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Sino-India Ties and Lessons from the Galwan Valley Brawl

On June 1, 2018, I was invited by the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), the organiser of the Shangri-La Dialogue, to speak at a special session entitled “Competition and Cooperation in China-India relations” right before Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s keynote speech. The other panelist was Mr Ram Madhav, the National General Secretary of the Indian Bharatiya Janata Party.

I was surprised to find how we both focused on cooperation rather than competition as if the different speeches were written by the same person.

But what happened on 15 June at Galwan Valley along the Line of Actual Control (LAC) between China and India is a far different story. Following tense military standoffs since April, a brawl involving fists, rocks and wooden clubs between Chinese and Indian soldiers left 20 Indian servicemen dead.

Without mentioning the number of its own casualties, China stressed that the Galwan Valley was located on the Chinese side of the Line of Actual Control. It added that the trigger for the brawl was Indian border troops trespassing into China’s territory to build fortification and barricades. The Indian side claims it was the Chinese who were the trespassers.

A root cause of the problem is the fuzzy nature of the LAC. It is not surprising then that boundary disputes have flared up on several occasions since the 1980s although none has been as deadly as the June encounter.

It’s fair to say both governments have made great efforts in avoiding conflict. Since 1993, at least five border agreements have been made, both at governmental and military levels, towards this end. But as always the challenge remains the lack of a commonly agreed LAC.

For example, according to the 1993 Agreement: “No activities of either side shall overstep the Line of Actual Control. In case personnel of one side cross the Line of Actual Control, upon being cautioned by the other side, they shall immediately pull back to their own side...” But how could they pull back to their side of the LAC if they don’t even know where the line actually lies?

Such a Catch-22 situation is in part the result of the different approaches taken by China and India to resolve the border problem. Beijing’s way is top-down — to propose that both sides should, as a starting point, agree to the general principle of mutual accommodation of the disputed territories before verifying the alignment of the LAC; But India’s approach is more bottom-up, that is, to verify the LAC first before talking about anything else.

Seen from the perspective of opposing approaches, it explains why so far negotiations over LAC have made little headway. Similarly it explains why New Delhi has shown no interest in negotiations over Arunachal Pradesh that is already under India’s control but claimed by Beijing as Chinese territory.

The only achievement seems to be a tacit understanding of not shooting at each other under any circumstances. As Prime Minister Narendra Modi noted in an interview with the Hindustan Times two years ago: “Over the last four decades, not a single bullet has been fired across the India-China border”.

But if the intent of the ‘no shooting’ guideline is to avoid escalation to a deadly conflict, then the fatal Galwan Valley episode has greatly undermined that understanding. It is sad to see the two largest armed forces in Asia, in an attempt to avoid shooting, turn instead to the most primitive methods of fist fights and stone throwing. Ironically, these same soldiers could very well have been the same people who in the past have happily joined the other side for national day or Armed Forces Day celebrations despite the border disputes.

The incident provides a chance of reconsidering what measures both have to take to deconflict. This might include keeping a safe distance from each other, not building any facilities on territories taken by the other side as its own and establishing hot lines between military commands that are critical in a crisis.

What are the takeaways and bigger issues raised by the deadly brawl in Galwan Valley?

For Beijing, it is the latest of recent incidents that leaves it wondering about India’s changing attitudes towards China and where the growing animus might lead. Prior to this there was the 2017 military standoff over Chinese construction of a road in Doklam near a trijunction border area, known as Donglang in Chinese. Even if India believes Doklam is Bhutanese rather than Chinese territory as China claims, it should not step into a faceoff with China on foreign territory that lasted for 73 days.

When asked what lessons India might learn from the Doklam standoff, then Indian defence minister Arun Jaitley said: “India of 2017 is different from India of 1962.” The Chinese spokesman’s pithy reply : “So is China”.

The related question is, to what extent will India side with the United States, which has clearly marked China as its primary strategic competitor?

Although Delhi is said to pursue a foreign policy of non-alliance, in recent years India is shifting ever closer to the US. India is part of the so-called “Quad” — a group that includes the US, Australia and Japan. None of the Quad members would admit it is against China, but their promotion of a free and open Indo-Pacific is a thin veil of their true intent. At the Raisina Dialogue in New Delhi in January 2019, a Chinese scholar asked the Indian panelists: if indeed the Indian-Pacific is free and open, could Quad accept China as a member? The response is a burst of laughter from the audience.

So, China has to ask itself, if the US grows ever more hostile, how will the Quad evolve? And what role will India play in it?

Some Indian strategists have long suggested that China wants to “encircle” India from the border in North and the Indian Ocean in South and perhaps with the help of Pakistan. Such worries, fuelled by a concern that China may eventually establish “a string of pearls” of military bases in the Indian Ocean, have grown particularly wild after the Chinese navy started anti-piracy patrols in the Gulf of Aden and the Somali Basin at the end of 2008.

There is no need for China to encircle India. China’s economy is five times larger than India’s. Unlike the Indian defence industry, the Chinese defence industry is capable of indigenously producing almost everything the People’s Liberation Army wants. In terms of the overall military strength, the PLA that is trying to catch up with the US can only leave the Indian military further behind.

The “String of Pearls” was particularly well-received in the Indian media. But 15 years after the term was first coined in 2005, the much hyped garrotte is nowhere to be seen - there is just one Chinese logistic base in Djibouti and that was built in 2017, in support of its counter-piracy operations in the Indian Ocean.

Both China and India describe themselves as developing countries. For China, no objective is more aspirational than realising “the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation”. This, described as “China dream”, is similar to Mr Modi government’s “New India” blueprint. It is also interesting to see China’s “Belt & Road” goes west while India’s “Act East” extends to the east.

The brawl in the Galwan Valley is unfortunate, but it should not be made out to be some kind of watershed that redefines China-India relations for the worse.

Rather, it works better as a useful reminder: Before the dragon and the elephant figure out a way to stay in the same room, the art of co-existence is to keep a safe distance.