China-India border dispute: is Pakistan about to enter the fray?

Name: Indian air force aircraft fly near disputed border with China
Uploaded: 2020-07-04T12:00:06.000Z
Duration: 1 min 15 s
Description: Indian air force aircraft fly near disputed border with China

The military stand-off in the Himalayas has raised the prospect of a clash between three nuclear-armed powers, experts say

The dispute goes beyond Kashmir’s borders. At stake are water resources on which 270 million people depend

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An Indian fighter jet flies over Leh, the joint capital of Ladakh. Photo: AFP

Tom Hussain

Published: 8:00pm, 4 Jul 2020Updated: 10:46pm, 4 Jul 2020

Experts believe the military stand-off between Chinese and Indian forces in the disputed Himalayan territory of Kashmir has made South Asia the most dangerous hotspot in a new cold war between Beijing and its United States-led rivals in the Indo-Pacific theatre.

By deploying troops to press an enhanced claim to the Galwan Valley in Ladakh, the northernmost Indian-administered region of Kashmir, China has significantly upped the probability of pre-existing disputes between India and Pakistan triggering further conflict in South Asia, the experts told This Week In Asia in a series of interviews.

Since India allegedly launched an air strike on a militant training camp in Pakistan in February last year, and unilaterally annexed the part of Kashmir it administers in August, relations between South Asia’s perennial enemies have been at their most strained since they last fought a war in 1999.

Both sides recalled their ambassadors and suspended bilateral communication last year, and last week expelled half of each other’s staff from their embassies in Islamabad and New Delhi over an espionage row.

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Indian air force aircraft fly near disputed border with China

With China re-entering the Kashmir fray for the first time since it defeated India in a 1962 border war, experts believe it is only a matter of time before there is another conflagration – possibly even a two-front affair involving all three nuclear-armed claimants to Kashmir.

“I think a conflict is a real possibility. For China, there is no incentive to start a war with India over Kashmir. It has bigger issues to deal with and those about the changing relative balance of capabilities across the Line of Actual Control [LAC] might be the trigger,” said Harsh V. Pant, a professor of international relations at King’s College London.