BRAHMA CHELLANEY
Mail Online India
November 28, 2013
India has held regular border-settlement negotiations with China since 1981, in what is the longest such continuous process between any two nations in post-World War II history.
The negotiations, which began as “senior-level talks”, were rechristened first in 1988 as “joint working group” talks and then in 2003 as talks between “special representatives”.
Yet, after 32 years of border-related talks, India has failed to persuade China to agree to the bare minimum – a mutually defined line of control – even as the two sides continue to farcically call their disputed front-line the ‘Line of Actual Control’, or LAC.
In fact, China has strengthened its leverage against India by upping the ante, both by hardening its stance in the negotiations and by stepping up military pressure, including nibbling at Indian territory through stealthy incursions.
The pattern to disturb the status quo little by little and mount increased pressure is in keeping with China’s preferred approach to territorial disputes: What is ours is ours and what is yours is negotiable.
Having annexed the Aksai Chin plateau, China has focused its attention on Arunachal Pradesh, aggressively laying its claim since 2006 to that Indian state, which is almost three times larger than Taiwan.
In a clever ploy to turn Arunachal into an internationally recognised dispute, it has started calling it “South Tibet”, a term unknown before 2006.
Yet a timid India has retreated to an increasingly defensive position in the border talks. The spotlight now is on China’s Tibet-linked claim to Arunachal rather than on Tibet’s status itself.
China’s revival of its claim to Arunachal, in fact, drew encouragement from the then Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s 2003 recognition of Tibet as part of the People’s Republic. Beijing’s success in securing that recognition has helped narrow the dispute to what it claims. As a result, a politically adrift India has been left to fend off China’s increasingly assertive territorial demands.
What does India gain by persisting with the border-talks charade? By staying put in a barren and counterproductive process, India only aids China’s containment-behind-engagement strategy.
As long as India remains directionless, China will continue to press its claims by whatever means – fair or foul – it deems advantageous. And as India gets sucked into a 1950s-style trap, history is in danger of repeating itself.
The issue then was Aksai Chin; the issue now is Arunachal.
