The time has come to do some plainspeaking. The prime minister, Manmohan Singh, who met his Chinese counterpart, Wen Jiabao, in Thailand on Saturday and external affairs minister S.M. Krishna, who played host to China’s foreign minister, Yang Jiechi, in Bangalore yesterday, appear powerless to stop the deterioration in Sino-Indian relations, which are being micro-managed beyond the control of the government in New Delhi.

Those in India outside the government, who want to roll back the progress — slow, but steady — since Rajiv Gandhi’s visit to Beijing in 1988 have hijacked the agenda for Sino-Indian engagement: they must take the entire blame for the incipient war hysteria that came to dominate public discourse on bilateral relations in the run-up to the meeting between Singh and Wen on the one hand and between Krishna and Yang on the other.

For this columnist, whose adolescence followed the crushing Indian military defeat at Chinese hands in 1962, growing up in a state where the largest political party blamed India for that border war, it is not easy to point a finger at the Indian side for the latest deterioration in relations with Beijing. But the bizarre truth is that influential sections of the Indian media and manipulative elements in New Delhi’s strategic community are responsible for creating a situation where the government’s hands are now tied in any effort in the immediate future to take Sino-Indian relations forward.

Take, for instance, a widely circulated report in a print medium on September 15, which gave a very detailed account of firing by Chinese soldiers from their side of the Line of Actual Control in north Sikkim. The report claimed that two members of the Indo-Tibetan Border Police had been injured in the incident, which was painted as a turning point in the deteriorating Sino-Indian border management, if only because guns had been silent in that area for 47 years. Besides, it was alleged in the report that by opening fire on ITBP personnel, the People’s Liberation Army had reneged on a key Sino-Indian understanding 13 years ago not to open fire, whatever the gravity of any provocation.

The ministry of external affairs immediately looked into the report, as did the ITBP, only to find that no such incident had taken place, as both agencies insisted the very next day. While it is possible to cover up an incident of firing that has left no trails, it is not that easy to deny injuries to personnel on the ground, especially if the injuries are serious and the death of those injured is likely. Sadly, there has been a pattern to such lies in sections of the New Delhi media about Sino-Indian relations and such deliberate distortions have been building up for some years now, slowly poisoning the atmosphere between the two countries in public opinion, less so in bilateral engagement.

Perhaps the most damaging of such concocted stories in terms of popular perception was the lie, repeated over and over in certain newspapers and by specific television pundits, that it was China that prevented Shashi Tharoor’s election as the United Nations secretary-general in 2006. Actually, it was the United States of America, the only country that vetoed Tharoor in the UN Security Council.

The truth is that before Tharoor’s candidature was announced in New Delhi, back-channel contacts had been established with Beijing, which took the position that it will not veto any Asian candidate. At that time, this principled stand by China applied not only to Tharoor, it equally applied to Ban Ki-moon, who eventually became secretary-general, it covered Jayantha Dhanapala of Sri Lanka, Surakiart Sathirathai of Thailand and some other Asians who fell by the wayside at various stages of the campaign to lead the world body.

Another lie, similarly propagated by this same crowd of writers and TV pundits was that the Chinese scuttled India’s chances of becoming a permanent member of the UN Security Council through the Group of Four route when India, Japan, Germany and Brazil launched a very serious bid in 2004 to bring about reform in the structure of the Council.

It is true that the Chinese did not support the G-4. But their opposition was to the idea of Japan becoming a permanent member of the Security Council. China has issues with Japan left over by history, and Beijing will not allow Tokyo to claim its place in the world until the Chinese are convinced that the Japanese have permanently and irrevocably turned their backs on militarism. The Chinese also do not want a country that will permanently act as cat’s paw to Washington in the Security Council. A change may now be on the anvil in Beijing with a new, progressive government in Tokyo that wants to move the country away from American influence.

But here again, it was the US which never supported India’s candidature for permanent membership of the Security Council. The Bush administration, which is hailed in India as its friend, at best gave a character certificate testifying in principle to India’s worthiness to be in the Council, but nothing more. On the other hand, even before George W. Bush became president, the US endorsed both Japan and Germany for permanent Council membership, although Bush had some reservations about Germany after it refused to support his invasion of Iraq. Contrary to the impression created in India by a section of opinion-makers, the US did not at any time come out in support of India taking its seat at the global high table.

When a vote on the follow-up of the Indo-US nuclear deal allowing the world to trade in nuclear material and technology with India was approaching, in the board of governors of the International Atomic Energy Agency and later in the Nuclear Suppliers Group, the very same opinion-makers and strategic thinkers began a propaganda in the print and visual media that the Chinese would block exemption for India in both instances. When that did not happen and the Chinese voted for India, there was a spate of stories and commentaries about how the Chinese attempted to derail the process, which was only rescued by American knights in shining armour who valiantly fought for India.

It is true that the Chinese tried to get something for themselves in return for their vote supporting India. But that is what good negotiators always do. It is also true that the Chinese made a pretence of lobbying the IAEA on behalf of Pakistan, knowing fully well that Pakistan will never get a nuclear deal similar to India’s. For the Chinese, the opportunity cost of that effort was next to nothing: at the same time, it got them some brownie points not only in Islamabad, but also in several other Muslim capitals.

For some time now, the Chinese have been complaining, officially and unofficially, to those in the government and to others outside it, that a large segment of India’s English-language media has been engaging in a verbal war on Beijing and its India policies.

To be fair, well before People’s Daily this month unleashed its reply to this war on China by a section of the Indian media, Sinologists in South Block and in other government agencies with Chinese expertise have been expecting a reaction from Beijing: they have only been waiting for the straw that would break the back of the proverbial Chinese camel. Perhaps, because many of those who received these complaints underestimated the gravity of the situation that was developing, they trotted out the excuse that the Indian media are free. The implication of this, of course, is that the Chinese media are not free.

It is perhaps not widely known in Delhi that at any given point, a political counsellor at the Chinese embassy on Shanti Path is constantly going through every item in the Indian press that is of interest to Beijing, line by line, even on weekends, putting individual commentators and analysts into ideological pigeon-holes. So when an Indian tells his Chinese interlocutor that India’s press is free, he accepts it without hesitation. But he does not accept that everyone who writes for the Indian press is free.

When the Olympic torch was travelling around the globe preparatory to the 2008 Beijing Olympics and was seized in Paris by a Frenchman, Beijing put on the internet a Google map of the exact location of the residence of the French citizen who vandalized the torch for the sake of Tibetans. If the Chinese can do this, would they not know the affiliations of those who mobilized an Indian media frenzy against China?

What is needed now, as the government tries to create a semblance of normalcy in Sino-Indian relations, is an acknowledgement that there is a method to what China is doing and that India needs to learn from this.