Chinese expansionism must be stopped, reversed. Does Delhi have a plan?

The Big Lens

During his recent visit to New Delhi, the Bhutanese King Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck reiterated the Himalayan Kingdom’s stand that Bhutan will not do anything that will put India’s border security and defence in jeopardy. In light of the 2007 Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation, wherein India and Bhutan agreed to cooperate on issues of national interest and to continue working for their “common security,” both countries should take a common stand on the Doklam trijunction.

This is not the only trijunction where China’s gameplans are unfolding. Beijing is believed to be fast-tracking the “bilateral resolution” of the roughly 372-km Kalapani trijunction, which was originally between India, Nepal and Tibet, but is now with China. Nepal’s illegal depiction of the map, usurping the entire area as its own, needs to be corrected immediately. Incidentally, post-1962 conflict, the Lipulekh Pass in Kalapani has been managed by the Indo-Tibetan Border Police since 1963. China’s illegal occupation of the Mintaka Pass in the Karakoram Range is another trijunction – this one between India, Afghanistan (through Pak-Occupied Kashmir) and Xinjiang (now China) -- which needs to be addressed and recovered.

Read | China would gain swift air superiority over Taiwan, US leaks show

China’s renaming spree and claiming Indian areas as its geography based on “historical evidence” is not new. It has been part of a larger gameplan that is expected to assist Beijing’s expansionist revisionism. Last year, China’s Ambassador to America, Qin Gang, wrote that “Taiwan has been an inseparable part of China’s territory for 1,800 years.” In the same article, he also advanced the perverse logic that “The Taiwan question is about China’s sovereignty and unity — not democracy.” Beijing conveniently forgets that it forcefully annexed Tibet and Xinjiang by brute military force and continues to oppress the local indigenous populations, trample on their culture and on their sovereignty. It is incumbent upon the world to act to restore the freedom and sovereignty of Xinjiang and Tibet. Qin Gang, in his article in The Washington Post, also warned the US that “Taiwan is one of the very few issues that might take China and the United States to conflict.”

Since China likes to go back into history to prove its territorial claims, Delhi should also read out from the pages of history. It is not only important but has become inevitable for New Delhi to remind Beijing that there was no “India-China border” – India’s border was with Tibet -- until China’s occupation of Tibet by force, beginning in 1950 and consolidated with the capture of Lhasa following the Tibetan Uprising in March 1959, a brutal affair in which the PLA massacred thousands of Tibetans. Even then, what the Chinese premier Chou En Lai proposed – and Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru refused to accept -- was a ‘Line of Actual Control’ (LAC) between India and China. Even post-1962 conflict, the Nehru government raised what it called the Indo-Tibetan Border Police (ITBP) to manage the border conflict with the occupation forces of the PLA. The LAC, itself a tenuous concept with no basis in history, was accepted by India only in 1993, for the purposes of border management and negotiations.

The occupation of Xinjiang and Tibet has resulted in China coming to share borders with four Central Asian countries and with Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Bhutan and Nepal, with whom China had otherwise no border at all historically. China’s economy and its hegemonic ambitions have got a big boost only because of its illegal occupation of adjoining geographies. If China’s expansionism is to be contained, then it has to begin with efforts to annul the occupation of territories all around it that it has undertaken in the last seven decades.

New Delhi should support all global calls and efforts to free Tibet from Chinese occupation, including the recent “Promoting a Resolution to the Tibet-China Conflict Act”, introduced by two US Congressmen, that “Tibet, including those areas incorporated into the Chinese province of Sichuan, Yunnan, Gansu and Qinghai, is an occupied country under the established principles of international law.” Taking strong exception to Chinese lies about Tibet, US lawmakers Jim McGovern and Michael T McCaul introduced a Bill in the House of Representative last year “to amend the Tibetan Policy Act of 2002 to modify certain provisions of that Act”.

China’s sudden eagerness to resolve “trijunction” issues with tiny Bhutan and Nepal under the veneer of solving border disputes with neighbours is a barely hidden attempt at further expansionism, and thus a serious security threat to India that merits attention, as well as the enunciation of a strategy and actionable plans at the highest level to contain such expansionism.

(Seshadri Chari reads between the lines on big national and international developments from his vantage point in the BJP and the RSS. @seshadrichari)