Modi's recognition of Taiwanese president increases tensions between India and China

In the week since he claimed a third term as Indian Prime Minister, Narendra Modis official account on X (formerly Twitter) is full of responses to congratulatory messages from dozens of world leaders from Ukraine. Volodymyr Zelensky to the American president Joe Biden to the Pakistanis Shehbaz Sharifand even people like Bill Gates And Elon Musk.

But one article in particular has raised concerns in China and raised eyebrows everywhere else. Taiwan's recently elected president, Lai Ching-te, was among the first to congratulate Modi last week in a message touting the growing partnership between Taiwan and India. Modi responded by endorsing closer ties between the two governments as well as a mutually beneficial economic and technological partnership.

As expected, China did not take this well. China opposes any form of official interaction between Taiwan authorities and countries having diplomatic relations with China, said Mao Ning, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson. told reportersreiterating Beijing's position that Taiwan is an inalienable part of the territory of the People's Republic of China and adding that China has protested to India over the issue.

The interaction between Modi and Lai did not take place in a vacuum. India and Taiwan have grown closer in recent years, largely thanks to technologies such as semiconductor chips and mobile device manufacturing.

Taiwanese company Powerchip Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp (PSMC) is building a chip manufacturing plant in partnership with Indian conglomerate Tata in Modi's home state of Gujarat, while Taiwanese manufacturing giant Foxconn, which assembles much of the world's iPhoneshas significantly expanded its manufacturing base in India. The two governments also sign an agreement in February for bring Indian migrant workers to Taiwan to alleviate the island's long-standing labor shortage.

That's partly because of India's own technology goals and a recognition that Taiwan is one of the world's largest and most advanced economies, said Tanvi Madan, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. in Washington, DC. This fits with India's search for like-minded people. partners, particularly in strategic technologies.

Apples elevation India, both market and manufacturing base also played a key role, Madan added, given that the US tech giant relies heavily on Taiwanese companies for components and assembly. Apple is almost running that business-to-business relationship, she said.

On the other hand, Modi's decision to publicly respond to Lai was unprecedented in many ways, and it was likely intended to send a subtle message to China, with which India's relations have deteriorated significantly over the from the same period when its ties with Taiwan deepened.

Military clashes on the India-China border in 2020, in which nearly two dozen soldiers were killed, damaged the bonhomie built by Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping. during their respective first mandates in the office. Both countries have since strengthened their troops and infrastructure at the border, and India's retaliation has also included banning TikTok and dozens of other Chinese apps. (Notably, Xi has yet to officially congratulate Modi on his victory, unlike what happened after past elections.)

It was the time when [India] We realized that if China doesn't pay attention to our red lines, why should we pay attention to China's red lines? said Sana Hashmia, a member of a Taipei-based think tank called Taiwan-Asia Exchange Foundation, who has previously worked with the Indian and Taiwanese foreign ministries. Over the years, we have seen China give India many reasons to focus on Taiwan, she added.

India, like the United States and many other countries, officially joins a The One China Policy which recognizes the Beijing government as China's sole global representative, even if New Delhi has not yet done so. publicly reiterated this position for more than a decade. (Modi's response to Lai, notably, did not include any possible trigger words, such as Taiwan or president.)

Ahead of India's recent week-long national elections, in which Modi won a third term, some timid signs of a possible rapprochement between India and China have appeared. At a meeting at last year's BRICS summit, Modi and Xi agreed to try to de-escalate the impasse at the border, and the post of Chinese ambassador to New Delhi, who had sitting vacant for 18 months, was finally filled in May this year.

But Modi's response to Laias, however calibrated it may have been, likely made any further engagement incredibly unlikely, if not entirely impossible, according to Sushant Singh, a lecturer at Yale University and Foreign policy contributor who has previously served in the Indian Army. This is a very clear provocation, this is outside the norm that we have seen established, Singh said. This has the potential to derail any path to normalcy that many of us saw following Modi's re-election.

The terms of this re-election, which culminated with the Modis Bharatiya Janata Party's inability to secure a majority on its own and having to rely on smaller parties to form a coalition government, could also have played a role in the Indian Prime Minister's decision to antagonize Beijing by publicly engaging Taiwan. Many people believe this was because Modi was seen as a much weaker leader after the election results, Singh said, adding that for Modi, the response to Lai was also a way to convey his strength, to make understand that he was going to stand up to China. , and he is going to be as bold and tough as he was in Modi 2.0.

China's response so far has been largely bluster and more deaf more blustering than his response to messages of congratulations from Washington to Lai on his election earlier this year. And the India-China border is already as militarized as it can be without escalating into a full-blown armed conflict that neither country would likely want.

Despite Modi's seemingly reduced political mandate on the domestic front, India's foreign policy is unlikely to change significantly, as perhaps illustrated by Monday's announcement that Foreign Minister S. Jaishankar will resume his role in Modi's new cabinet.

This foreign policy has also been marked by a closer relationship between India and the United States, defined largely by mutual concern over the rise of China. India has not publicly committed to defending Taiwan in the event of a Chinese invasion as Washington has, and it remains unclear what role, if any, New Delhi would play in such an event. But there is growing recognition that such a conflict would impact India's national and regional security. India's top military official last year would have ordered a study of possible scenarios of a Sino-Taiwanese conflict and actions that India could take.

“I think there is a greater awareness, for a number of reasons, of the impact that a Taiwan eventuality would have on India and its negative implications,” said Madan, the Brookings scholar. I suppose the next stage of this discussion will be about the range of things that India might be willing to do or not do.

But India's growing engagement with Taiwan should also be seen in its own right rather than just from the US-China perspective, according to the Taiwan-Asia Exchange Foundations Hashmi. China played an important role, but I think the merit of involving Taiwan is something that the [Modi government] I already realized it, she said. Differences with China have made leaders less hesitant to talk about Taiwan.

Although Modi's overtures to Taiwan may well be designed to provoke China, they may also be partly a function of his government's foreign policy doctrine of multi-alignment, in which India's relations are dictated more purely by its national interests than by external pressures or global pressures. rule-based order precedents. Modi's message of thanks to Zelensky, for example, was followed by an equally effusive message to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Modi has this general attitude: if I do something with a country, why am I hiding it? Madan said, noting that he was the first Indian prime minister to visit both Israel and Palestine.

I think with China he should be a little more careful, so I don't think it would just be a joke. If you talk to a Chinese person who calls for dialogue, they will probably tell you that they should not have done that, she added. So this could be a signal, [or] it could just be Modi.