Needless alarm

India should not be defensive about any new U.S. activism on the issue of Kashmir

Brahma Chellaney

DNA newspaper, November 11, 2008

Saddled with problems of historic proportions, US president-elect Barack Obama has little time to savour his epochal victory. He inherits national and global challenges more formidable than any American president has faced at inauguration. The necessity to clean up the unprecedented mess that has occurred under the swaggering and blundering George W Bush means Obama will have little time for major new initiatives. Yet, there is concern in India that Obama may appoint ex-President Bill Clinton as his special envoy on Kashmir.

The writer is professor of strategic studies at the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi.

http://www.dnaindia.com/report.asp?newsid=1205234&pageid=0

Stop Being Bullied

Present slipshod approach belittles India, eggs on China

Brahma Chellaney

Times of India, April 4, 2008

Beijing’s provocations against India continue unabated. Arrogant authoritarianism blinds China to counterproductive actions. Surprisingly, India plays into Beijing’s hands and compounds the indignities. Recent instances underscore the manner India is being belittled from within.

            What is discreditable is not that Beijing summoned the Indian ambassador post-midnight, but that the envoy — a distinguished woman diplomat — docilely turned up at the Chinese foreign office at 2 am. No host government can compel a foreign diplomat to appear before it at an odd hour, that too in peacetime. The correct response to that imprudent, bureaucratic-level call would have been for the ambassador to say politely but firmly that she would visit the foreign office during regular business hours.

            Worse, it was not Beijing but New Delhi that revealed the post-midnight summons and the ambassador’s South Block-cleared compliance. Had New Delhi retaliated or wanted to prepare public ground to retaliate, such disclosure was unavoidable. But to have revealed that without any intent to respond amounted to inflicting self-humiliation. It brought home the unmistakeable softening of the Indian state. When Beijing in the early 1960s summoned Indian chargé d’affaires P.K. Banerjee at an unreasonable hour, the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) called in the Chinese chargé d’affaires at 3 am on two separate occasions, after which the Indian envoy faced no further harassment.

            In the present case, New Delhi did not take umbrage that in handing to its ambassador a list of places where Tibetan exiles purportedly planned to hold protests, Beijing was not only asking the world’s largest democracy to deny Tibetans the right to protest, but also revealing the existence of a Chinese intelligence network in India (and suggesting it was superior to India’s). Far from retaliating, a feckless New Delhi actually rewarded Beijing, by granting its ambassador an audience with the home minister to discuss the Olympic torch’s safety, even as China’s brutal crackdown in Tibet mocks the Olympic Charter’s “human dignity” principle.

When the Chinese made a protest over the Prime Minister’s Arunachal tour, it was again not Beijing but New Delhi that leaked the news. In doing so, New Delhi helped put the spotlight — to Beijing’s delight — on China’s claim on Arunachal Pradesh. A wiser New Delhi would not have given publicity to China’s low-key action in presenting, as External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee admitted recently, “not formally, but informally, a démarche to our Embassy”. But it just could not resist the urge to use the démarche to pat itself on the back for the PM’s Arunachal trip, although the tour conspicuously skipped Tawang and came after, rather than before, his China visit.

            Yet, when Chinese forces last November provocatively destroyed some Indian army bunkers at the Sikkim-Bhutan-Tibet tri-junction, New Delhi did the opposite: It tried to sweep the grave episode under the rug, employing “sources” to discredit reports about the attack inside Sikkim. It took New Delhi four full months to acknowledge that attack, with Mukherjee admitting in the Rajya Sabha on March 19 that, although China accepts the Sikkim-Tibet border “as settled in the Anglo-Sikkim Convention of 1890”, “some bunkers have been destroyed and some activities have taken place”. This is the latest example of New Delhi first gratuitously downplaying a belligerent Chinese action, only to sheepishly admit the truth later.

Take another shocker: The Army chief had the gall to say recently that India is as culpable as China in committing cross-border intrusions. His statement not only made light of official assertions about growing Chinese incursions — about 300 in the past two years, or more than three per week — but also flew in the face of a glaring fact: China’s continuing refusal to clarify the frontline, in order to keep India under military pressure. Beijing’s breach of promise to exchange maps has brought the bilateral process to define the line of control to a grinding halt. Instead of stressing China’s intransigence, General Deepak Kapoor witlessly justified Chinese cross-border forays by saying the “Chinese have a different perception” of the frontline. The Chinese have a different perception because it suits them.

            Earlier, Gen. Kapoor betrayed his ignorance of India’s security commitment to Bhutan by saying that Chinese military intrusions into Bhutanese territory are “a matter between China and Bhutan”. When the Army chief does not seem to know (or care) that India is responsible for Bhutanese defence, which neighbour can bank on this country? Bhutan, in any event, is the only friend India is left with.

            The defence ministry has contributed its own bit to lowering India’s esteem, earning in the process a grudging compliment from China’s official Xinhua news agency, which in a March 25 Mandarin commentary states: “India’s defensive and cautious attitude toward China appears to have permeated its defence ministry”. The ministry has completely watered down the China section in its latest annual report, as if India’s concerns have just vanished.

The more power China accumulates, the more it will seek to humiliate India. It is past time India got its act together to deal with Chinese provocations deftly. Asymmetry in inter-state relations does not entail the propitiation of the stronger. Diplomacy is the art of offsetting or neutralizing power imbalances. Consistency and confidence help obviate flipping and whining. India’s present slapdash approach is not only an invitation to greater trouble, but nationally demeaning.

The writer is a strategic affairs analyst.

© The Times of India, 2008

Engage, don’t isolate 

Burma illustrates that sanctions are not just a blunt instrument but counterproductive

By Brahma Chellaney

Hindustan Times, April 2, 2008

This week’s visit of the Burmese junta’s vice-chairman, General Maung Aye, who is also the Army chief, will formalize an agreement to launch an India-funded multi-nodal transportation corridor linking northeast India with Burma’s Sittwe port. The $135-million Kaladan Corridor has been made imperative by Bangladesh’s refusal to grant India transit access — a blinkered approach holding up the BIMSTEC free-trade area accord.

Maung Aye’s visit is an occasion to remember that Burma today is one of the world’s most isolated and sanctioned nations — a situation unlikely to be changed by its junta scheduling a referendum next month on a draft constitution. The junta’s reclusive chairman, Than Shwe, announced last week that the military would hand over power to civilians after elections in two years’ time. But the junta still holds out the threat to debar opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi from contesting.

            Burma is an important state. First, size matters: this is not a Bhutan or a Brunei but a country that boasts the largest Indochina land area. Second, it is a resource-rich nation with copious natural-gas reserves. And third, it is a natural land bridge between South and Southeast Asia, and thus critical to the economic advancement of India’s restive northeast. Such is its vantage location that Burma forms the strategic nucleus between India, China and Southeast Asia.

            Burma’s present problems and impoverishment can be traced back to the defining events of 1962, when General Ne Win deposed elected prime minister, U Nu, an architect of non-alignment. Ne Win, a devotee of Marx and Stalin, sealed off Burma, banning most external trade and investment, nationalizing companies, halting all foreign projects and tourism, and kicking out the large Indian business community.

            It was not until more than a quarter-century later that a new generation of military leaders attempted to ease Burma’s international isolation through modest economic reforms. Such attempts, without loosening political controls, came after the military’s brutal suppression of the 1988 student-led protests that left several thousand dead or injured — a bloodbath that coincided with the numerology-dedicated Ne Win’s announcement of retirement on the ‘most auspicious’ day of August 8, 1988 (8.8.88).

Twenty years later, China, also addicted to the power of number 8, may be courting trouble by launching the Beijing Olympics on 8.8.08 at 8.08 am. The Games —   communist China’s coming-out party — have already been besmirched by the brutal crackdown on the monk-led Tibetan uprising, just six months after Burmese monks spearheaded a challenge to authoritarianism in their own country through street protests that had an underlying anti-Chinese tenor. In fact, Burma’s majority people, the ethnic Burmans, are of Tibetan stock. The resistance against repressive rule in both Burma and Tibet is led by an iconic Nobel laureate — a symbol of soft power standing up to hard power.

            Western penal actions against Burma began no sooner than the junta refused to honour the outcome of the 1990 elections, won by Suu Kyi’s party. But Burma became a key target of US sanctions policy only in this decade, as underlined by the 2003 Burma Freedom and Democracy Act (which bans all imports from that country) and a series of punitive executive orders. The new missionary zeal is due to a Burma activist in the White House — not the president but his wife.

            Laura Bush’s activism has only been aided by the junta’s remarkable short-sightedness. The regime invited a new wave of US-led sanctions by killing at least 31 people during last September’s mass protests. It continues to detain Suu Kyi, besides isolating itself from the public by moving the national capital to remote Nay Pyi Taw. With Burma’s 58 million people bearing the brunt of the sanctions, China — a friend to every pariah regime — has emerged the only winner.

            The oversized military fancies itself as the builder of a united Burma. In a country that has been at war with itself since its 1948 independence, the military has used the threat of Balkanization to justify its hold on politics. It trumpets its successes between the late 1980s and early 1990s in crushing a four-decade-long communist insurgency and concluding cease-fire agreements with other underground groups that left just a few outfits in active resistance. The period since has been viewed by the military as a time to begin state-building, while to the opposition it has been an unending phase of repression.

Given Burma’s potent mix of ethnicity, religion and culture, democracy can serve as a unifying and integrating force, like in India. After all, Burma cannot be indefinitely held together through brute might. But make no mistake: The seeds of democracy will not take root in a stunted economy, battered by widening Western sanctions.

Also, if the Burmese are to break their military’s vise on power, why has much of the world accepted the 1989 name change to Myanmar? As was evident from Ceylon’s 1972 renaming as Sri Lanka to give it a distinct Sinhala identity — a move that helped further alienate the Tamil minority — a name change represents powerful symbolism. The junta restored the traditional name, Myanmar, for nationalistic reasons. But a name change ought to have an elected government’s imprimatur.

The grim reality is that sanctions have put the Burmese society in a downward spiral of poverty and discontent while strengthening the military’s political grip. Burma is proof that sanctions hurt those they are supposed to protect, especially when they are enforced for long and shut out engagement. A calibrated approach is called for, with better-targeted sanctions and room for outside actors to influence developments within. Instead of targeting the junta, the widening sanctions have sought to choke off industries — from tourism to textiles — on which the livelihood of millions of Burmese depends. Many female garment workers made jobless by sanctions are being driven into prostitution, as one US official, Matthew Daley, warned as far back as 2003.

Yet, in the face of a visibly deteriorating humanitarian situation in Burma, Laura Bush has championed more sanctions, roping in the EU. Her husband, underscoring how power respects power and the weak get bullied, spits fire at Burma but accepts despotic China’s invitation to the Olympics. He should see how the Burma sanctions are holding its people “economic hostage”, as Burmese author Ma Thanegi told Stanley Weiss in an interview.

Such is Laura Bush’s ability not only to influence US policy but also to orchestrate an international campaign that she announced last December 10 that, “India, one of Burma’s closest trading partners, has stopped selling arms to the junta”. New Delhi has still to confirm that. Nor has it repudiated the ban. Who can contradict a first lady whose fury on Burma reputedly flows from a meeting with a minority-Karen rape victim and information from a relative with an erstwhile connection to that country?

If the Burmese are to win political freedoms, they need to be first freed from sanctions that rob them of jobs, cripple their well-being and retard civil-society development. Years of sanctions have left Burma bereft of an entrepreneurial class but saddled with the military as the only functioning institution. To avert a humanitarian catastrophe, the same international standard applicable to autocratic, no-less-ruthless regimes in next-door China, Laos and Bangladesh should apply to Burma — engage, don’t isolate.

http://www.hindustantimes.com/StoryPage/StoryPage.aspx?id=a9c9f792-f519-4cb3-9505-8e0c45ae326c&&Headline=Engage%2c+don%u2019t+isolate+

India should bring the Tibet issue to the centrestage

Brahma Chellaney

Expert, strategic affairs

Economic Times, March 21, 2008

No event since independence has more adversely affected India’s security than the fall of Tibet. Tibet’s annexation by China created a new geopolitical reality by bringing Han forces to India’s frontiers for the first time in history. Within 11 years of extending its full control over Tibet, China invaded India — a war whose wounds have been kept open by Beijing’s aggressive claims to additional Indian territories.

Today, China’s occupation gives it control over Tibet’s vast mineral and water resources. Tibet not only has 126 different minerals, but is also the source of rivers like the Brahmaputra, Sutlej and Indus — the ongoing damming of which allows Beijing to fashion water into a political weapon against India. Indeed, China’s reckless exploitation of Tibet’s natural resources carries serious ecological and climatic implications for India.

            The occupying power now is creating new demographic realities on the ground that would help accentuate India’s security challenge. Not content with having turned Lhasa into an overwhelmingly Han city, Beijing is pursuing a vigorous “Go West” Han-migration campaign, which is being facilitated by the new railway. Tibet’s Sinicization is helping marginalize Tibetans, sympathetic to India. Is it any surprise thus that Tibetans have risen in revolt against Beijing’s relentless repression?

            With the Tibetan rebellion having spread to remote parts of Tibet, and even beyond to the areas forcibly incorporated in Han provinces, China has responded with brute force, cutting off the Tibetan plateau from the rest of the world, killing scores of protestors and arbitrarily arresting many in an ongoing crackdown. India cannot stay a mute spectator to the bloodletting on the land of the pacifist Tibetan Buddhist culture. The autocrats in Beijing will not ease their crackdown unless international pressure is brought to bear on them. The world has no second option.

            Tibet is the core issue between India and China. So India should not hesitate to bring Tibet to the centerstage, and plan for the time when its ally, the aging Dalai Lama, is no longer on the scene.

(c) Economic Times, 2008

Unprincipled Principles

Brahma Chellaney

Asian Age, June 16, 2007

One passion of Chinese diplomacy is to go in for numbered policy pronouncements, like the “10-pronged strategy” unveiled in the joint declaration with India during President Hu Jintao’s visit last November. Another fetish is to enunciate diplomatic principles with another state and later, at an opportune time, reinterpret them unilaterally to add force to Chinese claims and ambitions.

Defining high-sounding principles to advance bilateral relations or dispute resolution helps Beijing to hold the other side to basic parameters, including a one-China policy, and foster a belief that the enunciation of cadenced concepts is progress by itself. Yet the idea behind formulating such principles is to bind the other party to them more than oneself. The principles devised are invariably so general and nebulous that Beijing, in any event, has ample room to reinterpret them or emphasize a single principle over the rest.

At times, the Chinese reinterpretation is nuanced, intended to bring the other state under transient pressure, with a particular aim in mind, such as to “correct” its behaviour. At other times, it is designed to be less subtle by signalling a diplomatic breakdown, as happened in the run-up to the 1962 Chinese invasion of India.

Beijing has proven an international past master in such diplomatic play. A fresh reminder of that was the message the new Chinese foreign minister, Yang Jiechi, conveyed to his Indian counterpart Pranab Mukherjee in Hamburg recently that the “mere presence” of settled populations does not affect Chinese claims on Indian territories.

Contrast that with what Premier Wen Jiabao had signed on to just two years ago in New Delhi. One of the six main principles defined in the much-touted “Agreement on the Political Parameters and Guiding Principles for the Settlement of the Boundary Question” mandates that the two sides “safeguard due interests of their settled populations in the border areas.”

While the message signals that Beijing is hardening its stance over the territorial disputes, should India be surprised by the development? The history of Sino-Indian relations, in fact, is largely a cyclic narrative of noble principles being framed, only to lull India into a false sense of complacency.

Consider the famed 1954 Panchsheel Agreement that defined the five principles of peaceful coexistence. Officially titled as the agreement on “trade and intercourse between Tibet Region of China and India,” the accord simplistically identified the following principles, without elaboration:

(i) “mutual respect for each other’s territorial integrity and sovereignty;”

(ii) “mutual non-aggression;”

(iii) “mutual non-interference in each other’s internal affairs;”

(iv) “equality and mutual benefit;” and

(v) “peaceful coexistence.”

No sooner had the accord been signed than China began finding new and different meanings in the Panchsheel principles. It laid claim to Indian border areas like Barahoti (located at the Uttarakhand-Tibet-Nepal tri-junction) and then stealthily intruded south of Niti and Shipki mountain passes — all specified border points in that accord. Before long, China began building a highway through India’s Ladakh region to link rebellious Tibet with another vast, occupied region, Xinjiang, home to Turkic-speaking Muslim ethnic groups.

Indeed, even as it started furtively encroaching on Indian territories, Beijing kept asking New Delhi to honour the principles of “mutual respect for each other’s territorial integrity and sovereignty” and “mutual non-interference in each other’s internal affairs.” That call only reflected the fact that everything about the Panchsheel Agreement was one-sided.

First, the Panchsheel was the first accord signed by any third party with China recognizing Tibet to be a “region of China”.

Second, the accord involved no give-and-take, only give from India’s side. It incorporated a formal Indian recognition of Chinese control over Tibet, without securing Beijing’s acceptance of the then-existing Indo-Tibetan frontier. When asked about the border having been left undefined, Jawaharlal Nehru blithely said: “All these are high mountains. Nobody lives there. It is not very necessary to define these things.”

Third, India forfeited all its extra-territorial rights and privileges in Tibet. The accord’s operative parts read as if victor China was imposing its will on vanquished India. Consider the following language: India “will be pleased to withdraw completely within six months from date of exchange of the present notes the military escorts now stationed at Yatung and Gyantse in Tibet Region of China;” “will be pleased to hand over to the Government of China at a reasonable price the postal, telegraph and public telephone services together with their equipment operated by the Government of India in Tibet Region of China;” “will be pleased to hand over to the Government of China at a reasonable price the 12 rest houses of the Government of India in Tibet Region of China;” and “will be pleased to return to the Government of China all lands used or occupied by the Government of India…”

Just eight years later, the Panchsheel principles went up in smoke when China invaded India.

Now fast-forward to the 2005 “guiding principles” for a border settlement. In substance, they are a tad less simplistic than the Panchsheel principles. But these six broad principles hardly lay the basis for a frontier settlement:

(i) “a fair, reasonable and mutually acceptable solution through consultations on an equal footing;”

(ii) “meaningful and mutually acceptable adjustments to their respective positions;”

(iii) “due consideration to each other’s strategic and reasonable interests;”

(iv) “take into account, inter alia, historical evidence, national sentiments, practical difficulties and reasonable concerns and sensitivities of both sides, and the actual state of border areas;”

(v) the “boundary should be along well-defined and easily identifiable natural geographical features to be mutually agreed upon;” and

(vi) “safeguard due interests of their settled populations in the border areas.”

Amazingly, it took several rounds of negotiations between the “special representatives” of the two countries to arrive at principles that are actually grist for the Chinese mill. A succession of three Indian national security advisers participated in this exercise in which, as is evident now, India struck a dry well. After 26 years of continuous border-related negotiations, a settlement is still no closer.

After every hardline action, be it the denial of a visa to any Arunachal Pradesh official or a provocative statement in public, like by Chinese Ambassador Sun Yuxi, Beijing repeats a platitudinous line borrowed from the so-called guiding principles: “We hold that the boundary issue be settled fairly and reasonably at an early date through friendly consultations.” When Prime Minister Manmohan Singh urged in his meeting with Hu Jintao in Berlin last week that the two sides adhere to the full set of guiding principles, the Chinese president merely repeated the “fair and reasonable” line.

The mechanical recitation of such bromides highlights that China neither wishes to settle issues with India fairly and reasonably nor seeks result-oriented consultations.

From Panchsheel to the border-related guiding principles, the road is littered with shattered principles. Yet the 1993 agreement to maintain “peace and tranquillity along the Line of Actual Control” — a line that has not been mutually defined up till now — repeated the defiled Panchsheel principles. How can peace and tranquillity be ensured if the frontline remains unclear and Chinese forces aggressively patrol certain sectors to sustain military pressure on India, not hesitating to carry out forays into, for instance, the Sumdorong Chu Valley?

Just as India tried unsuccessfully to persuade China between 1954 and 1962 to live up to the Panchsheel principles, it now seeks to promote the guiding principles. Yet China’s increasingly blunt assertion of claims to Arunachal Pradesh — a state more than twice the size of Taiwan — shows that those principles are already of little guidance.

All this begs a question: Why expend political capital, in the first place, to put together a set of principles, knowing that the strength of Chinese diplomacy is to design vain principles and then translate them in a way to suit Beijing’s convenience? What makes this question more troubling is that India, under Atal Bihari Vajpayee, agreed in 2003 to the diversionary Chinese proposal to shift the focus of the negotiations from the much-needed frontline clarification to the enunciation of principles for a border settlement.

Beijing’s partiality for numbered declarations, similarly, doesn’t mean it respects what it commits to. It continues to drag its feet on setting up what the “10-pronged” joint declaration of last November called for: “an expert-level mechanism to discuss interaction and cooperation on the provision of flood-season hydrological data, emergency management and other issues regarding trans-border rivers.” With China seeking to divert the waters of rivers flowing southward from the Tibetan plateau, a future conflict over the sharing of interstate water resources can no longer be ruled out.

Sardar Vallabhai Patel was the first Indian leader to grasp the enormity of the challenge from China. What he wrote 57 years ago still resonates today: “We have to take note of a thoroughly unscrupulous, unreliable and determined power practically at our doors… Any friendly or appeasing approaches from us would either be mistaken for weakness or be exploited in furtherance of their ultimate aim.”

© Asian Age, 2007

The Drag of a Dragon

Brahma Chellaney

© Asian Age, April 21, 2007

Coonoor, Tamil Nadu, India  

Yet another round of India-China border talks begins today in what is a 26-year saga of unending negotiations that of late are acquiring an even more laid-back spirit. Breaking the monotony of alternate meetings in New Delhi and Beijing, the two countries’ “special representatives” now confer in holiday hideaways, which have ranged from Kumarakom and Khajuraho in India to Xian in China. The latest meeting is in the hill station of Coonoor, in the Nilgiris.

            As if to publicize that India offers more exotic retreats than China, the Indian government is generously hosting a second consecutive round of talks. It will be remarkable if the Coonoor talks conclude in any way different from the houseboat diplomacy on the Kerala backwaters of Kumarakom — with warm handshakes, a statement applauding the “open, friendly, cooperative and constructive atmosphere,” and a promise to meet again. If stunning Khajuraho, Xian and Kumarakom failed to lift the talks to a higher plane, rugged Coonoor is unlikely to invigorate a wilting process.

         It has been almost 45 years since Mao Zedong’s regime launched a military invasion of India that led Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru — the world’s best-known panda-hugger until then — to make a national broadcast denouncing China as a “powerful and unscrupulous opponent.” That surprise aggression, and the ignominy it inflicted on the Indian state, followed the consolidation of Chinese hold over Tibet and three years of calculated efforts by Beijing to dispute the Tibetan frontier with India.

When the People’s Liberation Army had marched hundreds of miles south to annex independent Tibet and nibble at Indian areas, this, in Beijing’s eyes, was neither an expansionist nor forward policy. But when the outgunned and outmanned Indian army belatedly sought to set up posts along the mountain frontier to discourage further Chinese encroachments, Beijing and its friends dubbed it a provocative “forward policy” and proceeded to employ it as a rationalization for the attack.

Decades later, the Himalayan frontier is peaceful, but India and China are still not separated by a mutually defined frontline. Worse, the wounds of that war have been kept open by China’s publicly assertive claims to Indian territories, including some areas it overran in 1962, only to move back quickly so as not to overstretch its tenuous logistic and communication lines.

The invasion established firm Chinese control over the Aksai Chin plateau, with the ejection of Indian forces from the area of the Karakoram Pass, Pangong and Spanggur Lakes and Demchok. In NEFA (now Arunachal Pradesh), Beijing’s first offer, after the PLA advanced up to 65 kilometres into India, was for both sides to pull back 20 kilometres from the “line of actual control,” which it had refused to define — and which to this day it remains averse to delimit. While the PLA ultimately moved back to the McMahon Line in 1962, Beijing is still loath to exchange maps with India of the main sectors — the eastern and the western — so that the ambiguities plaguing the line of control are purged. In the western sector, China actually maintains an outer and inner line of control.

All in all, the ongoing process of border negotiations since 1981 redounds to China’s credit but not to India’s. There are three main reasons for this.

            ● First, a long, barren but continuing process chimes with the Chinese interest to keep India under strategic pressure. In assiduously seeking to drag out the negotiations indefinitely, Beijing is following the principle, “negotiate to engage the other side, not to reach accord.” This principle dovetails with China’s broader two-pronged strategy to present a friendly face while building up its power-projection force capability through military, economic and diplomatic means.

Rich in symbolism, the talks continue to be woefully short of progress on specific issues. Not only has there been little movement on reaching a settlement on the large chunks of territories in dispute, but also India and China remain the world’s only neighbours without a defined frontline. Their 4,057-kilometre frontier represents neither a line of “actual” control nor even a mutually agreed line in maps.

The Manmohan Singh-Hu Jintao joint declaration of last November committed India and China to pursue a “10-pronged strategy.” But in accordance with Beijing’s wishes, the declaration merely cited the need for an “early settlement of outstanding issues,” including “the boundary question,” without putting it among the strategy’s top five prongs. Instead of good fences making good neighbours, China believes that disputed fences help keep India in check.

● Second, China persuaded India in 2003 to shift from the practical task of clarifying the frontline to the abstract mission of developing “principles,” “concepts” and “framework” for a border settlement. This shift was designed to release Beijing from its commitment in 2001 to exchange maps with India of first the western sector and then of the eastern sector — a pledge it had already breached by missing the mutually agreed deadlines.

The fact is that the contours of a possible settlement have been known for long — a simple trade-off involving India foregoing its claims to territories it has lost to China, in return for Beijing’s abandonment of its claims to Indian-held areas. It was clear at the outset that an exercise to define “principles” and “concepts” would, at best, be academic — contributing little to settlement prospects — and, at worst, diversionary, holding up progress.

As Foreign Minister Pranab Mukherjee admitted at the Japan Institute of International Affairs in Tokyo last month, India and China have yet to reach agreement on “substantive” issues. Indeed, no sooner had the two countries identified six “guiding principles” in 2005 for a border settlement, including “due consideration to each other’s strategic and reasonable interests” and “safeguard due interests of settled populations in the border areas,” than Beijing scoffed at those very principles by publicly renewing its claim to Arunachal Pradesh, including Tawang.

Given its vantage point, China in unwilling to settle on the basis of the status quo. It knows no Indian government can cede even a slice of Arunachal, yet it persists with its egregious territorial claims with a twofold objective: to up the ante against India, and to keep progress at bay. By redirecting the process from frontline clarification to the enunciation of principles, and then cynically reinterpreting the agreed principles, Beijing, however, has laid bare its intentions.

            ● Third, India has sadly retreated to a more and more defensive position, bringing itself under greater Chinese pressure. Nobody is suggesting India adopt an aggressive posture. But if New Delhi is to engage Beijing on equal terms, the latter cannot have a monopoly on outrageous territorial claims that it pitchforks into the negotiations agenda to put the ball in India’s court and stall progress.

Far from adopting a nuanced position on the core issue, Tibet, to gain leverage, India continues to be excessively cautious and obliging in its diplomacy, arming Beijing with an open licence to demand more. It is bad enough that the Indian public is discovering after more than a quarter-century of border talks that China is unwilling to settle on the basis of the status quo. It is worse when India countenances such intransigence by opening negotiations on Chinese claims, however preposterous. 

Nothing better illustrates this than the separate statements earlier this year of two capable and level-headed officials — Pranab Mukherjee and National Security Adviser M.K. Narayanan — that because China lays claim to Tawang, that issue is on the agenda to find a final border resolution. The truth is that the Chinese claims epitomize a classical pursuit of incremental territorial expansion, with Beijing citing not any Han connection to Arunachal/Tawang but purported Tibetan ecclesiastical ties. India today militarily is a far cry from 1962, when the Chinese invaders poured through the mountain passes in a three-pronged drive that decimated the Indian brigade in Tawang. Yet it is no small irony today that Tibet’s exiled god-king says Tawang is part of India while New Delhi discusses Tawang with China in the border talks.

World history testifies that a border settlement has rarely been arrived at on the basis of the status quo when the more powerful party is overtly revisionist. It is only when both sides seek to alter the existing territorial control that a resolution respecting the status quo becomes possible.

Pitted against status quoist India are two irredentist regional adversaries. And because India has not sought to build and exploit counter-leverage, the advantage in negotiations tends to lie with these neighbours. The Sino-Indian negotiations have brought out in sharp relief that New Delhi’s acquiescence to China’s annexation of Tibet has come to haunt it, as Chinese claims on Indian territories are predicated on their alleged links with Tibet.

As the special representatives meet amidst tea plantations in Coonoor, their dialogue has gone from the agreed-but-now-contested guiding principles to another ethereal task — “finalizing an appropriate framework for a final package settlement.” Given that they are still discussing conceptual, not concrete, issues, the special envoys are likely to run out of new exotic retreats for their meetings even before they get to negotiate any real settlement package.

A periodic treat for the special representatives, in any event, cannot substitute for progress. Indeed such stagecraft hardly honours the memory of the 3,270 Indian army men killed by the Chinese invaders in 1962. What India needs is high-quality statecraft to ensure that no prime minister will tell the nation what Nehru did in 1962 — that China returned “evil for good.” The 32-day invasion in 1962 lasted longer than the 1965 and 1971 wars with Pakistan and claimed the lives of more Indian soldiers than any other aggression faced by India since independence, with the exception of 1971.

The border-talks process has yielded what it could — an agreement to maintain peace, tranquillity and stability along the Indo-Tibetan frontier, and the initiation of modest military-to-military cooperation. The process offers little more. Staying put in a sterile, everlasting process cannot become an end in itself for India. Indeed it only emboldens China to be publicly intractable and pugnaciously revanchist. Indira Gandhi, who initiated the process, would be turning in her grave over the way the negotiations have lost their direction, with India playing into China’s game plan.

Copyright: Asian Age, 2007