Tibetan mind games: India’s edge in border dispute with China?

Despite a limited breakthrough, New Delhi appears to be playing the Tibet card in an effort to unsettle Beijing and gain an advantage on the ground

Reported plan to teach Indian officers the Tibetan language and culture is aimed at reading the enemy and making better use of local intelligence

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An Indian army soldier near Zojila mountain pass, which connects Srinagar to Ladakh. Photo: AFP

Published: 7:36pm, 10 Feb 2021Updated: 11:28pm, 10 Feb 2021

On Wednesday, China’s defence ministry announced it had reached an agreement with India over disengaging its troops from the Pangong Lake in eastern Ladakh, one of the friction points between the two sides.

But, despite the limited breakthrough, the tussle over the disputed India-China border is far from resolved.

On Sunday, the retired Indian army chief and Union minister VK Singh boasted that Indian forces had transgressed the Line of Actual Control more times than the Chinese. This prompted the Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin to respond a day later that Singh had made “an unwitting confession” and that India had been making frequent attempts “to encroach on China’s territory” and was “constantly creating disputes and frictions”.

The heated exchange came as the stand-off along the LAC, the de facto border, entered its tenth month with – as the Indian foreign minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar put it last week – still “no visible expression” of the two sides’ earlier agreement to disengage.

But, disengagement or not, there are signs that New Delhi may be upping the ante in the confrontation by turning to mind games designed both to push Beijing’s buttons and gain a tactical advantage on the ground.

Chief among these mind games appears to be an attempt by New Delhi to rattle Beijing by taking potshots at its cherished ‘One China’ policy, without officially withdrawing India’s acceptance of it.