THE SHADOW OF DOKLAM
Ayear after the August 2017 disengagement between the Indian and Chinese armies after a 72-day stand-off, the shadow of Doklam lingers. “Amazing how a lady like Sushmaji has buckled and prostrated herself in front of Chinese power,” Congress president Rahul Gandhi tweeted on August 2. “Absolute subservience to the leader means our brave jawan has been betrayed on the border.”
Rahul, it appears, has seized upon Doklam as one of the key issues with which to puncture the Modi government’s narrative on its foreign policy successes, ahead of the 2019 Lok Sabha elections. He has made more than a dozen statements on Doklam in the past year, and described Prime Minister Modi’s April 28 summit in Wuhan as a “no agenda” meeting.
That Rahul has been able to pursue this line of attack is, to some extent, a problem of the government’s own making. Since the disengagement, the ministry of external affairs (MEA) has insisted there have been “no new developments at the face-off site and its vicinity” and that “status quo prevails”. This is technically correct. The turning point near Doka La, where China was extending a road towards the India-China-Bhutan trijunction point, is free of Chinese presence.
But the same cannot be said for the rest of the contested 100 sq. kms plateau, which India and Bhutan see as Bhutanese territory. As this magazine reported in September last year, the status quo elsewhere has changed, with the People’s Liberation Army back in
greater strength. Camp stores and construction material under tarpaulin sheets reveal China’s determination to continue infrastructure building, along with prefabricated structures for troops.
The only difference is these constructions are directed towards the Bhutan border, not India’s. All the same, it has made the MEA’s insistence of Doklam being “resolved”— “without losing any ground” and without “an iota of change on the plateau” as Swaraj told Parliament last week—hard to justify. All the more when even defence minister Nirmala Sitharaman told Parliament that the PLA had dug trenches and built helipads to sustain its positions in the winter.
The problem for India is that there are no easy options. If sending troops a few hundred metres into Bhutan was in itself unprecedented, sending troops to confront China a few kilometres deep into a third country’s territory—on which India has no claims—is an even more difficult proposition, particularly with Bhutan choosing to remain silent on China’s moves. Whether this is what Rahul and the opposition want is unclear, as amid all their political point-scoring, they haven’t offered any credible alternative solution.
A former official says he finds the MEA’s strategy of silence puzzling. In some sense, Doklam was a success. Despite the opposition’s claims of kowtowing to China, the decision to send troops into Bhutan was anything but that. Indeed, India’s prime objective of preventing a road to the most sensitive point of the trijunction remains fulfilled. Much of China’s new moves are in the direction of Bhutan.
On this, the government has failed to make its case clearly. And ignoring the PLA’s salami-slicing of the plateau is an increasingly untenable proposition, as also the government’s reluctance to shed light on what were the terms of the August 28, 2017, disengagement. After all, the MEA had last June, explaining its decision to cross the border into Bhutan to stop the PLA, cited the unilateral altering of the trijunction by China, in contravention of past understandings with India. That is precisely what China is doing. “Doklam was never about the PLA leaving,” an Indian army official told this magazine last year. “It was about them staying.” And signs are they are not going anywhere in a hurry.
—Ananth Krishnan