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| India-Pakistan |
| Time to draw the line with China |
| 2006-06-30 |
| By Brahma Chellaney For 25 continuous years, India has been seeking to settle by negotiation with China the disputed Indo-Tibetan frontier. These border talks are the longest between any two nations in modern world history. Yet, not only have the negotiations yielded no concrete progress on a settlement, but they also have failed so far to remove even the ambiguities plaguing the long line of control. Beijing has been so loath to clearly define the 4,057-kilometre frontline, that it suspended the exchange of maps with India several years ago. Consequently, India and China remain the only countries in the world not separated by a mutually defined frontline. In contrast, the Indo-Pakistan frontier is an international border, excepting in Jammu and Kashmir, where there is a line of control that has been both clearly defined and delineated. Only in the 110-kilometre northernmost tip of the Indo-Pakistan frontier at Saltoro Ridge, encompassing the disputed Siachen Glacier, is the frontline ill-defined. The latest round of Sino-Indian border negotiations ended in Xian this week in predictable fashion — with warm handshakes and a promise to meet again. But after a quarter century of unrewarding negotiations with Beijing, India ought to face up to the reality that it is being taken round and round the mulberry bush by an adversarial state that has little stake in an early border resolution. An Indian reappraisal of the present process has to begin with greater transparency at home in order to promote a meaningful public debate. Official candour on the background and present focus of the talks can help build a public opinion that is more informed and alert about the intentions and tactics of China. Conversely, a domestic public opinion lulled into a false sense of complacency through official obfuscation and a speciously positive pitch can hardly be conducive to India’s own interest, particularly at a time when China’s accumulating power and growing assertiveness are beginning to constrict Indian strategic space. In that light, why misinform the Indian public by stating that this was “the eighth round of talks,” as if the border negotiations began with the 2003 appointment of “special representatives”? In 2003, merely a new label was put on the talks, but nothing else changed. Why bury the fact that the border talks have been going on ever since they were initiated by Indira Gandhi in 1981? The number of rounds of talks should be counted from 1981, not from a label change. For the first seven years, the negotiations were labelled “senior-level talks.” In order to contrive a “breakthrough” when two different Indian Prime Ministers visited Beijing, the tag was changed in 1988 to “joint working group” and then to “special representatives’ talks” in 2003. What was touted at the last label change as an upgraded dialogue at the “political” level has turned out to be an exercise merely in window dressing: while the Chinese team has been led since 1981 by a career diplomat with the title of a vice foreign minister, India switched in 2003 from a serving bureaucrat (the foreign secretary) to an ex-bureaucrat serving as the national security adviser. This despite the fact that the national security adviser is senior in protocol to China’s “special representative,” Dai Bingguo, the first of eight vice foreign ministers. In fact, India has had a new “special representative” every year since 2003. The 2005 appointee, M.K. Narayanan, has to last out 2006 to break away from that spell. The more the talks have dragged on, the less Beijing has appeared interested in resolving the border disputes other than on its terms. In the period since 1981, China has realised a tectonic shift in its favour by rapidly building up its economic and military power. While keeping India engaged in sterile border talks, China has strengthened its negotiating leverage through its illicit nuclear and missile transfers to Pakistan and strategic penetration of Burma. Today, Beijing gives the impression that an unresolved, partially indistinct border fits well with its interests. Indeed, it sees a strategic benefit in keeping hundreds of thousands of Indian troops pinned down along the Himalayas, ensuring in the process that they would not be available against China’s “all-weather ally,” Pakistan. This is the “third party whose interests China cannot disregard,” as a Chinese official divulged at a Track II dialogue in Beijing that this writer had co-organised a few years ago. An unsettled border also endows China with the option to activate military heat along the now-quiet frontier if India played the Tibet card or entered into a military alliance with the United States. More importantly, China is sitting pretty on the upper Himalayan heights, having got what it wanted — by furtive encroachment or by conquest. It definitely sees no reason to strategically assist a potential peer competitor by lifting pressure on the borders through an amicable settlement. Given these realities, India’s top priority from 1981 to 2002 was to get the line of control fully clarified while remaining open to any Chinese proposal for a complete border settlement. The accompanying confidence-building measures were premised on the elimination of frontline ambiguities to help stabilise the military situation on the ground. But the process of adopting CBMs has advanced much faster than the parallel process of defining and delineating the frontline, farcically called “the line of actual control.” In 1996, the two countries, for example, signed a CBM prohibiting specific military activities at precise distances from a still-blurry frontline. That accord requires the two countries, among other things, not to fly combat aircraft “within 10 kilometres of the line of actual control” (Article V.2) and not to “conduct blast operations within two kilometres of the line” (Article VI), when the reality is that there is no agreed frontline on maps, let alone on the ground. It took two full decades of border talks before China agreed to exchange maps with India of even one border sector. In 2001, the Chinese and Indian sides exchanged maps showing each other’s military positions in the least-controversial middle sector. China then committed itself to an exchange of maps of the western sector in 2002 and the eastern sector in early 2003. The completion of an exchange of maps showing each other’s presently held military positions was intended, without prejudice to rival territorial claims, to define where actual control lay. Through such clarification of the frontline, the two sides intended to proceed towards mutual delineation on maps and perhaps even demarcation on the ground, pending a final settlement. After the first exchange in 2001, however, China went back on its commitment, creating an impasse in the talks. Having broken its word, Beijing insisted that the two sides abandon years of laborious efforts to define the frontline and focus instead on finding an overall border settlement. That move clearly appeared to be a dilatory tactic intended to disguise its breach of promise. Ask yourself: if Beijing is not willing to take an elementary step — clarifying the frontline — why would it be willing to take far-bigger action to resolve the festering border problem through a package settlement? A final border settlement would be a complex process involving not only a full resolution of the claims that involve large chunks of territory but also the drawing of a clear-cut frontier. The idea of a “package” settlement is not new. China began peddling that even before its 1962 invasion, as a red herring to divert attention from its aggressive designs. Since 1981, it has raised the same idea from time to time. But till date it has not once put forward a concrete proposal for consideration. If anything, the border talks have revealed that Beijing is not willing to settle on the basis of the status quo. This is manifest from its laughable claim to India’s Tawang region — as an extension of its annexation of Tibet. Yet, as Prime Minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee sought to propitiate China during his 2003 Beijing visit on two separate fronts: he formally recognised Tibet as “part of the territory of the People’s Republic of China,” completing the process begun by Jawaharlal Nehru of India sacrificing its northern buffer; and he gave in to the Chinese demand to switch the focus of the border talks from frontline clarification to the elusive search for a package settlement. His concession to the hosts not only stalled the process of clarifying the frontline, but it also has taken India back to square one — to discussing the “principles” and “basic framework” of a potential settlement. The two negotiating teams are now engaged in giving meaning to and implementing the six abstract principles that were trumpeted as yet another “breakthrough” in April 2005 during the New Delhi visit of Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao. The focus of the talks now, as admitted by both sides, is on applying the principles to devise a “basic framework” for negotiations. In other words, the two sides are still not close to actually discussing any package-settlement idea. India needs to reflect on the wisdom of the course it has pursued. It not only rewarded Beijing in 2003 for an act of bad faith, but also has played into its hands by switching from the practical task of clarifying the frontline to a conceptual enunciation of vacuous principles and a new framework for talks. A well-known strength of Chinese diplomacy is to discuss and lay out principles, and then interpret them to suit Beijing’s convenience, as India found out bitterly after signing the 1954 Panchsheel agreement. It is inexplicable why India should join hands with China to camouflage the lack of progress in the border talks. Re-labelling ingenuity and a number of high-level visits and joint statements cannot epitomise progress. Is it in India’s interest to cover up China’s evident lack of sincerity? There is little new that the so-called special representatives are discussing. After 25 years of talks, any two sides will run out of new ideas, principles or proposals to discuss. Indeed, the way the talks are continuing, China and India can only consolidate the record they hold for the longest, most-barren negotiations. If New Delhi really believes in the maxim that good fences make good neighbours, it is time for it to draw the line, at least in the negotiations. But first it needs to re-evaluate the very utility of staying absorbed in a never-ending process that jibes well with Beijing’s India policy of engagement with containment. |
| Posted by:john |
| #3 watch that rail line China's building, "for tourism"...yeah, riiiggghhhtt |
| Posted by: Frank G 2006-06-30 20:41 |
| #2 Don't bet on it, at least in 5 years. They've both been paying attention to the performance of the U. S. military. Not that they're at theat level, but they know what the goal is. |
| Posted by: Nimble Spemble 2006-06-30 20:02 |
| #1 I ponder the possibility of an India-China border war, a low-level but murderous conflict of infantry and artillery. Both sides throwing endless conscript manpower at each other while keeping their conventional professional armies in the rear. A reenactment of WWI trench warfare. |
| Posted by: Anonymoose 2006-06-30 19:29 |