ENEMY NUMBER ONE

On April 1 this year, the diplomatic lines between New Delhi and Beijing were clogged with messages of peace and friendship. Exactly 70 years ago, India had done what seemed unthinkable for a non-socialist bloc country at the time—it recognised the government of the Communist Party of China which had only the previous year overthrown the Chinese Nationalist Party. In his letter to Chinese president Xi Jinping in April, President Ram Nath Kovind observed how the two sides had “made considerable progress especially in the last few years in enhancing our bilateral engagements in a number of areas, including political, economic and people-to-people ties”. Prime Minister