A return to pre-April 2020 status quo is the key

India will neither escalate nor compromise on the border. Insisting on a return to pre-April 2020 status quo is the only viable option.

The eagerness with which we expect a meeting between Narendra Modi and Xi Jinping in October on the sidelines of the BRICS Summit in Kazan, Russia hoping that an agreement for ‘tactical’ normalisation of India-China relations will be reached, shows how border talks between the two nations have been, for the last four and a half years, contingent on disengagement, de-escalation, and restoration of status quo. 

The ‘progress’ in the border talks is off limits to the media. Recently, the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) provided an update on the current state of India-China relations, characterising them as ongoing dialogue and efforts to resolve tensions through the Working Mechanism for Consultation and Coordination (WMCC) meetings. Diplomatese often hides the situation on the ground but we were made to learn that India and China held the 31st meeting of the WMCC in Beijing on August 29, where they decided to jointly uphold peace and tranquillity on the ground in border areas “in accordance with relevant bilateral agreements and protocols”.

External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar has said that “roughly” 75 per cent of the “disengagement problems” with China are sorted out but the bigger issue has been the increasing militarisation of the frontier. The Indian and Chinese troops are locked in a standoff in certain friction points in eastern Ladakh even as the two sides completed disengagement from several areas following extensive diplomatic and military talks. Opposition leader Rahul Gandhi claimed recently that China occupied 4,000 sq km of Indian territory, “occupying land the size of Delhi in Ladakh”.

Two things strike us. First, Jaishankar didn’t let us know how he quantified the “disengagement problems”, or how he measured it. But somehow what is evident is that the 25 per cent that remains to be solved is the trickier part. There should be a white paper with full details of the specifics of areas of disengagement and occupation. Second, experts point to the unverifiability of “considerable” land being lost to China in eastern Ladakh in view of the fact that there are no borders except a 1,597 km-long Line of Actual Control (LAC), a notional demarcation separating India and China since 1962, giving rise to wildly differing perceptions of the LAC and the patrolling areas. 

But there was a status quo until May 2020, which the Chinese troops tried to change by force in eastern Ladakh. Both sides have since deployed thousands of soldiers with advanced weapons in forward positions. In the area around Pangong Lake in eastern Ladakh, China built underground bunkers to store weapons and fuel and hardened shelters for armoured vehicles at a key base in the region. If China violated multiple agreements in 2020 much to our surprise, one might consider that to be misplaced because China has had a record of springing surprises.

That the unsettled border remains at the centre of the bilateral tensions is well-known. What is also known by now is that China is determined to hold off indefinitely on a border settlement with India through an overt refusal to accept the territorial status quo, and that lies at the heart of China’s strategy, alongside its persistence to press claims on additional Indian territories to keep India under military and diplomatic pressure. It occupies some 43,180 sq km of the so-called western sector of what belongs to the original princely state of Jammu and Kashmir, that includes some 5,180 sq km of land ceded to it by Islamabad under the Sino-Pakistan boundary agreement of 1963. 

China covets some 90,000 sq km of territory under Indian administration in the eastern sector, where Tibet shares a 1,030-km border with Arunachal Pradesh. Several small but strategic tracts of land are in dispute in the central sector and in India’s Ladakh region. If China insists on changing the territorial status quo as it envisages and interprets things, it has to be earned only through military conquest in a limited war, no less. China cannot coerce a nuclear India into submission.

Information of all these Chinese fantasies is not classified and is as old as the hoary chestnut. Details of all the treaties and agreements, and the confidence-building measures are well-documented and are long in the public domain, the implications of which have been analysed thoroughly. But border talks are contingent upon disengagement talks.

Perhaps Jaishankar refers to the last formal disengagement along the LAC that took place in September 2022 when both sides pulled back troops from Patrolling Point-15 in the Gogra-Hot Springs area of eastern Ladakh, besides friction points such as Galwan Valley and the north and south banks of Pangong Tso within the 75 per cent of “disengagement problems” deemed resolved; the 25 per cent unresolved must be along the LAC at Depsang Plains, Demchok, etc. 

A narrative triumphs for lack of a counter-narrative. If India’s ‘Forward Policy’ was blamed for provoking China in 1962, it bears recall that in 1950, the PLA marched hundreds of miles south to occupy the then-independent Tibet and made forays into Indian territories. It was not counted either as an expansionist strategy or a forward policy. But when the Indian Army later sought to set up posts along India’s unmanned Himalayan frontier to try and stop further Chinese encroachments, or when now India is making an effort to beef up defences to counter growing PLA cross-border incursions, it is being labelled ‘new Forward Policy’ by Beijing.

If we compare the register of national grievances, for instance, China’s claim to  the disputed borderlands of Arunachal Pradesh and Tawang and China’s support of Pakistan as against India’s “Look East” policy (and closer relationship with the United States) alongside its support of the Dalai Lama and his exiled Tibetan community in Dharamsala, we would see a grim battle between what are “civilizational twins,” a term coined by Sino-Indologist Tan Chung, evident from their modernising navies and militaries in the Indian Ocean. Chung advocates a Sino-Indian border as a replica of the boundary between the US and Canada and wants India and China to follow that model. 

Phunchok Stobdan, a Ladakhi and a former Indian Ambassador to Kyrgyzstan, has wisely pressed for the need to give up “seeking a geometrical linear boundary and instead opt for creating a soft cultural frontier along the trans-Himalayan region” and to gradually transform, “the long militarised boundary into a humanised frontier zone” in the interests of India, China and the Himalayan people. But in view of the intractability and lack of convergence of views and the Chinese stance of seeking advantage in an unsettled LAC, of all the three general policy strategies available to move forward -- to escalate, to compromise, or to maintain the status quo -- the third remains the only viable option for India.

(The writer is a Kolkata-based commentator on geopolitics, development, and culture)