Five years later another crisis developed. The Chinese established a permanent well-equipped military post at the site of a temporary Indian intelligence post that was vacated every winter. The location was Sumdorong Chu in one of the 'gray areas' that both countries claim. Indians responded by large-scale military deployments that made the Chinese post highly vulnerable to underscore that India of 1986 was not the India of 1962. Using the advantage of terrain, the Chinese too mobilised their troops. There was no dearth of Jeremiahs, especially in the West, that predicted a repetition of 1962 at the old battleground. They were wrong. New Delhi and Beijing defused the crisis, and then, in 1988, Rajiv Gandhi made a path-breaking visit to China during which China's paramount leader, Deng Xiaoping, told him: 'If China and India do not cooperate, the 21st century cannot be the Asian century'.

There was great optimism on both sides but the improvement in relationship was still slow. In 1993, the two countries signed the first of a series of agreements to commit themselves to maintaining 'peace and tranquillity' along the Line of Actual Control (LAC), pending a solution of the border issue, and to expand the areas of cooperation in all other fields. The problem, however, was that there was not, and still isn't, an understanding on where exactly the LAC lies. Hence there are gray areas such as Sumdorong Chu where both sides complain of 'incursions' by each other. The Atal Bihari Vajpayee government that came to power in 1998 tried hard to get the LAC 'confirmed and clarified' but to no avail. On the contrary, the May 1998 Indian nuclear tests evoked intense criticism from China but this was controlled soon enough.

The turn of the century became the starting point of a tremendous surge in India-China economic relations. The trade between the two countries has burgeoned from a measly few hundred million in the 1990s to $40 billion. Indeed, China is on the verge of becoming India's largest trading partner. Several hundred Indian entrepreneurs have set up shop in China. The traffic in reverse is equally thick. This has driven many to saying that the current phase is one of Hindi-Chini buy-buy. The euphoria is tempered, however, by the realisation that the Chinese are buying only iron ore and other raw materials and selling India consumer goods and industrial machinery. Any Indian trying to set up much-needed power stations makes a beeline for China to buy the equipment.

It is in the arena of Asian power balance and geostrategy that China has drawn rings round India. And, to the dismay of many Indians, the government in New Delhi remains stilted, slurred and even mealy-mouthed even when it comes to taking up China's age-old help to Pakistan in relation to nuclear technology, missiles and military supplies. All these impinge on Indian security.

Though China has taken note of both Rising India and the tremendous change in India-America relations, it still does not consider India to be in the same league as it is in. It has done everything it could to prevent India's entry into Asia-Europe summit, Asia-Pacific Economic Council (APEC) and several other forums. Most importantly, without saying anything or doing anything directly itself, China scuttled, with some assistance from the U.S., the Indian move to secure a permanent seat on the UN Security Council.

At the same time China has conspicuously upped the ante over the border question. In 2005, India's Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and his Chinese opposite number, Wen Jiabao, agreed that while settling the boundary, the two countries should leave populated areas undisturbed. A short while later the Chinese ignored this and started pressing their claim on the whole of the state of Arunchal Pradesh, particularly the strategic Tawang Tract. Last year the newly appointed Indian Defence Minister A. K. Antony, went to the border areas and was horrified by the contrast between the spanking, new infrastructure the Chinese have built on their side and the appalling state of the infrastructure on the Indian side. He has ordered corrective measures but by the time these are completed, the Chinese, who are planning to extend their railway from Lhasa to Kathmandu, the capital of Maoist-ruled Nepal, would have advanced far ahead.

It was only after China's intriguing and obstructive behaviour at the critically important meeting of the Nuclear Suppliers' Group (NSG) at Vienna in August over the Indo-U.S. nuclear deal, which is the centrepiece of the wider India-American strategic partnership, that scales began to fall from Indian eyes. For three years, Chinese dignitaries kept telling Indian leaders privately that China 'would not stand in the way of the deal going through'. They never repeated this publicly but the Indian government naively believed that the Chinese would keep their word. In fact, China subtly and quietly, continued to encourage the countries bent upon opposing the deal at the NSG for their own reasons. The Chinese evidently believed that the deal would either fall through or its opponents would insist on the same concessions being made to Pakistan, China's all-weather friend.

All the six nations opposed to the deal, China was confident, would block it. But later it realised that it had overestimated the determination of the 'like-minded Six' and underestimated the American clout. When, under American pressure, the Six showed signs of buckling under, the Chinese showed their hand. They wanted the deal to be non-discriminatory and pay more attention to nuclear nonproliferation. The Chinese delegation even threatened to walk out. To add insult to injury, President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao declined to take the Indian prime minister's call. Only after President George Bush had phoned Hu Jintao did the Chinese relent. They were delivering Washington the message that it could not expect to get its way without consulting Beijing.

A few days later China's Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi came to Delhi on a pre-arranged visit. His Indian hosts expressed their disappointment and displeasure with Chinese behaviour in no uncertain terms. Yang blandly argued, however, that China had done nothing wrong but had acted in a 'constructive' and 'responsible' manner. No one believed him. Today the public anger against China is much greater than the Indian government would like to admit. On September 24, prime ministers of India and China met in New York. As expected they made appropriate noises about putting the nuclear deal controversy 'behind them' and getting on with mutual cooperation. But this would in no way reduce, leave alone eliminate, India's deep misgivings about the undependable northern neighbour.

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