How is the ‘Belt and Road Initiative’ of China going to affect India-China relations? (2017, 20 Marks)
The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), launched by Xi Jinping in 2013, is China’s attempt to wire Eurasia and the Indian Ocean to its economy through transport, energy and digital networks. India has refused to join since boycotting the first Belt and Road Forum in May 2017, so BRI is a standing bilateral irritant. Its effect is that of a multiplier: it hardens old disputes, carries rivalry into India’s neighbourhood and seas, and still leaves room for limited cooperation.
Hardening the core dispute
- The China–Pakistan Economic Corridor, BRI’s flagship, runs through Gilgit-Baltistan, territory India claims. China, already holding the Shaksgam tract ceded by Pakistan in 1963, acquires a material stake in the Kashmir dispute that it must now defend.
- India’s objection is framed as sovereignty and territorial integrity, which leaves no room for compromise; India stays out of the BRI paragraph of SCO declarations, Tianjin (2025) included. Shivshankar Menon argued (April 2017) that CPEC lacks economic logic and entrenches Pakistan’s occupation. The pledge at Kabul (20 August 2025) to extend CPEC into Afghanistan widens the corridor further.
- The corridor deepens the two-front problem. After Operation Sindoor (May 2025), India’s Deputy Chief of Army Staff said China had fed Pakistan live inputs, and China supplied about 80% of Pakistan’s arms imports in 2021–25 (SIPRI). Pakistan is one of Kanti Bajpai’s “four Ps” of rivalry (India Versus China, 2021); BRI hard-wires it.
Rivalry in the neighbourhood and at sea
- BRI turns South Asia into a competitive market for finance. Nepal signed a BRI cooperation framework in December 2024; Sri Lanka leased Hambantota for 99 years in 2017. India answers with credit lines, grants and crisis support, as for Sri Lanka in 2022.
- At sea, ports from Gwadar to Kyaukphyu and the Djibouti base (2017) feed fears of a “string of pearls”, shaping India’s response from SAGAR (2015) to MAHASAGAR (2025), the Quad and Malabar.
- The debt-trap charge, popularised by Brahma Chellaney, sharpens Indian messaging; Deborah Brautigam’s counter-evidence on Hambantota shows the picture is more mixed.
A contest of orders
- Constructivists see a clash of status: BRI offers a hierarchical, Sinocentric order in which India would be a junior participant, and India’s identity as a civilisational power rejects that role.
- India’s alternative stresses standards over scale: INSTC, Chabahar, the Kaladan project and the India–Middle East–Europe Economic Corridor (2023). The Bangladesh–China–India–Myanmar corridor, once a meeting point, has stalled.
- Realists expect balancing, and Menon foresaw that a geopolitical BRI would meet countervailing forces: it has pushed India closer to the United States, Japan, Australia and France.
Room for cooperation
- Liberals stress complementarity. India is the largest borrower from the China-led Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and co-founded the BRICS New Development Bank, so it accepts Chinese-linked finance multilaterally.
- New routes and supply chains could serve Make in India if India engages selectively; climate and energy offer joint work, and Project Mausam echoes the Maritime Silk Road.
- The 2024–26 thaw, from the Kazan meeting (October 2024) and Narendra Modi’s Tianjin visit (August 2025) to Xi’s talks with Modi in New Delhi at the BRICS summit (September 2026), came without any change in India’s BRI stance. BRI therefore constrains the relationship without vetoing it; CPEC engagement itself fell 77% in 2025.
Conclusion
BRI will not decide the India–China relationship, but it will structure the rivalry: it fixes CPEC as a permanent sovereignty quarrel, turns India’s neighbourhood into a market where influence is bought, and makes connectivity a test of competing models of order. India’s interest lies in competing on transparency and sustainable debt rather than in boycott alone, keeping BRI a managed irritant rather than a cause of confrontation.