STAND-OFF CAN RESET RELATIONS
Tensions could force India to re-examine cooperative elements of bilateral relations
NEWDELHI: Chinese aggression in eastern Ladakh will complicate the planned disengagement process at the border, but more fundamentally, lead to a reset in New Delhi-Beijing ties and bring the competitive element of the relationship under sharper focus, experts say.
It could force India to closely re-examine the cooperative elements of its relationship with the Asian neighbour.
NEW DELHI: The Chinese aggression in eastern Ladakh, and the killing of 20 Indian Army personnel in Galwan valley, will complicate the planned disengagement process at the border, but more fundamentally, lead to a reset in New Delhi-Beijing ties and bring the competitive element of the relationship under sharper focus, experts say.
It could force India to closely re-examine the cooperative elements of its relationship with the Asian neighbour, and have an impact on geopolitics.
While the India-China border confrontation had been “roughly peaceful” until now, the “largescale brawl” on Monday has changed the dynamics, Ashley Tellis, a strategic analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington DC, who has closely studied South Asian security dynamics, said in a video analysis posted on the Carnegie website.
“The planned disengagement is now somewhat in jeopardy. Remember, there are three locations where these confrontations are occurring. The Indians had hoped they would be able to secure a mutual disengagement from the first location, which is where the brawl occurred and then move on to negotiating further disengagements in other locations. All this is now up in the air,” Tellis said.
But Tellis pointed out that the real question now was the future of the bilateral relationship itself, which leaders on both sides had attempted to “manage”, despite the “underlying competitiveness and rivalry”, keeping the standoff “within bounds”. But what has now happened, he added, changed the dynamic “quite significantly”. “This suggests to me that Sino-Indian relations can never go back to the old normal. They will reset with greater competitiveness and in ways that neither country had actually intended at the beginning of this crisis.”
Former Indian foreign secretary Nirupama Rao, who also served as ambassador to China and has closely studied the border dynamics, after a careful reading of the People’s Liberation Army statement on the incident, said on Twitter, “Chinese statement minces no words. The gloves are off.”
She noted that the statement was in line with communications received from the Chinese after the border dispute erupted in 1959 and skirmishes in the western and eastern sectors. “A dark hour like this with all the blood that has been shed is such a dreadful tragedy. Efforts made for normalization since 1976 have come to nought. There is a bad moon rising on India-China relations.”
Illustrating the possible Chinese motivations, S D Muni, professor emeritus at the Jawaharlal Nehru University and a former ambassador of India to Laos, said the Galwan violence was a “tough Chinese message” of not vacating strategic heights occupied through encroachments. “Strengthening Indian defence infrastructure in the region, along with the Indian political resolve on Pakistan-occupied Kashmir and Aksai Chin, is seen as a threat to Chinese illegal occupation of Aksai Chin and its strategic access through the Karakoram highway to Pakistan. It has sunk billions of dollars in Pakistan to nurse this strategic access,” Muni said.
He also called for a tougher stand from India. “Delhi should revisit its Tibet and Taiwan policies, must reinforce its Indo-Pacific strategic partnerships, and widen Quad by including Indonesia, Vietnam and Singapore in it. The building of Andaman and Nicobar as a formidable tri-service base must be expedited too.”
Quad is an informal security dialogue between four countries -- India, the US, Japan and Australia. It was conceptualised, in part, to counter China’s growing influence in the Indo-Pacific.
While suggesting that China’s motivations and the reason for the timing of its action in Ladakh are hard to gauge, Alyssa Ayres of the Council on Foreign Relations said it was important to note China’s territorial assertiveness in several other places as the world dealt with the pandemic.
On the future of the bilateral ties, she added: “India-China ties will undoubtedly suffer; they have for decades been marked by security tensions but with some degree of multilateral cooperation. It is harder to see New Delhi want to compartmentalise in the same way going forward.”
Ayres added that India’s options seem limited but it will have to make choices. “China is pushing India to make choices about who its friends are, a decision that India has historically refrained from making.”