Indian Border Security Force soldiers guard a highway leading towards Leh, bordering China, in Gagangir on June 17. Photo: AFP
Opinion
Opinion
by C. Uday Bhaskar
Opinion
by C. Uday Bhaskar
How rising tensions on the India-China border are dashing hopes of an ‘Asian century’
With China standing its ground, India determined to prevent a repeat of its 1962 humiliation and tensions rising in the region, the stakes are high for both President Xi Jinping and Prime Minister Narendra Modi
In a major setback to the already uneasy and troubled relationship between India and China, 20 Indian soldiers were killed on Monday in clashes with People’s Liberation Army troops in the Ladakh region of the contested border known as the Line of Actual Control (LAC).
This includes a colonel who was commanding the local infantry battalion – the first combat casualty since 1975. The Indian army issued a late-night statement confirming the death toll, while reports of casualties on the Chinese side have not been confirmed by Beijing.
This level of unprecedented violence follows a tense military face-off between the army border patrols in the eastern Ladakh region that includes the Galwan valley and along the Pangong lake that had been simmering since mid-April.
The LAC is a notional line that runs from the high Himalayas in the west to the extreme east of India for almost 4,000km, and is an unmapped, contested territorial demarcation awaiting political resolution. An informal de facto status quo has been in place for decades and this eastern Ladakh region has not been claimed by Beijing since 1963.
Both India and China have claim lines along this mountainous LAC and their border patrols periodically assert their presence, but an uneasy but relatively stable status quo has prevailed since 1993, when the two nations signed off on a peace and tranquillity agreement.
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Death toll rises to 20 in border clash between India and China
Death toll rises to 20 in border clash between India and China
It has been often noted with satisfaction that while India and China are two nuclear-armed nations who fought a short border war on October 1962 and despite their proximate military deployment along the contested LAC for almost 60 years, not a single shot has been fired in anger since the 1993 agreement.
This distinctive bilateral ozone layer has been punctured by the June 15 death toll, and the much-acclaimed Wuhan spirit (from an informal April 2018 summit between President Xi Jinping and Prime Minister Narendra Modi) has turned sour.
The Indian response has been measured but unambiguous, and the Indian foreign ministry accused the PLA troops of “attempting to unilaterally change the status quo” in the Galwan valley despite June 6 talks and an agreed military de-escalation and troop de-induction process being implemented.
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Three Indian soldiers killed in border clash with Chinese troops
Three Indian soldiers killed in border clash with Chinese troops
The statement added: “Both sides suffered casualties that could have been avoided had the agreement at the higher level been scrupulously followed by the Chinese side.”
In a mirror image of the recriminations, the PLA statement accused India in turn “of going back on its word” and “violating commitments” reached at the June 6 military commanders’ talks. The Chinese foreign office has lodged a “strong protest and representation with the Indian side”.
Diplomats are expected to seek to unravel the June 15 knots that have exacerbated the already tangled and opaque territorial dispute between the two Asian giants.
Tactically, Beijing has the advantage, with PLA troops occupying areas in eastern Ladakh that China had never claimed so aggressively before, and Delhi will have to weigh its objectives and options carefully.
Territoriality has acquired a sacred connotation for China and India, and it is intensely guarded with emotive nationalist overtones on both sides.
The bloody partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947 and communist China’s march to freedom in 1949 saw the emergence of two nascent nation-states with deep civilisational roots and glorious self-images of their hoary past but they had to grapple with the challenge of territories lost in the colonial period and undefined borders.
For China, the unification goal of the return of Hong Kong, and Taiwan, and the assimilation of Tibet and Xinjiang is of the highest political priority. For India, the territorial challenge over the Kashmir issue has been compounded with Pakistan ceding certain disputed territory in the Aksai Chin region to Beijing, even as the LAC with China remains unresolved.
After the 1962 war, the Sino-Indian bilateral relationship went into cold storage and was revived only in December 1988 by then-prime minister Rajiv Gandhi’s “historic” visit to Beijing where he met Deng Xiaoping, then chairman of China’s Central Military Commission.
Described as a “major event” by the Chinese foreign ministry at the time, both sides pledged to adhere to the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence. It added that the only way to resolve the border issue was: “To act in the spirit of mutual understanding and mutual accommodation”. It concluded that: “The two sides agreed to settle the boundary issue through peaceful and friendly consultation.”
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Indian Defence Minister teaches Chinese soldiers how to say 'namaste'
Indian Defence Minister teaches Chinese soldiers how to say 'namaste'
The latest violence and loss of lives along the LAC is a radical departure from the bilateral aspirations of 1988 (Gandhi-Deng) and 1993 (Narasimha Rao-Jiang Zemin), and will pose a serious challenge to Modi and Xi, who are also grappling with the fallout from the Covid-19 pandemic and other issues.
The stakes are higher for Modi, for he has been projected as a strong, democratically elected leader and the China portfolio is the most complex and critical for the Indian growth story.
For reasons held closely to his chest, Xi has pursued a determined policy of assertive territorial expansion in recent years and this has been noted with growing concern by China’s neighbours, both in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and East Asia. India has joined that cluster.
The consensus in India is that this is not October 1962 and a resolute response cannot be discounted. But after the Sino-Indian Galwan valley violence, the much hoped for and hyped “Asian century” has just become more elusive.
Commodore C. Uday Bhaskar is director of the Society for Policy Studies (SPS), an independent think tank based in New Delhi
