“China pushes India on the roof of the world: Age-old disagreement could lead to war”, Le Monde diplomatique

By Vaiju Naravane, Paris, November 2020 Issue

The last time Indian and Chinese armies clashed on their border, they had the same defence budgets. Now China is rich enough to spend more than four times as much as India, and it is flexing its muscles.

A Tibetan refugee in India wears a mask calling for a boycott of Chinese goods, August 2020 Mayank Makhija · NurPhoto · Getty

On the night of 15 June, soldiers from India and China engaged in what can only be described as medieval warfare on treacherous mountain terrain at an altitude of 4,200m, in the disputed grey zone along the Indo-Chinese frontier. For over seven hours, in pitch darkness, they battered each other with nail-studded wooden staves and iron rods wrapped in barbed wire, hurled rocks and fought with their bare hands. Day dawned on the stark, inhospitable Himalayan landscape, revealing 78 Indian soldiers wounded and 20 dead, most from exposure or drowning after being thrown into the freezing waters of the Galwan river below. Some of the bodies had floated downstream and were recovered further south at the point where the Galwan meets the Shyok. China remains tight-lipped about casualty numbers but Indian sources suggest the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) lost more than 40 men. In keeping with a 1993 protocol signed by the two countries, no firearms were used.

This episode followed several weeks of clashes along India and China’s 3,488km-long border, which has never been clearly demarcated. Since the 1962 war between the two countries, this has been known as the Line of Actual Control (LAC) and it includes a grey zone that falls within territory claimed by both sides. Since each side has its own view of where the line runs, their claimed borders criss-cross and overlap in many places, and clashes between patrols, incursions (even unintended) and other transgressions are common. However, the fatalities on 15 June were the first in 45 years.

For several decades, despite these regular scuffles, India and China have achieved the remarkable feat of maintaining a largely peaceful border, resolving disputes through talks at military or diplomatic level. In 1988 they agreed to set the border question aside in order to concentrate on other aspects of their relationship.

The Agreement on the Maintenance of Peace and Tranquillity along the Line of Actual Control in the India-China Border Areas, signed on 7 September 1993, formalised ‘in an international treaty, a bilateral commitment by India and China to maintain the status quo on the border. Effectively, the two countries promised not to seek to impose or enforce their borders except on the negotiating table’ (1). In 2016 it was supplemented by a protocol banning the use of firearms by troops patrolling the area, to limit bloodshed. The two countries cemented this accord by opening up their markets, cooperating on investment, education and culture, and signing agreements setting out confidence-building measures, and other protocols, the most recent in 2013. However, despite determined attempts to keep the relationship even and cordial, solutions to the disputed border question have remained stubbornly elusive.

What shocked India about the 15 June clash was the ferocity of the attack and that it came when disengagement and de-escalation talks were already under way over transgressions and skirmishes that had begun six weeks earlier, after Chinese soldiers entered territory held or habitually patrolled by Indian forces. As the facts surrounding the encounter emerged, it seemed likely that it was a well-prepared trap. Chinese forces had allegedly dammed small streams and let loose a torrent of water as the Indian troops approached, sweeping some of them off the mountainside.

Claim to the Galwan valley

All this took place in territory to which China has never in the past laid claim. This is the very first time China has claimed the entire Galwan valley, describing it as being part of its territory ‘since ancient times’ (2), a demand that surprised India. China’s refusal to demarcate boundaries clearly allows it to reinterpret the LAC at will, using constant infringements and military interventions to move the line. Its latest advance is to the southern shores of Pangong lake in Ladakh, traditionally patrolled by India.

After a high-level meeting between corps commanders, Indian army chief General Manoj Mukund Naravane had told the nation on 13 June, just two days before the incident, ‘I would like to assure everyone that the entire situation along our borders with China is under control.’

This is clearly the most dangerous border dispute between the Asian giants since the short, costly war in 1962 that ended in a humiliating defeat for India and a personal failure for its first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. According to Beijing, it was a punitive war, waged ‘to teach New Delhi a lesson’. However, several western experts, including Alistair Lamb and particularly Neville Maxwell (in India’s China War, 1970) (3), say India gave China the casus belli it was seeking by initiating a forward policy that stationed troops along its version of the disputed border to prevent Chinese incursions.

Other scholars, like Bertil Lintner (in China’s India War,2018) (4), dispute this allegation, saying that China began preparing its India war a full two years before Nehru even thought up his forward policy. The main aim of the 1962 conflict was less to conquer territory than to wrest leadership of the Third World away from Nehru and demonstrate that China, not India, was the major rising power in Asia. Nehru did not believe that China would attack India although China was showing signs of discontent through the three years preceding the conflict. Beguiled by Zhou Enlai’s professions of peace, he placed his trust in the advent of an ‘Asian Century’, symbolised by Indo-Chinese brotherhood.

What ‘line of control’?

This was a serious misreading of the situation, and India paid a heavy price. In 1960 Zhou suggested China might accept the McMahon Line in the east (see A question of borders, in this issue) if India abandoned its claim to the areas of Aksai Chin overrun by China. India’s second blunder was rejecting this offer outright. Nehru saw the Chinese invasion of 1962 as a complete betrayal of the friendship he believed existed between the two countries.

After the war, which lasted a month and a day, and allowed China to advance deep into Indian-held territory, Zhou suggested each side withdraw 20km from the LAC. This led Nehru to exclaim, ‘There is no sense or meaning in the Chinese offer to withdraw 20 kilometres from what they call “line of actual control”. What is this “line of control”? Is this the line they have created by aggression since the beginning of September [1962]? Advancing 40 or 60 kilometres by blatant military aggression, and offering to withdraw 20 kilometres provided both sides do this, is a deceptive device which can fool nobody’ (5).

The 1962 defeat left deep scars on India’s psyche, and while it is fully aware of the asymmetry of power, economic resources and expansionist determination between the countries, it feels it cannot constantly give way to China’s tactics of incremental territorial gains.

Since the end of August the tone of exchanges between the countries has become sharper. India accuses PLA troops of violating the military and diplomatic disengagement mutually agreed after the crisis began, and of carrying out ‘provocative military movements to unilaterally change the status quo’ by shifting the LAC further to the west, thereby gaining about 600 sq km of new ground. India is demanding that both countries return to the status quo ante, the situation that prevailed in April 2020.

China says all the disengagement that had to be done is complete and that it is India, not China, that is the intruder. It alleges that India is ‘seriously violating China’s territorial sovereignty’ and has demanded that it withdraw immediately. China’s semi-official mouthpiece the Global Times warns that ‘if China and India are really engaged in comprehensive antagonism, it will be much easier for China to rope in countries, including Pakistan, against India’ (6).

Since the current crisis began in May, both countries have markedly strengthened their presence along the LAC as they see it. According to a Stratfor report published in July, China has moved over 5,000 troops, as well as armoured vehicles and heavy ordnance, into the region, and built 26 encampments, 22 forward bases and two helipads. In response, India has deployed three infantry divisions in eastern Ladakh.

The absence of a properly demarcated border between India and China, one of the world’s longest, goes back to the 19th and early 20th centuries, well before the countries became modern sovereign independent republics. So what are the reasons for China’s suddenly aggressive stance?

Border tensions

‘To clear misgivings and mistrust’

Essayist and journalist Prem Shankar Jha and international relations expert Victor Gao, a former interpreter to Zhou Enlai, argue in an article in The Wire that China has no warmongering motives, although ‘occupying the heights above finger 4 [one of the eight mountain spurs that come down to the Pangong lake] can give the PLA the capacity to interdict any Indian counter-attack on Chinese aircraft landing on the lake. A similar dominating position on the heights above the Galwan valley can give the PLA a second choke point from which to target the road from Ladakh to [Daulat Beg Oldie, a strategic forward Indian airfield]’ (7).

These can be seen as strategic deployments in preparation for war, yet, they argue, the intention is not to go to war but to get India to respect treaties and agreements, and to persuade Prime Minister Narendra Modi to come to the negotiating table and ‘clear the misgivings and mistrust his abrupt change of foreign policy in 2014 has sown in Beijing’s mind’.

So what has Modi done that has so upset China? The list of potential grievances is long. Within months of coming to power Modi signed the US-India Joint Strategic Vision for the Asia-Pacific and Indian Ocean Region, which required its signatories to maintain freedom of navigation in the South China Sea, which China also claims to wish to respect. India became a ‘major defence partner’ of the US; sent a flotilla of warships to join a US-Japan task force in the South China Sea; and began hosting Exercise Malabar in the Bay of Bengal (one of whose war games is the closing of the Malacca Straits, though which 40% of China’s exports and 90% of its oil imports have to pass).

A ‘warrior wolf’ posture

The abrogation by decree of article 370 of the Indian constitution, which ended the autonomy of Jammu and Kashmir (8), and the publication of new maps showing Gilgit-Baltistan (under Pakistani control) and all of Ladakh, including Aksai Chin, as Indian territory was certainly not to China’s liking. Indian ministerial statements in parliament that the country would recapture all of Aksai Chin, Gilgit-Baltistan and Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (POK) also unsettled Beijing. Finally, India signed military logistics agreements with the US and Japan, and increased its one-on-one cooperation with Australia, which has particularly tense relations with China.

Gao and Jha conclude that ‘China could no longer ignore the fact that under Modi, India did not feel duty bound to abide by the tenets of the Panchsheel [‘peaceful coexistence’] agreement [on trade and relations between Chinese Tibet and India], which are reiterated in … the 1993 Border Agreement’ (9). However they fail to mention the many ways in which China has not kept its side of the bargain. China has persistently thwarted India’s efforts to become a great power, preventing it from joining the Nuclear Suppliers Group, by emphasising that it has not signed the non-proliferation treaty. It has opposed India’s attempts to win a permanent seat on the UN Security Council and vetoed India’s attempts over several years to get a key Pakistani terrorist involved in the 2008 Mumbai terror attack placed on the UN’s terrorist blacklist, relenting only in May 2019. While China itself has vastly improved its military might and infrastructure, any attempt by India to do the same appears to act as an irritant.At the time, under Xi Jinping, China increasingly adopted a ‘warrior wolf’ posture, taking a tougher stance on Taiwan, Hongkong, Vietnam and other countries bordering the South China Sea, which it sees as its main strategic direction. While China considers its border problems with India to be strategically secondary, it nevertheless seeks to deter Indian challenges to its border supremacy through armed incursions that, while creating instability and inflicting damage, do not amount to a major conflict. The aim is to keep India destabilised at all times.

In 1988, when both countries chose cooperation over confrontation, India’s GDP was $296bn (at 2010 exchange rates) while China’s was $312bn. Their defence budgets, at around $20bn, were almost identical. Twenty years later, when Indian GDP reached $1.2trn, China had become a $4.6trn economy. Today, China’s economy is nearly five times the size of India’s, while its defence budget, at $261bn (1.9 % of GDP), completely dwarfs India’s, at $71bn (2.4%) (10). The parity upon which the agreements between the countries were predicated no longer holds, effectively making them unequal agreements.

India improves infrastructure

In the last decade, India has moved to improve its military infrastructure and road network in the north and northeast. A new feeder road connects the LAC near the Galwan river with the road leading to the airfield at Daulat Beg Oldie. A second road, also in Ladakh, will allow India to reinforce its presence on the LAC in the Pangong lake area. India established two new mountain divisions in 2009, and in 2013 announced the creation of a 90,000-strong mountain strike corps. It has increased the frequency of its patrols and improved the quality of its forward airfields, allowing C-130s and Antonovs to land at Daulat Beg Oldie.

Despite this progress, long years of neglect and underfunding have left the Indian armed forces weak and struggling before a militarily vastly superior enemy. The extent and aggressiveness of China’s current reaction may seem surprising, but for internal and external reasons, it feels the need to show resolve: its economy is slowing, it has been widely criticised for its handling of the coronavirus crisis, and it feels threatened by what it sees as India’s rapprochement with the US, especially when its own relationship with the US is deteriorating.

Through its border transgressions, China aims to nip in the bud India’s ambitions to become a regional power, even if that means accepting a few losses. China is the big boss in the region, and to prove that is doing exactly what it did in 1962: humiliating India. It is also courting Nepal, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka with generous handouts, to India’s great displeasure.

India now seems determined to stand up to Chinese belligerence: it has moved several divisions to its western sector and strengthened points where it has a tactical advantage. Given the strategic, operational and resource asymmetry between the two sides, this stance might appear foolhardy, and risks putting India’s armed forces to a harsh test if the current escalation continues. For while India’s friends like Japan, the US or Australia might give it outward support, perhaps even some weapons, they are unlikely to come to its aid should a major conflict develop.

India’s democratic advantage eroded

Perhaps the only area where India has always had an advantage over China is in its choice of political system. But India’s democratic institutions have been systematically hollowed out and eroded by Modi’s increasingly authoritarian Hindu nationalist government.

Is Modi going down the same path as Nehru and repeating the mistakes of 1962? Convinced of his own charisma and armed with an absolute belief in his ability to solve issues through face-to-face contact, he has met Xi Jinping 18 times since 2014 and made five visits to China, despite growing evidence that the Chinese are increasingly disgruntled and restive.This façade of cordiality has not prevented him from sending mixed messages that risk offending China, publishing maps that show Aksai Chin as Indian territory, making bombastic statements about reconquering lost territory, and flaunting his friendship with the US, China’s main rival.

Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has whipped up anti-China feeling in India. It has banned some 200 Chinese apps, including TikTok, and put a brake on investment in key sectors such as railways, infrastructure and telecoms. This despite warnings from economists that while economic measures may pinch China they will ultimately hurt India more.

After consistently waving a red rag at the Chinese, Modi suddenly became conciliatory on 19 June, telling an all-party conference, ‘Neither has anyone intruded into our territory, nor are we in anyone else’s territory.’ This statement deeply embarrassed Indians, especially the army and the diplomatic corps, as Chinese officials seized on Modi’s words to ‘prove’ they were not the intruders. Are India and China on the verge of another muscular border conflict, even a full-scale border war, or will they finally sit down for serious negotiations?