India–Taiwan relations

The bilateral relations between India and Taiwan have improved since the 1990s, despite both nations not maintaining official diplomatic relations.India Taiwan Commercial Relations
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/ref> India recognises only the People's Republic of China (in mainland China) and not the Republic of China's claims of being the legitimate government of Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Macau - a conflict that emerged after the Chinese Civil War (1945–49). However, India's economic and commercial links as well as people-to-people contacts with Taiwan have expanded in recent years.

According to a 2010 Gallup poll, 21% of Taiwanese people approve of Indian leadership, with 19% disapproving and 60% uncertain. According to a December 2019 survey conducted via National Chengchi University's Election Study Center, 53.8% of Taiwanese people polled overall supported "increasing ties with India", with 73.1% of DPP voters supporting increasing ties with India and 44.6% of KMT voters supporting increasing ties.

In May 2020, two members of the Indian Parliament virtually attended the newly elected President Tsai's swearing in ceremony and praised Taiwanese democracy, thereby sending what some have termed a warning message to China and signaling a strengthening of relations between the Tsai and Modi administrations. In July 2020, the Indian government appointed a top career diplomat, Joint Secretary Gourangalal Das, the former head of the U.S. division in India's Ministry of External Affairs, as its new envoy to Taiwan.

Background

Despite China proper and the Indian subcontinent, where two of the four ancient civilizations of the world emerged, having shared thousands of years of extensive trade and cultural exchanges, primarily through Buddhism, direct contact between Formosa and South Asia has historically been considerably more limited due to geographic constraints and distances. Tianzhu (天竺), situated in Buddhist cosmology at the "Western Heaven", has traditionally been regarded by Buddhists as an idealized holy land where their faith originated from, and subsequently served as a pilgrimage site for many who sought to receive Buddhist scriptures, as romanticized in the classical Chinese tale of ''Journey to the West''. According to historian Tansen Sen, during some of the Chinese dynasties, "South Asia...found itself occupying a unique place in the Chinese world order: a foreign region that was culturally and spiritually revered as equal to the Chinese civilization." Hu Shih, the ROC Ambassador to the United States from 1938 to 1942, commented, albeit critically, on India's Buddhism almost completely subsuming Chinese society upon its introduction.

ASIA is one. The Himalayas divide, only to accentuate, two mighty civilizations, the Chinese with its communism of Confucius, and the Indian with its individualism of the Vedas. But not even the snowy barriers can interrupt for one moment that broad expanse of love for the Ultimate and Universal, which is the common thought-inheritance of every Asiatic race, enabling them to produce all the great religions of the world and distinguishing them from those maritime peoples of the Mediterranean and the Baltic, who love to dwell on the Particular, and to search out the means, not the end, of life.

While never having actually visited India in his lifetime, Sun Yat-sen, founder of the Republic of China, occasionally spoke and wrote of India as a fellow Asian nation that was likewise subject to harsh Western exploitation, and frequently called for a Pan-Asian united front against all unjust imperialism; in a 1921 speech, Sun stated: "The Indians have long been oppressed by the British. They have now reacted with a change in their revolutionary thinking...There is progress in their revolutionary spirit, they will not be cowed down by Britain." To this day, there is a prominent street named Sun Yat-sen street in an old Chinatown in Calcutta, now known as Kolkata.

In 1924, on his major tour of several major Chinese cities giving lectures about using their shared Asian values and traditional spirituality to help together promote world peace, Rabindranath Tagore was invited to Canton by Sun Yat-sen, an invitation which he declined. There was considerably mixed reception to Tagore from the Chinese students and intellectuals; for example, a major Buddhist association in Shanghai stated that for seven hundred years, they had "waited for a message from India", while others, mostly modernizers and communists, outright rejected his ideals, stating that they did not "want philosophy, we want materialism" and "not wisdom, but power".

Believing that then-Republican China and India were "sister nations from the dawn of history" who needed to transform their "ancient friendship into a new camaraderie of two freedom loving nations", Jawaharlal Nehru visited China in 1939 as an honored guest of the ROC government. Highly praising both Chiang Kai-shek and his wife Song Meiling, Nehru referred to Chiang as "not only a great Chinese but a great Asiatic and world figure...one of the top most leaders of the world...a successful general and captain in war", and Song as "full of vitality and charm...a star hope for the Chinese people...a symbol of China's invincibility". During his visit, Chiang and Nehru shared a bunker one night when Japanese bombers attacked Chongqing in late August, with Chiang recording a favorable impression of Nehru in his diary; the Chiangs also regularly wrote Nehru during his time in prison and even after their 1942 visit to India.Transforming India-Taiwan Relations
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Partially to enlist India's aid against both Japanese and Western imperialism in exchange for the ROC's support for Indian independence, the Chiangs visited India under British rule in 1942 and met with Nehru, along with Mahatma Gandhi and Muhammad Ali Jinnah. The Chiangs also sought to present their nation as a potential third option for the Indian people to ally themselves with, with public sympathies at the time sharply split between the British and the Japanese, who actively tried to sway India's population with pledges to liberate Asia if they would help their efforts against the British. Despite pledges of mutual friendship and future cooperation between the two peoples, Chiang argued that while Gandhi's non-violent resistance was not necessarily invalid for the Indian people, it was an unrealistic worldview on a global context; Gandhi, who had at the time insisted on India refraining from participating in any war unless India was first given complete independence, in turn later noted that, although "fun was had by all...I would not say that I had learnt anything, and there was nothing that we could teach him." Some Western publications such as ''Life'' also covered their meeting, noting that Chiang and Gandhi together ruled a third of the world's population and contrasting Chiang as a hardened "man of action" to the more detached pacifism of Gandhi, but also noting that despite their differences, he was "exceedingly polite" to all of India's leaders during his visit.

In their meeting in Calcutta, Jinnah tried to persuade Chiang, who had pressed Britain to relinquish India as soon as possible, of the necessity of establishing a separate nation for Muslims in the subcontinent, to which Chiang, who apparently recognized Congress as the sole nationalist force in the Raj, replied that if ten crores of Muslims could live peacefully with other communities in China, then there was no true necessity as he saw it of a separate state for a smaller population of nine crores of Muslims living in India. While the public reception to the Chiangs was mostly positive, some reacted less favorably to the Chiangs' presence in India, with Jinnah believing that Chiang Kai-shek lacked proper understanding of Indian society and feeling he was biased in favor of Nehru and Gandhi while neglecting the demands of other religious communities, his newspaper ''Dawn'' calling him a "meddlesome marshal", while others such as Muhammad Zafarullah Khan expressed mistrust for the couple's motives, believing that their government wanted to eventually expand its influence to Indochina and the subcontinent after the British's departure.

For his part, Chiang apparently believed none of the major Indian leaders could help his government meaningfully. As an ardent nationalist who lived through China's internally turbulent years, he felt Jinnah was "dishonest", and used by the British to divide the peoples of British India and by extension Asia, he and his wife Song believing that cooperation between its religious communities was difficult but possible. At the same time, he also felt genuinely disappointed by Gandhi, whom he initially had high expectations, and noted afterwards that "he knows and loves only India, and doesn't care about other places and peoples". Having been unable to make Gandhi change his views about satyagraha, even after arguing that some of their enemies such as the Japanese would make the preaching of non-violence impossible, Chiang, himself raised a Buddhist, blamed "traditional Indian philosophy" for his sole focus on endurance of suffering rather than revolutionary zeal necessary to rally and unite the Asian peoples. Nevertheless, the Chiangs continued to commit themselves to supporting the Indian independence movement from afar, mostly via diplomacy, with Song Meiling writing Nehru encouragingly: "We shall leave nothing undone in assisting you to gain freedom and independence. Our hearts are drawn to you, and...the bond of affection between you and us has been strengthened by our visit....When you are discouraged and weary...remember that you are not alone in your struggle, for at all times we are with you in spirit."

Although their meetings had ended on a positive note, with Gandhi offering to adopt Song as a "daughter" in his ashram

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