China incursion in Ladakh: Still The lesson India has not learnt

The ongoing game of kabaddi in the high Himalayas between Indianand Chinese troops shows no signs of ending. According to the latest reports, Chinese troops ventured into the Indian side of the Line of Actual Control in the Chumar area of south-eastern Ladakh in mid-June and

made away with surveillance cameras that Indian troops had set up there. The troops are also believed to have issued grim warnings – in Hindi! – to the local shepherd community and families, urging them to depart from what they claimed was Chinese territory. After strong protests from the Indian side, the cameras were evidently returned, leaving both sides to claim that once again, sagacity and a cool head had prevailed and the border tension had not been allowed to escalate.

Whether the transgression was a childish game of one-upmanship by the local unit of the Chinese patrol troops or whether it was intended to signal a message – as happened in April, when PLA troops advanced 19 km into what India considers its territory in the Daulat Beg Oldie area of Ladakh – isn’t immediately clear.

In any case, the Chumar area of Ladakh is rather more prone to border incursions of these sorts – by both the Chinese and the Indian troops – given the nature of road infrastructure facilities on either side of what passes for the border there. In 1999, Chinese troops laid a road on their side of the undemarcated Line of Actual Control in order to move men and military machines with ease. That was part of the extensive border infrastructure that China has put in place on its side of the border, which has widened the “infrastructure deficit” between the two countries.

Representative image. AFP.

Curiously, although that road construction work by China came up soon after the Kargil war between India and Pakistan, and was clearly in violation of the agreed freeze on border work area, India did not protest at that time, leaving the Chinese road project to gain de facto legitimacy over the years.

From there on, the plot thickens. Indo-Tibetan Border Police personnel patrolling the border, being somewhat at a disadvantage in the absence of similar roads on the Indian side connecting their border posts, are known to frequently use the Chinese roads to get from one post to another. These too count technically as border ingress, which goes to show that neither side is entirely an angel when it comes to allegations of border transgressions. Not always is there a malign intent, but these things nevertheless happen.

Even so, a pattern of behaviour is becoming discernible in the Chinese blow-hot-blow-cold routine. At the just-concluded Special Representative-level talks in Beijing on the border dispute, for instance, the Chinese side conveyed an expansiveness of outlook, claiming even that China was looking to “break new ground” in addressing the border dispute.

But the only thing that lies broken today is the trust between the two sides, which always rested on slippery ground.
Nevertheless, the striking thing about the Indian response to the latest border incident is that unlike in April – when India exercised the full force of its coercive diplomacy to get the Chinese troops to withdraw – the Indian side appears to have made light of the latest incident.

That the Special Representative-level talks between the two sides went ahead as planned, followed soon thereafter by Defence Minister AK Antony’s official visit, suggests that the Indian side did not choose to escalate the matter.

That goes against the grain of the stern lesson that the Indian side was taught in the April incident. At that time, Indian leaders – from Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to External Affairs Minister Salman Khurshid – initially dismissed the border incident as being of no significance. Singh suggested that it was a local-level incident, and Khurshid waxed lyrical about how such border incursions were like “acne on the beautiful face” of the Sino-Indian relationship, which would go away with the application of some unguents.

Only when the Chinese troops signalled that they had no immediate intention of leaving did the Indian government bestir itself. The message was sent out – through the Indian ambassador in Beijing – that the presence of Chinese troops on notionally Indian territory would make for bad optics during the planned visit if Chinese Premier Li Keqiang to India, and that the Indian government would, if pushed, be constrained to call off Khurshid’s visit to Beijing to prepare for Li’s coming to India.

It was only then, and evidently under orders from Beijing, that the Chinese troops withdrew.

The lesson that the Indian side ought to have learnt from that experience is that rolling over and playing dead is a bad strategy to take on Chinese aggression on the border. India, as that episode demonstrated, was not without levers of coercive diplomacy, and China was compelled on that occasion to acknowledge, even if only unofficially, that it had perhaps overreached.

But the fruits of that experience appear already to have been lost, given the apparent failure on Antony’s part to even raise the red flag over the latest incident. That signals only a timidness of approach, which the Chinese are good at scenting. Walking on eggshells to avoid offending Chinese sensibilities, India may have set itself up for yet more transgressions along its contested border.