China demands India withdraw from disputed plateau
China has repeated its demand for India to withdraw its troops from a disputed plateau in the Himalayan mountains as a weeks-long border standoff continued unabated.
Geng Shuang, the foreign ministry’s spokesman, said India’s withdrawal was a precondition to any talks to settle the standoff, saying it would demonstrate New Delhi’s “sincerity”.
His remarks came ahead of an expected meeting between Narendra Modi, the Indian prime minister, and Xi Jinping, China’s president, on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Hamburg on Friday. The dispute may well cool after the two men have spoken. But for now, with the standoff due to enter its fourth week on Saturday, neither side appears willing to step down.
Since the beginning of last month, each country has moved at least 3,000 troops to the Doko-La plateau in the Sikkim region, which lies near a junction where Indian, Chinese and Bhutanese territory meets.
The plateau is claimed by China and Bhutan, with India supporting Bhutan’s claim. And after China began building a road in the plateau earlier this year, India – at Bhutan’s request – sent troops to the area last month to obstruct the project.
China claimed Indian troops blocked the “normal activities” of construction crews on the Chinese side of a de facto border that runs through the plateau. India, however, maintains its troops only joined Bhutanese soldiers in blocking construction of the road when it intruded into territory on the Bhutanese side of this border .
A skirmish broke out between Indian and Chinese troops, during which Chinese soldiers demolished two army bunkers in the north- eastern Indian state of Sikkim in a cross-border strike. No lives were lost.
India is a longtime ally of Bhutan but it also has its own reasons for wanting to stop the Chinese road: once completed, the road will bring China closer to the narrow land corridor in the state of West Bengal known as Chicken’s Neck, which connects India’s north- eastern states to the rest of the country.
The Chinese road endangers Indian defence positions and thus “threatens Indian security”, Sushant Singh, a former lieutenant-colonel in the Indian army, told The National.
The current dispute has highlighted chronic disagreements over other parts of the India’s and China’s Line of Actual Control, the 3,488-kilometre shared border. China claims about 90,000 square kilometres in the north-eastern Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh, while India says Beijing is occupying 38,000 square kilometres of its territory on the Aksai Chin plateau.
The latest standoff escalated on June 19 when, in apparent retaliation for the situation in Doko-La, China refused 47 Indian pilgrims entry through the Nathu La mountain pass, preventing them from reaching Mount Kailash, a site holy to Hindus and Buddhists in the region of Tibet. China then sent a submarine and a dozen other naval vessels to the Indi- an Ocean, even as India, Japan and the US are to begin military exercises on Monday next week.
On Thursday last week, Lu Kang, another spokesman for China’s foreign ministry, said New Delhi ought to learn “historical lessons” – a reference to a border war that India lost against China in 1962.
Indian defence minister, Arun Jaitley, said on Friday: “The situation in 1962 is different, and the India of 2017 is different.”
The Global Times, a newspaper run by China’s Communist Party, yesterday took the hardest line yet. “Jaitley is right that the India of 2017 is different from that of 1962 – India will suffer greater losses than in 1962 if it incites military conflicts.”
Whether the standoff will escalate further remains unclear.
“This is going to take some diplomatic effort to de-escalate,” Mr Singh said.
This border standoff is going to take some diplomatic effort to de- escalate