As China and India struggle to stabilise their wobbly relationship — the latest bump comes from Beijing’s protest against Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s visit to Arunachal Pradesh — there is one big missing link. It is the absence of sustained engagement between their political classes.

Bilateral trade may have risen more than fifty-fold over the last ten years, but there is little contact between the leading cadres of the Chinese Communist Party and the Indian political parties. It is in the interest of neither country to have its political class view the other through the distorting prism of media and internet chatter.

The CCP has indeed reached out to both the Congress and the BJP by looking beyond its traditional ties to the CPI and CPM. There is also growing academic exchange between the Chinese think tanks and their Indian counterparts.

Nevertheless, from the perspective of China’s expansive international interaction, Beijing’s outreach to Indian civil society is rather thin. And Delhi’s penetration of China’s political universe, in turn, is shockingly shallow.

The Indian communists could have been a natural bridge between the two societies; but their ideological blinkers have prevented them from becoming the interpreters of either the complex Chinese realities to India or Delhi’s political sensitivities and domestic compulsions to Beijing.

There is no substitute then for greater contact and communication between the CCP and India’s many political parties, especially its younger leaders who can relate to a globalising China far more easily than their elders.

The transformation of India’s relationship with the United States began only when Delhi and the Indian American community reached out to the political establishment in the United States. India must do the same with China by breaking out of its current narrow interface with a small section of Chinese bureaucracy.

... contd.