For weeks now, soldiers of the Indian Army and the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) have been eyeballing each other and occasionally arm-wrestling at a height of more than 10,000 feet above sea level in the eastern Himalayas. India calls this narrow plateau, where the stand-off is underway, Doklam, while in Mandarin, it is Donglang, and in Tibetan, it is Zhoglam. Situated near the Ha valley in Bhutan, India also terms it a tri-junction, between China, India and Bhutan.
So it is no surprise that there is a dispute. Rival claims are made to an area until recently not marked on survey maps. Even with accurate coordinates, there can be variances between points shown on maps and conditions on the ground. The tri-junction was a crisis waiting to happen.
n But what is the trigger now?
Bhutan lodged a protest as PLA soldiers started advancing towards Zompelri on June 16, 2017, to provide cover to the Chinese road crew preparing to extend the road when the Indian Army stepped in to stop the road work. The face-off has continued since then with the Chinese bellicose, like never before, in their English media. Meanwhile, Rajiv Ranjan from Shanghai University says: “Beware of misreading Chinese media.”
India, however, has a full-blown crisis at hand. Ranjan may be right, but China’s stated position is unequivocal: Pull back your troops first before talks. That stand, if accepted by India, will be a severe loss of face for New Delhi and for Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who is a nationalist first and a pragmatist second. A muscular foreign policy has been his strong suit. So to accede to China could well be devastating.
n Will Modi exhibit statesmanship?
There is the chance that a pullback may ultimately pave the way to a permanent solution of the border problem. Most crises come with an opportunity in disguise. Destiny beckons him. A pullback will have the opposition baying for his blood. And Modi lacks that consensual bent of mind to craft a policy that will get the opposition to his side. And without the Congress party supporting him, he is unlikely to rewrite history. Even his own party maybe unwilling to let him take this risky step. But is there a genuine, one-step-back-two-steps-forward option here?
India’s disastrous war with China in 1962 casts its long shadow over its relations with China. The tortuous narratives on how that loss came about, who was responsible for it, could it have been avoided and so on have all scarred the public’s mind to the extent that a rational and balanced view is almost impossible. India’s first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru is generally held responsible for this debacle and his ‘forward policy’, the primary reason for China’s war with India.
n So what is this ‘forward policy’?
It is a set of foreign policy doctrines applicable to territorial and border disputes, in which emphasis is placed on securing control of disputed areas by occupation and annexation, or by the creation of compliant buffer states. It is a throwback to the Great Game of the 19th century, in which the British Empire sought to keep at bay the pressures from the Russian Empire’s southern expansion into Afghanistan, Iran and central Asia.
Nehru, an arch anti-imperialist, after initial hesitation, borrowed the ‘forward policy’ of its erstwhile colonial rulers, not by annexation but by posting control posts and aggressive patrolling of the contested areas between India and China. The border between China and India traverses a distance of 4,000 kilometres, over high mountains, glaciers, high altitude deserts like Aksai Chin, river beds and plateaus like Doklam. Survey maps are difficult to obtain and clear demarcations a challenge. And therein lies the genesis of the historic distrust between China and India; a wariness bound to geography but also to differing worldviews. This distrust is exacerbated by China’s rise, spectacular and near exponential, and India’s surge albeit modest and granular.
The most contentious part of the Sino-Indian border is in the east, the McMahon Line, that traverses five Indian states, and on the Chinese side, the Tibet Autonomous Region (Tar) and the contentiousness became pricklier with China’s annexation of Tibet in 1950. This line proposed by Henry McMahon, the British plenipotentiary, at the 1914 Simla Convention, has always been disputed by the Chinese Government, but India abides by it, by and large, though both parties agree that this line is difficult to trace it on the ground; the terrain is forbidding and varying interpretations have been given to the existing survey maps. It was precisely on account of this that Nehru decided on his ‘forward policy’ with the intention of using it as a hedge, a maximalist tactic, which, however, backfired disastrously in that 1962 war with China. India lost almost 40,000 square kilometres of territory.
Doklam is not an exception. There has been a series of flare-ups — some very minor, others major, dating from 1965, 1987 to 2013 and 2014. In 1993, India and China put in place the ‘Agreement on Maintenance of Peace and Tranquillity (AMPT) ‘that provided the mechanism for handling these disputes and this has ensured stability across the border by and large. A central tenet of the AMPT is that neither party will resort to unilateral action either by cartographic aggression or military action and status quo would be maintained without prejudice to either side’s claims.
n Why then the Doklam crisis?
China claims Nehru accepted the 1890 treaty between China and British India over this section of the border and therefore it is India that is reneging on its terms. Two things stand out here. First, Nehru did not accept in entirety that old treaty. Indeed, he had expressed his reservations precisely over the tri-junction area. Next, China has always maintained that old agreements signed when China was a weak and an imperial power like Britain unilaterally coerced her into one-sided treaties are unacceptable to her. Indeed, the McMahon Line was rejected by China on exactly on these grounds. So how does China square with the 1890 treaty? More importantly, the McMahon Line for all its imperfections had one underlying principle embedded in it, namely the use of watershed principle to the extent it could as markers for ease of interpreting the map on the ground. Thus a river basin, a plateau or a mountain ridge were signposts for drawing the boundary and hence less subject to varying interpretations.
Many military analysts also emphasise that Doklam is critical for maintaining India’s security; the vulnerable chicken’s neck, the Siliguri corridor, is vital for keeping open the bridge between India’s Northeast and the rest of India. In 1962, this link was on the verge of being closed. So these fears are not unfounded. However, there are others who question these apprehensions. Read the Wire’s ‘The Bhutan stand-off is an opportunity, not a threat’. Indeed this article argues for a measured and calibrated pullback to make China accept the watershed principle and the McMahon Line. It would be a huge victory for common sense and peace. A win–win situation for both China and India. A nightmare of a border that has bedevilled relations between the two ancient civilisations, that could well be put to rest for ever.
Should Modi take this profoundly transformative step, he may well be anointed a ‘great’ Prime Minister of India.
Ravi Menon is a Dubai-based writer, working on a series of essays on India and on a public service initiative called India Talks.
