Formal messages have been sent to Pakistan that India would like to hold official-level discussions with it from June onwards as a follow-up of the Nawaz Sharif-Vajpayee meeting in Lahore last February. There has been no response from Pakistan so far, but we have the large-scale intrusion in Kargil instead. More important, however, is the fact that the dialogue with China stands revived with Foreign Secretary K. Raghunath's visit to Beijing in April and the revival of the Joint Working Group's meetings after a gap of over a year.

The meeting held now in Beijing was the culmination of a process which commenced last July. Sino-Indian relations took a nose-dive after our DefenceMinister declared China to be a major security threat and after Vajpayee mentioned the Chinese threat as one of the major reasons for India's nuclear weaponisation. The Chinese reaction to India's nuclear and missile tests and India's policy statements was angry and aggressive. From mid-May last when the Shakti tests were held to July when the ASEAN foreign ministers' conference was held in Manila, India's relations with China were in decline.

Deputy Chairman of the Planning Commission Jaswant Singh's meeting with Chinese Foreign Minister Tang Xijuan in Manila during the foreign ministers' conference was the first step aimed at achieving a Sino-Indian thaw. India's reiteration of its desire for a normal working relationship with China evoked a reticent but positive response from the Chinese who, while reciprocating our desire for normal relations, urged that India ``had tied a knot in Sino-Indian relations which is for India to untie''.

The follow-up of this meeting in Manila was a series of bilateraldiplomatic discussions which led to the visit of Rangachari, Joint Se-cretary in charge of China, in the Ministry of External Affairs, to Beijing early this year. He prepared the ground for the visit of Foreign Secretary K. Raghunath and the revival of JWG meetings.

The Chinese, while remaining stridently cri-tical of India's nuclear and missile weaponisation programme, perhaps calculated that reverting to a hostile rel- ationship with India would not serve their st-rategic and economic interests in the ASEAN region. They have their worries about Taiwan, their tensions regarding territorial and economic claims in the South China Sea, their general security concerns about new dimensions in US-Japanese security arrangements, their worries about Tibet and Xinjiang, as well as internal socio-economic centrifugal forces. A hostile, suspicion-ridden neighbourhood in South Asia and South East Asia was not conducive to China's interests.

So institutional bilateral discussions stand revived. We should, however,note the view of a section of our foreign policy and strategic establishment that India's attempt to normalise relations with China has been one-sided, with no response from the Chinese.

This section argues that India should not hesitate to take an adversarial stance against China because it is not willing to solve the boundary question, it continues to have defence collaboration arrangements with Pakistan and has similar tie-ups with Myanmar and it is expanding its military and naval presence in Myanmar and the north-eastern re-aches of the Indian Ocean. These arguments perhaps underpinned George Fernandes' posturing against China.

The arguments sound simplistically firm. Advocates of this view should, however, answer several questions arising from their own arguments. Will India's adoption of an adversarial stance against China on the boundary question automatically persuade it to resolve the issue according to our wishes, or are we capable of resolving the problem by coercive military or diplomaticmeans? Alternatively, is it a more practical approach to continue the discussions on the boundary issue, even if it takes time to resolve the problem? Secondly, is public stridency going to stop China from continuing defence cooperation arrangements with other countries in our neighbourhood which are sovereign and which have the discretion to define their relations with China? Thirdly, will a militant anti-China stance on the Tibet issue bring India any dividend or encourage China to exploit Indian vulnerabilities in Kashmir and the Northeast? There is wisdom in the saying that you should not get on a high horse if you cannot ride it effectively.

India must also not lose sight of a broad parallelism in the approaches of India and China on macro-level global issues like the emerging interventionist role of NATO or issues related to management of the environment, the impact of WTO and IMF policy orientations on developing countries, on the need to prevent the new world order being exclusively dominated by onegreat power. This parallelism provides the basis for general cooperation between the two countries.

This does not mean that India should shy away from those elements in China's foreign policy and regional stances which pose general security challenges to India. The solution is for India to consolidate its economic, technological and defence capacities, to engage China in a political dialogue from a position of unity and national strength.

This approach seems to have a national consensus in India cutting across party lines, as the Vajpayee government's renewal of the dialogue with China shows. Equally significantly, the Congress has also opened lines with China -- a delegation visited China in April. The ill-considered public petulance about China is happily being remedied by these initiatives.

It is time that both China and India showed results from JWG deliberations. Security issues emerging from India's nuclear and missile weaponisation and the Chinese critical response to it should become anadditional item on the JWG's agenda. A purposive effort should be made to delineate those sections of the Line of Actual Control about which there are still differences of opinion.

India should also give serious consideration to opening up additional routes of border trade between Tibet and the states of Sikkim, West Bengal and UP in India. Agreements on these trading arrangements should be based on China acknowledging the reality of Sikkim being part of India.