Who’s playing the Taiwan card in India-China tensions, Modi or the RSS?

Members of expatriate Indian Hindu nationalist groups are unofficially calling for greater engagement with Taipei – something likely to anger Beijing

While the calls mirror a hardening of New Delhi’s stance, it is unclear how much weight they carry with PM Modi – and for him, that’s very convenient

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Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Photo: AFP

Published: 3:00pm, 20 Sep 2020Updated: 3:33pm, 20 Sep 2020

Expatriate Indian groups tasked with advancing a Hindu nationalist agenda in Taiwan could pose trouble for the already-tense India-China relationship.

Right-wing Hindu organisations linked to India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and registered as religious groups in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau, where an estimated 50,000 Indians work and study, are unofficially calling for greater engagement with Taipei – something that is likely to anger Beijing.

The stance of the groups – which are linked to the BJP’s ideological parent the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh or RSS – could add to pressure on Prime Minister Narendra Modi to “play the Taiwan card” in India’s increasingly acrimonious relationship with Beijing.

For nearly 20 weeks, the two countries have been locked in an unprecedented and occasionally deadly stand-off along their disputed 3,488km border and while both sides have said they are keen for peace the tensions have regularly spilled into the diplomatic realm. In recent months, New Delhi has made various moves aimed at pressuring China, from limiting Chinese investments in Indian businesses to banning Chinese imports and machinery and 177 Chinese mobile applications, including TikTok.

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China hawks, from retired diplomats to analysts, have called on Modi’s administration to go further, by getting closer to Taiwan as a diplomatic foil, and some have even called for India to change its position on the one-China policy, a diplomatic understanding that Taiwan and mainland China are part of the same sovereign nation. While most analysts see such calls as being too extreme to be taken up – given that Beijing views acceptance of the policy as a prerequisite for diplomatic ties – that such an idea is gaining currency among Modi’s power base is likely to be viewed with alarm in Beijing.

Like most countries, India has no formal ties with Taiwan but the BJP – the world’s biggest political party, with 180 million members (about twice that of the Communist Party of China) – and its affiliates have recently been extending their influence in the self-governing island.