India won’t be a US ally against China – former vice president

Expectations that New Delhi will stand with Washington to offset Beijing are “not realistic,” Hamid Ansari told RT India c

India will not be an ally of the United States against China, former Vice President Hamid Ansari has told RT India.

In the latest episode of In Conversation with Salman Khurshid, Ansari said he did not think it was “realistic” for India to partner with the US to offset Beijing.

The US has always expected India to be “some kind of a distant ally helpful in Asia,” he said, adding, “But we’ve never been able to come to that equation.” 

New Delhi should be realistic in its ties with the US, which seeks certain economic advantages, the former vice president said.

“We have relations with the United States which are under stress. We have [had] relations with the Soviet Union, which have survived from the past,” Ansari said, adding, “we still don’t know where we stand with China.”

New Delhi needs to adopt a new approach in its ties with Beijing, he said, explaining that India “misread” China in the 1950s and 1960s.

Ansari said then Chinese Prime Minister Zhou Enlai visited India in 1959, but nothing much came out of the trip. “Zhou Enlai had come here to seek a solution,” he added. “A solution, which I think subsequently we have willy-nilly hinted at. That misunderstanding led to the India-China war [of 1962].”

Ansari described China as a big, populous, developed country, and said India needed “to think of a new way of coming to terms with Chinese existence.”

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When asked about the Ukraine conflict, Ansari said Russia has some justification. “Basically, the Russian concern is [that] Ukraine is almost next door to Moscow,” he added. “The distance is minimal. So they did not want a NATO power sitting next to their frontiers.”

The former vice president said NATO membership for Ukraine was a red line for Russia and that “no ruler of Moscow. Mr. Putin or anybody else, can accept the situation.” 

Ansari served as the vice president of India from 2007 to 2017.