Why India-China border talks require a clear deadline – Firstpost
There are two ways to attempt resolving the India-China border dispute through the instrument of the Special Representatives (SR) of the two nations. One is a step-by-step, sector-by-sector approach. The other is a wholesale deal across the table, converting the existing Line of Actual Control (LAC) into an international border first, with post-accord adjustments, with specific queries and guidelines built into the same.
India and China are now following the sector-wise approach, which is time-consuming, so to say. It is a cartographer’s job, aided, assisted, and often guided by strategic considerations and security agencies. A wholesale pact is a here-and-now approach, involving a pre-meditated give-and-take approach, where national attitudes rather than approaches guide the process.
Such a course works only against a set time frame. A prime example is the Radcliffe Commission, which fixed the India-Pakistan border at Partition and Independence. It is still argued that it was an arbitrary process, hence leaving many things unsaid and . Some even used to argue—they still do—that British Law Lord Cyril Radcliffe used a pen to draw the India-Pakistan border on a map first and then proceeded to identify it on the ground. According to them—half jokingly, half mockingly, yet serious—the blunt nib of the pen covered vast areas in reality, leading to unpleasant and undesired consequences.
Or was it so? Yes, the Radcliffe lines were not without fault and fault lines, yes, but the problems of partition violence were independent of Radcliffe’s work. If anything, it quickly disposed of the question of individual villages and communities. The unprecedented violence that followed was political.
So was the confusion, contradictions, and continuing confrontations that led to the ‘Kashmir issue’. The two emerging nations, India and Pakistan, and also Cyril Radcliffe had readily acknowledged the sovereignty of Kashmir, its ruler and his subjects, and the kingdom was not considered for merger with either of the new nations by the Border Commission.
Both India and Pakistan staked claims for Kashmir to merge with them while the ruler, Hari Singh, mischievously toyed with the idea of staying independent—like some other ‘native rulers’ did at the time. Pakistan deploying so-called razakars forced Hari Singh to sign the Instrument of Accession with India.
Could Radcliffe have followed the sector-wise sector approach, invited suggestions and complaints, and sat at every flashpoint and tried to sort it out and arrive at a consensus—or even give a split verdict, part favouring one and part favouring the other? The kind of balancing out both? Possibly such negotiations would have been continuing to date, with much more bloodshed spread over years and decades than actually occurred—which was massive in every which way.
The Radcliffe Commission worked on totally different landmasses, in Punjab in the West and Bengal in the East, and came up with a collective verdict, quick and fast. Yes, East Pakistan, now Bangladesh, became a problem area, but again it is wrong to assume that Radcliffe was to blame. It was a political decision of the leaders of the two yet-to-be-formed nations that it would have to be this way, and Lord Louis Mountbatten put Radcliffe to work with a stiff deadline.
Day job, part-time job
It is this kind of an approach that both India and China have to employ to arrive at a border settlement, which alone is the backbone of ensuring normalcy in bilateral relations for a long, long time to come. Yes, with Special Representatives (SRs) from the two countries at work, it is not a unilateral decision of the Radcliffe kind that they could arrive at. Instead, there would still have to be negotiations—and for 21 years since they began, the SRs have not made much progress.
The recent SR meeting between India’s National Security Advisor (NSA) Ajit Doval and Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi was the 23rd in the series, with many more to follow, so to say. It is sufficient to point out that the SRs’ role and hence the complicated border talks involving them have been made part-time jobs requiring the least urgency for officials on both sides, whose ‘day job’ is something much bigger, consuming all their time and energy, even otherwise.
Can the two nations decide to make SRs work exclusively on border talks, on which alone real normalisation of bilateral relations hinges? What was thought of initially when the Vajpayee Government designated the nation’s first NSA, the late diplomat Brajesh Mishra, as the SR was aimed at feeling the waters. It remains so to date despite the constant change of SRs, without any real change in mandate, through the past years.
Yes, in an operational sense, the Doval-Wang Yi meeting in Beijing was working on initial normalisation of ties, post-Galwan, for which agreements and accords were worked out by the defence forces of the two countries and also their foreign ministers. From India, External Affairs Minister (EAM) S Jaishankar was the point man.
A real breakthrough was seemingly achieved after NSA Doval met Minister Wang Yi in Moscow earlier this year in their principal roles. Their meeting again, this time wearing the SR caps, followed not long after. Of course, in between, the two sides declared that they have sorted out the post-Galwan border issues satisfactorily—but not the larger border dispute, which was not in anyone’s glare until that happened.
At the Beijing talks with Doval, Wang said that it was important to ‘draw from the lessons’ of the four-year-long military standoff at the LAC in order to maintain peace and tranquillity at the boundary. If it was a loaded statement, it went without being contested—a good beginning for talking forward the revived SR-level talks. The two also discussed related aspects of bilateral ties that the Galwan row had adversely impacted, with the aim to provide ‘positive directions’ for cross-border exchanges, including the resumption of the Kailash Mansarovar pilgrimage, data-sharing on trans-border rivers, and border trade.
A Chinese Foreign Ministry statement said that the two SRs held ‘substantive discussions’ and reached a ‘six-point consensus’ that would see efforts to maintain peace at the borders and develop bilateral relations. The Indian statement from the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) did not refer to any ‘six-point’ consensus or agenda for the future, but it reiterated almost the same points on promoting bilateral exchanges.
Political guidelines
Significantly, the Chinese statement made a positive reference to the ‘political guidelines’ that the two SRs had agreed upon on resolving the border dispute as far back as 2005, which Galwan 2020 violently interfered with. ‘Political guidelines’ and a ‘political solution’ on the top of it alone would help in a quick resolution of the vexatious border dispute, which, if left to heal, would also help heal wounded memories on both sides. For India, it’s memories of the 1962 military debacle. For China, it’s about India’s ‘Forward Policy’, which, even when contestable, was unsustainable, to say the least.
Time is the best healer, and it has done its bit through the succeeding decades, with border tensions between the two nations being relegated to the mind and memories rather than on the ground. It was thus that the informal summits between President Xi Jinping and PM Narendra Modi at Wuhan (2018) and Mahabalipuram (2019) were expected to—rather, believed to have—set the mood and methods for an early resolution of the border dispute. Again, Galwan 2020 happened, cruder and crueller than the pre-summit Chinese incursions in the tri-junction with Bhutan in Doklam, 2017.
Galwan ensured that for the two nations, years were lost and the mutual trust of the immediate and intermediary past was shattered. Now, both sides are picking up the pieces, which was to have been avoided in the first place. Hopefully, fast-tracking of the process might also ensure that another Galwan kind mistake does not erupt.
Going beyond ensuring peace and tranquillity, peace along the 3,488 km of shared borders between the two countries means a lot for their stand-alone and cooperative growth and development all through. Together they are; it would mean a lot again for regional peace and geo-strategic balancing or re-balancing, if you want to call it so in the context of the US-initiated Quad and Indo-Pacific. As the Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao implied in Bengaluru in 2005, ‘Together, China’s hardware and India’s software’ can go a long way—the implication of the statement was not lost on his IT sector audience’.
Today, the LAC gives ‘physical control’ of borders in respective possession without addressing ‘territorial claims’, on what remain as ‘frontiers’. The reasons are not far to seek, either. There has not been any clear-cut border in those areas from time immemorial, though China (alone) keeps producing maps that it claims belonged to a distant past. China has continued to reject the ‘outcomes’ of the 1913-14 Simla Convention and the McMahon Line that sought to set out a border.
Arunachal and Aksai Chin
Today, the issue is more complicated and at the same time easy to resolve, if and only if there is a political will and direction with a deadline that can be real or imaginary—but one has to be there. The intention should be to end the deadlock(s), not prolong them in the context of strategic concerns, which are more for India, both owing to historic reasons and ground realities.
It has to begin with China giving up all purported claims to Arunachal Pradesh, which Beijing continues to flag from time to time, only to irritate New Delhi—but whose literary consequences are far more serious. It will have to decide to return Aksai-Chin back to India without wantonly dragging Pakistan back into what should essentially remain bilateral. In the past, China was believed to have taken a position that the PoK areas that Islamabad had passed on to Beijing as a ‘traditional’ Chinese region could form part only of a trilateral discussion, be it of the India-China border dispute or India-Pakistan differences.
Let India accept, if it could otherwise, that China is in possession of those areas and also has the ‘ownership’ it claims that it has. Nothing then should stop Beijing from giving those portions back to India as a part of an overall border solution. How an accord in this respect should be worded is for the two SRs to decide with legal assistance from both sides. How India takes possession of those areas is for New Delhi to worry about.
Yes, such courses are not going to be easy. But they are also not going to be as difficult as they have been made out (to be) through the current cartography-based step-by-step and sector-by-sector discussion. From a purely Indian standpoint, a strong, ‘nationalist’ government of the BJP-Modi kind can ‘market’ a political solution to the border dispute better than any other in its place. And the Chinese leadership has no reason to suspect that there would be a ‘nationalist uprising’ against Xi if he struck a historic and momentous deal of the kind with PM Modi. It could only bolster their images nearer home and even more overseas—and it would have their positive reflections and vibrations back home and across the larger region, going beyond South Asia but covering Asia as a whole and beyond.
In all this, a no-war, more-cooperation agreement between the two nations can go a long way in cementing not only bilateral relations but also bilateral trust that has been missing since the days of the forgotten five-point ‘Panchsheel’ agreement, 70 years back, in 1954!
The writer is a Chennai-based Policy Analyst and Political Commentator. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.
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