Vajpayee now has taken his sweet revenge, visiting Vietnam as Li arrived in India and testing the Agni 2 missile while the visitor was still on Indian soil. To have a 30-minute minute with Vajpayee, Li had to cool his heels in the Indian capital over a full weekend. No sooner had Li began a tour of southern India than Beijing, along with a number of other nations, received advance notification from India that it was testing a long-range missile. The missile, which can reach Shanghai if fired from India's northeastern corner, was successfully launched over the Bay of Bengal 130 minutes before Li's scheduled departure. If India wanted, it could have waited for Li's flight to take off for Beijing before firing the missile.
Missiles are at the centre of China's ambitious military modernisation.
What is likely to sting Beijing the most, however, is that India's action symbolizes its growing confidence in relation to China. For long, Beijing had taken it for granted that India will continue to pursue a feckless foreign policy toward it. The extended Chinese nuclear and missile assistance to Pakistan was designed to lock New Delhi in a low-level deterrent relationship with Islamabad, with the flow of assistance calibrated to match every Indian advance and keep India boxed in the subcontinent. With India seeking to impose no retaliatory costs, the dictators in Beijing concluded that their containment strategy was working, with the Indians tied down subcontinentally and rendered too meek to break out of the strategic straitjacket. By firing a missile up Li's tail, India has delivered a second shock.