Chinese Chequers

The Disputed Region
 

“It’s summer and the Chinese, like us Europeans, probably like camping in your beautiful Himalayas,” quipped a Western diplomat whom I met during the tense few days when a Chinese platoon squatted 19 km deep in Ladakh’s Daulat Beg Oldie sector beyond what both sides tacitly agree as the line of control, raising alarm not only within the country but among a host of nations with which China shares a land or maritime border and has a dispute.

The Chinese eventually walked back but not before wrangling a deal from India that it would do away with observation bunkers (which were later described by Indian foreign ministry officials as sheds) at Chumar which overlooks the strategic Karakoram highway. As one commentator said the Chinese move was an enigma within a mystery.

Intriguingly, the move came weeks before India’s foreign minister Salman Khurshid was to travel to Beijing to be followed by a visit by Chinese Premier Li Keqiang to India. Normally, most nations would try to be on their best behaviour before such high profile visits.

However, the Chinese decided to do just the opposite. Many old China hands say this is typical of the Chinese. They send in probes to test responses ahead of talks, to see how much they can extract from their opponents in any negotiations.

India’s initial response was timid. It planted a platoon of Indo-Tibetan Border Police in front of the Chinese troops and waved flags with Chinese lettering asking them to go back. The Chinese responded by waving their own banners which said in English that Indians have strayed into Chinese territory !

The border between India and China has always been tense ever since a border war in 1962, which saw the Chinese getting the better of India before withdrawing to what is perceived to be the border, though not officially accepted as one by the Chinese. The conflict over the line stems from a border pact negotiated and signed in 1912 by three powers -  British India, Tibet and China which claimed nominal suzerainity over the otherwise independent hermit kingdom. However  Beijing soon rejected the pact as undue British interferencein its affairs. **

Chinese obduracy would not have mattered had not China invaded Tibet in 1949 bringing its troops near India’s and then driven out the Dalai Lama and several tens of thousands of Tibetan into India ten years later. India’s grant of refuge brought the two sides face to face against each other and a series of moves by China nibbling away at the border ended with a full-scale border war in the winter of 1962. Since then there have been many tense face-offs in the Himalayas, some known  to the world, some not so well known.

The recent face off between ITBP border guards and Chinese People’s Liberation Army troopers,  was initially not publicised by either side. However, when Chinese troops simply dug in and attempts through normal diplomatic and military channels did not succeed, someone in India’s Army headquarters quietly broke the story to the Press Trust of India, India’s leading news agency.  The story was quickly picked up by the rest of the media, embarrassing the government of the day into more vigorous attempts to settle the dispute.

Salman Khrshid : Chinese "...acne ..."

Predictably India’s foreign ministry tried to play down the whole affair. Minister Khurshid famously said “One little spot is acne which cannot force you to say that this is not a beautiful face,” while describing the Chinese intrusion into Ladakh, to chagrin of many. However, that stance changed after opposition parties, the Jammu & Kashmir chief minister and even ruling party MPs started demanding the government take some kind of acceptable action.

A deal was eventually hammered through – some claim helped along the way by a prominent Mumbai based industrialist who buys his telecom and power equipment from India’s northern neighbour – which saw both lose some face. The Chinese walked back and Indians agreed to dismantle a couple of strategic bunkers on land which has been de facto Indian for several centuries now.

Which leads to the question – why did it happen at all? What did China gain from it all?

Chinese Take-away !

Some claim the whole brouhaha was a localised affair where a PLA Commander decided to test his Indian counterpart, without letting his masters in Beijing know. Possible,  but difficult given the tight control political commissars exercise over Chinese troops. With the recent change in guard at the top in Beijing, troop commanders would be even more desperate now to prove their loyalty to the new masters, rather than risk their ire with any display of independent thinking.

The Indian bunkers at Chumar, with their spy cameras trained on the Karakorams must have irked the Chinese considerably, but with spy satellites and drones buzzing all over, were a few bunkers and a few cameras enough to endanger the peace in the Himalayas at a time when China is caught up in a raft of border disputes? Partly because of shrewd calculations and partly  fuelled by xenophobia, China is in visible conflict over islands in South China Seas with no less than half-a-dozen nations including military powers Japan, Korea and Vietnam. These islands ranging from tiny islets under Japanese and Korean control to Taiwan and the Spratleys form a girdle around China’s coast and have the potential to be used as bases to choke China’s trade and energy supply lines in wartime.  China wants these islands and the energy rich seas they are in, to be its own.

India wants the seas free to navigate in as it needs to use them to carry on its burgeoning trade with China, Japan and Korea (trade with China alone is slated to go up to $ 100 billion a year within the next two years) and to access its leased oilfields in the Sakhalin in Russian Siberia. This is taken to imply that India supports Japan, Korea and Vietnam in their dispute with China, which it certainly does.  Part of China’s angst is perhaps because of this tacit support that India has been giving to its enemies.

In the Tibetan highlands, China continues to face resistance from a brave and desperate people who refuse to accept their suzerainty excercised through brute military strength. Monks continue to burn themselves and poets continue to write songs dreaming of an independent Tibet. A young prime minister in exile of the Tibetans operating out of Dharmashala,  seems to be slowly filling into the shoes of the Dalai Lama, the God-King and undisputed leader of the Tibetan people till now.

Tibet continues to simmer

Perhaps someone in Beijing (and the new leadership has many minds with experience of running Tibet) shrewdly calculated that a show of strength in the high Himalayas could possibly also help douse some fires in Tibet and squash ideas that India could come to the Tibetans' help, a fond hope that most of China’s oppressed races including Uighurs and Mongols,  nurture.  

For Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, unfortunately, the stand-off could not  have come at a worse time. Except for a resounding win for his party in Karnataka, the news for the PMO and the Congress party has been quite bleak. A Bansal-gate in the railways, Supreme Court’s strictures on the way CBI’s reports were “re-written”, the killing and mutilation of an alleged Indian spy in Pakistan, following beheading of Indian soldiers by Pakistani troops gave people a perception that the  government was perhaps indecisive and worse.

Khurshid's comments on the Daulat Beg Oldie incident did not help either. It showed Singh's cabinet as weak not only before the Indian people, whom the Prime Minister has to face in general elections early next year but also to India’s neighbours who look towards the Asian power for protection from an increasingly aggressive China.  

People contrast his timid response to Indira Gandhi’s handling of China in two incidents – Nathu La in 1967 and Siachen in 1980s. At Nathu La, Indian troops held their ground in the face of Chinese demands that India vacates the pass which leads into Sikkim, then  an Indian protectorate. In the ensuing artillery duel which followed, India extracted a heavy price on the Chinese eventually forcing them to agree to a ceasefire.

In the 1980s, in the face of Pakistani attempts at establishing before the international community, that Siachen, a glacier bounded on three sides by India’s Ladakh, Pakistan-held Kashmir  and Chinese-held Karakoram ranges, was part of its territory, Indian troops quietly moved in. Some in her cabinet at that time had tried to dissuade her by pointing out that China may get involved in the conflict which must ensue. However, those in the know say she did not flinch and stuck to her stand that India should own the high ground.

Siachen
 

 ** Note on Ladakh Border

Ladakh was actually conquered by Gen Zorawar Singh in 1835-36, for the Maharaja of Kashmir Gulab Singh from Tsepal Namgyal, the Gyalpo (King) of Ladakh, a tributary of Tibet till then. This was recognised in treaties signed in 1842 and 1853 by the Tibetan government and recognised by the Chinese who had nominal authority over Tibet. The boundaries of the region were well defined at Panghyong lake on the east and Karokaram range in the north-west and remain so till this date.

Aksai Chin, the icy desert north east of Ladakh, which the Chinese surreptiously annexed in the 1950s was however not part of this treaty, its status lay undefined. Though the Maharaja of Kashmir nominally claimed it in the 19th century after W.H.Johnson, a British officer of the survey of India drew a border in 1865 which placed Aksai Chin within the Maharaja's territory