Letter From New Delhi

One evening last September, Asgar Qadri, a wiry, 27-year-old credit analyst from Indian-controlled Kashmir, stood at the glittering departure terminal of New Delhi's international airport surrounded by a small group of friends. The boys hugged Qadri and patted his back with exclamations of random names they associated with China: "The Bird's Nest!" "Hu Jintao!" "Huawei!"

As Qadri pushed his luggage trolley toward the Air China counter, his eyes brimmed with tears. A schoolteacher's son from a remote Kashmiri village, he had recently won a scholarship to study public policy at Tsinghua University, in Beijing. "With that flight to Beijing," Qadri later told me, "I felt my life was about to take off."

But Indian immigration officials told Qadri that all Indian passport holders must have their visas pasted on, not stapled to, their passports. He was barred from boarding the flight.

Various meetings with Chinese and Indian officials revealed that Qadri had gotten swept up in a hostile diplomatic battle between the two rising Asian powers. In a signal of China's resistance to India's control of the disputed regions of Kashmir and Arunachal Pradesh, which China has long claimed as "Southern Tibet," China began issuing stapled visas to Indian passport holders from those areas.

Qadri lost his scholarship in Beijing and quietly began to apply for graduate study in the United States. The Indian media, however, immediately went into hysterics over his case and those of other Indian nationals caught up in similar altercations; talk of Chinese interference and aggression was everywhere, as was the memory of India's 1962 border war with China.

China's decision to needle India over Kashmir -- long one of India's most sensitive diplomatic issues -- suggests a major departure from China's earlier noninterventionist policy. In India, the crisis has become perhaps the most visible sign of the friction that will accompany the so-called Asian century: as China's and India's economies continue to grow, the two countries will vie for greater influence, competing for both markets and resources.

In the weeks that followed Qadri's visa dispute and the ensuing uproar, tensions continued to rise. In October, China opposed a trip by Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to Arunachal Pradesh to campaign for candidates from his Congress Party running in local elections. Chinese foreign ministry officials called on India to address their "serious concerns" and "not trigger disturbances in the disputed region."

This showdown was the latest in a series of disagreements over the status of Arunachal Pradesh, part of which was under Tibetan rule until it was annexed by British India during World War II. Last spring, China objected to a $2.9 billion loan to India from the Asian Development Bank, $60 million of which was earmarked for flood management in Arunachal Pradesh. Five months later, in August, China moved approximately 50,000 additional soldiers to the Tibetan border, about 25 miles from Tawang, a town in Arunachal Pradesh that is the second-holiest site for Tibetan Buddhists after Lhasa. India responded by deploying tens of thousands of its own troops to its border with China.
 
Soon after China protested Singh's visit, India countered with its own objections to the construction of a Chinese power plant and other projects in Pakistani-controlled Kashmir. The Indian foreign ministry called on the Chinese to "cease such activities in areas illegally occupied by Pakistan." A few weeks later, China took issue with the construction of a road along India's de facto border with China in Ladakh, a part of Indian-controlled Kashmir; construction was stopped. At the same time, Indian analysts began speaking of incursions by the Chinese military across the border.

Tensions rose even higher in November, when the Dalai Lama was preparing to visit the Tawang monastery, where he spent his first night of exile after crossing the border from China into India in 1959. Since 2005, when India began pursuing close ties with China, New Delhi had adopted a colder posture toward Tibetan activists. But with China renewing the border dispute, India asserted its sovereignty over Arunachal Pradesh and allowed the Dalai Lama's visit. Although the Dalai Lama described his intentions as "nonpolitical," many believe that he was trying to identify his eventual successor among the monks at the monastery.

The event reawakened tensions over the two countries' 2,200-mile effective border, known as the McMahon Line, named after Sir Henry McMahon, the foreign secretary of British India who demarcated it in 1904. McMahon negotiated the border with a then autonomous Tibetan government. Today, India largely accepts the line, but China rejects it, because it views the border as an impediment to Chinese control of Tibet. After a series of border skirmishes in the 1950s, the two countries fought a brief war in 1962. In 2005, China and India agreed to a framework that would solve the dispute with a series of mutually accepted adjustments, but little progress has been made since.

The festering discord -- and relations with China, in general -- is perhaps the one foreign policy issue that causes anxiety for an otherwise buoyant and optimistic government in New Delhi. Some Indian policymakers believe China's newfound assertiveness stems from its relative economic clout after the United States and Europe were hit especially hard by the global recession. "The Chinese have come out at the top of the heap," said India's former ambassador to the UN, Arundhati Ghosh, who was involved in negotiating the U.S.-India nuclear deal that was strongly opposed by China. "It is that sense of power that is leading them to prick India and flex muscles."