan, tightened Indo-American relations. In 2007, India joined the Quad (Quadrilateral Strategic Dialogue), an alliance forged by the US, Japan and Australia as a counterpoint to Chinese influence in the Indo-Pacific.

The rise of Xi Jinping in 2012 marked a leap in Chinese ambitions. China First – the foreign policy of the new Grand Helmsman was structured around two contradictory strategies. Globally, under the concept of Great Power Diplomacy, India should be courted as a priority partner and removed from US geopolitical initiatives in the Indo-Pacific. Regionally, under the Neighborhood Strategy, aimed at converting China into the uncontested Asian leader, India would need to bow to Chinese hegemony. The dilemma, which remains unresolved, has poisoned bilateral relations.

More or less frozen since 2008, the Quad was reactivated in 2017 and four years later, in a direct message to Xi Jinping, he declared as his goals “a free and open Indo-Pacific” and “a rules-based maritime order in the seas”. of Eastern and Southern China”. The adherence of the Hindu nationalist government of Narendra Modi to the communiqué marked a clear break with the traditional Indian policy of non-alignment.

Months before the announcement, in mid-2020, clashes on the disputed border line of Ladakh and Tibet reignited the fire of Sino-Indian rivalry. In the remote Galwan valley, next to the imposing Karakoram range, skirmishes between soldiers left 20 Indians and four Chinese dead. The incident was provoked by the construction of roads and Chinese military infrastructure in the border strip of the Aksai Chin, an “area under recognized dispute”, according to the curious formula of the bilateral jargon.

China talks of isolating border disputes from the broader relationship between the two countries. However, from India’s point of view, border stabilization is defined as an indispensable condition for the normalization of relations. After the clashes, Modi banned apps controlled by his neighbor and blocked massive Chinese investments on the so-called New Silk Road. In late 2022, Indian and US forces conducted joint exercises in the state of Uttarakhand, on the outskirts of Chinese Tibet.

In the Lula government’s foreign policy circles, the romanticized view of the South-South axis prevails, an illusory attempt to update the Third World doctrines of the past. However, the “Global South” must be described as a mirage: a field of competition between China and India, separated by a geopolitical chasm.

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