Land Grab

Strategic Vision vol. 9, no. 47 (September, 2020)

Pandemic used as cover for action on longstanding India-China border dispute

Raviprasad Narayanan

photo: BMN Network

COVID-19 has held the whole world in a state of crisis with millions of diagnosed positive cases and hundreds of thousands of deaths. This is an opportune moment for the world to come together, although there are differences of opinion about what exactly the virus is, what its origins are, and how best to diagnose and treat it. Conversely, at this moment, some governments see an opportunity to enforce their writ, using the lockdown and the preoccupation with fighting the virus to ignore international concerns and legal niceties. Such is the case with China’s continuing provocations in the high Himalayan region of western Ladakh in India, where the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has been expanding its territory by ignoring the Line of Actual Control (LAC), which was established in an agreement signed by both sides in 1993, called the Agreement on the Maintenance of Peace and Tranquility along the Line of Actual Control in the India-China Border Areas.

PLA ambush

Matters escalated recently when 20 Indian soldiers were killed in an ambush by the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) in this area. Under the command of their colonel, the troops were tasked with enforcing India’s right to patrol the Indian side of the LAC and removing illegal structures that PLA troops had built on Indian soil. The number of losses on the Chinese side is not known. This incident reveals that, following the Galwan river valley confrontation, the geostrategic and geoeconomic tensions between China and India will continue to reverberate for decades to come.

China and India are Asia’s largest countries geographically, and the second- and fifth-largest economies of the world. With their respective geopolitical schema distinctly out of synch, it appears that violating international norms is the methodology of choice for some, while for those at the receiving end, a temporary setback is worryingly creating domestic acceptance of the need to prepare for a more kinetic eventuality, should matters lead there. At a time when the world’s two most populous countries need so desperately to work together to fight the coronavirus pandemic, domestic political impulses seem instead to be at the fore.

China and India do not have a formal boundary agreement to delineate the 4,056-kilometer boundary between the two countries. What passes for a border between the two countries are a mélange of acronyms: the Line of Actual Control (LAC), the International Border (IB) and the Line of Control (LOC). From northwestern Ladakh in Jammu and Kashmir union territory, to Arunachal Pradesh state in India’s north-

“The exact geographical coordinates are not available in the public domain, leading to a situation where the PRC can claim territory never controlled by them.”

east, the unresolved boundary dispute between Asia’s two largest countries has deep, intrinsically embedded characteristics of ennui, and historical narratives prevail over the rational and the practical.

Bharat Mata sits at the entrance of an Indian military base in Ladakh, representing the patriotic and religious duty of all Indians to defend the nation.

photo: John Hill

In western Ladakh, the Galwan River valley, at an altitude of more than 4,500 meters, is coveted by China. This river originates as a stream in the eastern Karakoram Mountains and merges with other streams from various melting glaciers to flow into Aksai Chin of Jammu and Kashmir and into the Shyok River. This is entirely on the Indian side of the LAC. The Galwan River, owing to geographical contours, takes a sharp bend before flowing into the Shyok River. This bend forms a Y-shaped riverine estuary, which China calls the Galwan-Shyok estuary. India refers to this estuary as the Y-shaped nullah. According to India, the LAC is a few kilometers east of the estuary. The exact geographical coordinates are not available in the public domain, leading to a situation where the PRC can claim territory never controlled by them.

Troops clash

Pangong Lake in eastern Ladakh in India was witness to clashes in early May this year when Indian troops patrolling Pangong Lake were stopped by PLA soldiers and accused of trespassing into Chinese territory. The following day, when Indian troops were on patrol at the same place, PLA troops in larger numbers engaged them in fisticuffs, leading to a tense situation.

While these transgressions by Chinese troops were happening in eastern Ladakh, at the same time Chinese troops were transgressing at Nako La, a highaltitude mountain pass in the Sikkim state of India. To Indians, the memory of the 72-day Doklam episode of 2017 on the Bhutan-China-India border are still fresh. Until 2003, the PRC Ministry of Foreign Affairs considered the Sikkim state of India an independent country, revealing the uninterrupted coveting of land by leaders in Beijing.

An Indian military communications station sits high in the mountains of Kashmir, in the northernmost geographical region of the Indian subcontinent.

photo: Sandeepachetan.com

The two instances at the Galwan Valley should have raised concerns in New Delhi, but they were not deemed an indication of greater anomalies in bilateral relations. China, in the Galwan Valley fracas, has been unsuccessfully trying to establish sovereignty rights through force. This attempt is a blatant violation of international law, and is Beijing’s “reverse gear” methodology in operation to recreate what was done in 1962, when India lost eastern Ladakh in the war.

These high-altitude mountains are strategically important to China as its geographical spread and altitude can, if matters turn ugly, restrict China’s communications with Xinjiang. A physical presence in these remote regions also makes it easier for China to implement its One Belt One Road (OBOR) project connecting Pakistan-occupied Kashmir with China’s Xinjiang province. The China-Pakistan Economic Corridor is investing around US$14 billion to construct a four-lane highway in Karakorum where the average height is between 12,000 and 15,000 feet above sea level.

By forcibly altering the map and illegally occupying India’s territory, the PRC wants to display its readiness to tackle potential geopolitical adversaries. There are several reasons why China violated the treaty of 1993. First, China’s Highway 219 connects Xinjiang with Tibet: two regions with huge geographical spreads that roughly account for more than one-third of China’s total land area. Second, this highway, at 2,342 kilometers in length, was constructed in the first decade since the PRC was founded in 1949.

Third, by going through Tibet, this highway encouraged China to claim India’s northwestern high Himalayas, where Ladakh is located. Fourth, to Beijing, Xinjiang has to be kept under strict control lest it lead to a situation where secession of East Turkestan is revived as an issue by restive Uyghurs. India’s loss in the 1962 war with China saw eastern Ladakh, known as Aksai Chin, taken over by the PLA. The whole of Ladakh is a part of Jammu and Kashmir union territory in India, and losing this strategic geographical area still animates policy makers in New Delhi. The Galwan River and valley were never claimed by China until 1960. This was an addon to the claim China made in 1956, and is rejected by India.

To India, China claiming territory south of the Kunlun Mountains as an intrinsic part of its Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous region was an irredentist advancement of claims lacking any historical basis. These days, most people are well aware of just how “autonomous” Xinjiang really is.

A US Air Force F-15 takes off from Kadena Air Base in Okinawa to support operations in the Sea of Japan.

photo: Peter Reft

The history of the Galwan Valley was imprinted by the PLA in 1962 at Samzungling, used as a command position during the war. Talks between Zhou Enlai and Jawaharlal Nehru in 1959 involved an exchange of maps, and the Chinese map did not show Galwan as an area Beijing was claiming. One of the consequences that followed was India’s rejection of China’s claim of 1956 which included the whole of Aksai Chin. Quickly after India’s rejection came the Longju and Kongka pass incidents, which led to an all-out war between the two countries in late 1962.

Prior to the 1962 conflict, China’s irredentism was noted by senior politicians in India, especially by then Vice President Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan and Home Minister Govind Ballabh Pant, both of whom were averse to Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s overtures to China seeking “equality” and “commonality” as lodestones to the bilateral relationship. Vice President Radhakrishnan opined at the time that, if China could claim Aksai Chin, it could set a precedent where India could claim parts of Afghanistan (specifically Kabul and Kandahar).

He told visiting Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai that China had hurt India deeply by claiming Ladakh and Aksai Chin, and that he was surprised Zhou was not aware of this fact. It has to be added here that Zhou’s visit to New Delhi was a failure after his border settlement agreement with Burma encouraged Beijing to bring a favorable closure to the boundary dispute with India. This failure rankles China, much as the loss in 1962, with its territorial re-alterations, continues to gnaw at India. The only takeaway emerging out of Zhou Enlai’s six day visit was the setting up of a high-power group to study border issues and demarcations, a process interrupted by war and internal political chaos in China during the Cultural Revolution.

Long-standing compacts

China’s continental and maritime borders are an imprint of political authority with little or no adherence to long-standing international compacts. Beijing’s land-boundary disputes with most of its continental neighbors have been settled, with India and Bhutan being the exceptions. Maritime claims are another story, with China currently having maritime disputes with all of the littoral ASEAN countries in the South China Sea. In pressing its claims, China has made repeated transgressions of international maritime law. Supplementing China’s absolutely vacuous claims on the Galwan River valley is a concerted attempt

to accuse India of having started the fracas. Beijing claims that India has repeatedly been violating the LAC, ignoring China’s “sovereign historical rights” over the Galwan Valley, creating friction in US-China relations as the backdrop to Washington and Beijing’s trade concerns, and fomenting “splittist” activities in Xinjiang … all revelatory of a modus operandi of an opaque political system.

Global stratagem

The recent fracas with China has been intensively reported in the Indian media with such a degree of openness that even information considered highly secret has been disclosed to the public. As a nation with a profile matching that of an emerging power, India infers China to be a spoiler, as it does not want an equal in Asia; only vassals. China’s economic success over the last four decades has been matched by a commensurate increase in its global stratagem. India, while still in the “emerging power” bracket, seeks to replicate China’s economic growth and impress upon the rest of the world its credentials as a democracy. India wants to be a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council, arguing that it would lend credence to the grouping lest it lose all international respect due to its members—China among them— not adhering to its own resolutions.

India has minimal geopolitical ingress, globally, and is currently going through a phase of introspection and regression. China’s military adventurism on the LAC with India coincides with its aggressive intent as evidenced by its behavior in the South China Sea, where it disregards regional multilateral institutions such as ASEAN and international covenants like the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea.

India’s lackluster presence in international relations owes its origins to the slipshod manner in which erstwhile powerful multilateral institutions like the NonAligned Movement and the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) exist only in annual conference jamborees and issuing anodyne statements.

At this juncture, China is leveraging India’s domestic political reformulations, economic stasis, and the fecklessness of SAARC to woo away neighbors like Nepal, Bhutan, Myanmar, and Bangladesh. Pakistan is a different entity altogether, and has cultivated China as a crutch for defense and economic reasons.

This latest episode in China-India tensions has encouraged New Delhi to adopt the US vision of what China is, and has become an active member of the Quad (consisting of Australia, Japan, India, and the United States) with defense cooperation and joint training exercises commencing soon. Beyond just the strategic dimension, India has calculated that, in trade matters, it could reduce its large trade deficit with China during the current phase by endorsing the boycott of China-made goods and services. The banning of apps, smartphones, and components made in China was the beginning of a new phase in bilateral relations, where minus sanctions, domestic laws are tweaked, to sequester Chinese products as those from an enemy.

The death of Indian Army personnel has had an effect on Indian people’s attitudes toward China. Beijing’s misgivings about New Delhi not joining the OBOR and MSRI have proven a continuity in India’s foreign policy making, where it prefers not to anchor with any powerful grouping. This is, however, undergoing rapid change, with government defense contracting preferring US long-range aircraft (Lockheed C-130 Hercules) and helicopters (Apache) to replace their aging Russian-made equivalents. The current troubled relationship between India and China is a situation to watch closely, as China wants to remake Asia by attempting to coerce its only plausible competitor, India.

Dr. Raviprasad Narayanan is an associate professor at the Centre for East Asian Studies, School of International Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.