How conflict at the top of the world became India and China’s new status quo

As an icy military standoff between the two Asian giants approaches its third year, China appears to be settling whole new stretches of the Himalayas and has passed a law making them its first line of defence. Shweta Sharma reports on how India has been caught off guard by Xi Jinping’s more bullish outlook

Tibetans living in exile in India take part in a protest march in Delhi against the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics (EPA)

India has generally turned a blind eye to the Beijing Winter Olympics that opened on Friday, with only a single athlete taking part and no interest at higher levels of the government in joining the diplomatic boycott led by western nations.

It came as some surprise, therefore, when news emerged that China had selected as an Olympic torch-bearer one of its soldiers who had been involved in the most bloody border clash between the two Asian countries in decades.

The Galwan Valley battle was a brutal hand-to-hand brawl between Chinese and Indian border patrols, of the sort that routinely takes place without firearms to prevent a major escalation of conflict. It left 20 Indian soldiers dead, and an unconfirmed number of Chinese casualties, ranging from four to 40, depending on which reports you believe.

India tried to downplay the incident, with its prime minister Narendra Modi denying in the aftermath that China had gained any territory beyond the line of actual control (LAC) – the de facto border between the countries, both of which lay claim to much larger swathes of Himalayan territory. “No one had intruded, nor is anyone [currently] intruding, nor have any of our posts been captured by someone,” Modi assured the nation in televised comments, while simultaneously promising a “befitting response” to the loss of so many Indian soldiers’ lives.

Since the battle, on 15 June 2020, the two sides have been engaged in a tense standoff, and there have been more than a dozen rounds of high-level military talks to try to return to the prior, more peaceful status quo without any breakthrough.

And in the intervening period, China has not been sitting idle. A Pentagon report in 3 November 2021 claimed that China had built a “large 100-home civilian village inside disputed territory” between the Tibet Autonomous Region and India’s Arunachal Pradesh “sometime in 2020”.

With both sides claiming more territory than they currently control in the region, any major infrastructure development close to the LAC is potentially provocative, seen as an attempt to cement the country in question’s claim to that land.

According to Indian broadcaster NDTV, satellite images show another new settlement of 60 buildings that has emerged on China’s side of the LAC, around six kilometres inside what India claims is its territory.

As well as these developments on the ground, China has also been busy taking legislative steps to strengthen its position along the border. The new land border law, which came into effect last month, empowers civilians to assist in protecting and defending border infrastructure – the newly built villages included – to defend the “sovereignty and territorial integrity” of China.

What worries observers of the India-China border is that these constructions have cropped up in areas around Arunachal Pradesh – the eastern Indian state that Beijing has long maintained is the Chinese province of South Tibet.

Brahma Chellaney, a professor of international security and the author of nine books on geopolitics in the region, tells The Independent: “These villages are in areas which official Indian maps show to be within Indian borders. But Indian maps show areas over which India has lost control. This is true in relation to both China and Pakistan.”

Video footage shows soldiers bandaging the head of China’s regimental commander Qi Fabao as Indian and Chinese troops face off in the Galwan Valley on 15 June 2020 (CCTV)

Pravin Sawhney, one of India’s top strategic analysts, says China’s unspoken message is simple: that they will “reclaim Arunachal Pradesh”, and that the new law provides a legal justification for building more civilian infrastructure on disputed land.

China intends to make the disputed border region its first line of defence, and is already building new permanent structures “pretty much on the disputed territory or on the Indian territory”, he says, adding that India can do nothing about it.

Sawhney says these “constructions have become a part of the new normal” of heightened tensions along the border, and that the Chinese militia are not “going anywhere”. “In fact, they have also made constructions in Doklam (at the conjunction between India, China and Bhutan) and also intimidated the Bhutanese,” he says.

Experts say China is already acting on the orders of the land border law, which among other things requires states to set up clearer boundary markers on all borders and to construct border towns and improve their connectivity. It assigns more army and police resources to safeguard Chinese borders and to use weapons against intruders.

While the rules will be applicable to all 14 countries that share a land border with China, the timing and scope has raised particular alarm for India. China has formally resolved territorial disputes with 12 of its 14 neighbours, leaving only India and Bhutan engaged in costly and tense disagreement with the country.

Srikanth Kondapalli, professor in Chinese studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi, says China is taking unilateral measures in deciding where its borders are with neighbouring countries.

“The implementation of the law is from January, but China has been intending to build 628 xiaokang, which translates as well-off society villages, all across the Tibetan border areas. By last year, it had already built 604 villages out of 628. And out of the 604, which are already in Tibet, 200 are on the LAC with India. China has also built these villages [at the border] with Bhutan and Nepal,” Kondapalli says.

Returning to the quieter, more peaceful past along the Himalayan border may not actually be possible now that so much building has gone on in the vicinity of it, says Delhi-based foreign policy expert Swaran Singh, meaning more drawn-out forward deployments and face-offs between patrols will be inevitable.

This is because the once lightly patrolled frontier has turned into a perennially active border, where more soldiers, much heavier equipment, and semi-permanent establishments can now be moved faster as both sides now have better infrastructure, he explains.

“Even if you give the Chinese the benefit of the doubt of not ratcheting up things intentionally, the fact that infrastructure has improved, [along with] mobility of forces and capability to bring forward heavier equipment much more quickly, their much bigger and larger numbers of deployment will lead to more regular encounters and face-offs in these regions,” says Singh.

He underscores that all of this creates stress, fatigue, and angst between two of the world’s largest and most powerful armed forces, and that tempers could rise, leading to more frequent clashes.

Another purpose of the model villages being built by China on its frontiers, Singh says, is to encourage recruitment and indirect support among the ethnic groups that are more acclimatised to the area than the bulk of the PLA (People’s Liberation Army), which mostly comprises Han Chinese.

“This law calls for creating model or “well-off” villages, which are connected between themselves and also externally by rail, road, power lines and internet connectivity. They are to have enough food and water so that they would be an important backbone of the People’s Liberation Army, or People’s Armed Police, as these are going to be deployed in frontier areas for prolonged periods of time,” he says.

Beijing-based political analyst Einar Tangen tells The Independent that the current standoff stems less from an expansionist outlook on the part of China and more from a trust deficit between Delhi and Beijing, which first took shape after the Modi government revoked the semi-autonomy of Jammu and Kashmir in mid-2019.

“Beijing saw the annexation of Jammu and Kashmir and the continued improvement of a military road on the border as preparations for a military land seizure, and responded as a means of warning India this wouldn’t be tolerated,” he says.

“The subsequent tit-for-tat, and the difficulty of both sides to differentiate military tactics from diplomatic goals, has resulted in the face-off,” he explains.

Moving forward, Tangen says he expects an eventual cooling off – arguing that it benefits neither side to have expensive military confrontations with powerful, hostile neighbours in the long term.

India certainly isn’t going out of its way to be confrontational, and its response to the constructions along the border has been largely muted, with mixed statements coming from the military as well as the government.

In November, foreign ministry spokesperson Arindam Bagchi said the government had taken note of the Pentagon’s report, and admitted the presence of “illegal” Chinese construction within what India claims as its territory.

“China has undertaken construction activities in the past several years along the border areas, including in the areas that it has illegally occupied over the decades. India has neither accepted such illegal occupation of our territory nor has it accepted the unjustified Chinese claims,” Bagchi said, adding that the government had conveyed a “strong protest” to China.

But India’s army general at the time, Bipin Rawat – who later died in a helicopter crash –  gave a contradictory statement, saying that the villages were “well within the Chinese side of the LAC” and that China had “not transgressed anywhere on our perception of the line of actual control”.

There was one point in the past 20 months when India took back some of the initiative in the standoff – surprising China by advancing along the south bank of Pangong Lake to capture strategic peaks in the Kailash range. Strategists said the move gave India a dominant position above China’s Maldo base, while India claimed it pre-empted the Chinese army’s own planned advance.

Singh says the development was the first to give India some leverage, and it resulted in a breakthrough in talks with China, which withdrew its own forces from the north bank of Pangong Lake on the condition that India retreated from the peaks it had taken. Since then, he says, talks have stalled because China sees no pressing need to make further compromises.

“The Chinese immediately made us withdraw from those positions,” he says. “Beyond [Pangong Lake] they have not moved back, because apparently there is no bargaining advantage that India has to offer them, other than sustaining its deployments.”

Sawhney says the only way for an immediate breakthrough at present would be if “India agrees to Chinese terms, because they believe China is a superior military power”.

One tactic India has yet to explore, the experts say, is via the less direct route of collective international diplomacy. While other nations have been outspoken in challenging China over issues such as Taiwan, the South China Sea and Hong Kong, India has largely stayed out of it. Its most forthright comment at the UN on Hong Kong, for instance, did not name China directly, and said only that Delhi was keeping “a close watch on recent developments”.

India stayed out of the diplomatic boycott of the Beijing Olympics until the last possible moment. It was therefore a significant event on Thursday when the foreign ministry announced that no Indian representatives would be present at the opening or closing ceremonies of the Games, and bemoaned China’s decision “to politicise the Olympics” with its choice of torch-bearer, calling it “regrettable”.

Happymon Jacob, a professor and strategic analyst, suggests India has to be a “little more proactive about these issues” rather than sticking to its own backyard and supporting Beijing on the broader “One-China” principle.

“I don’t think India’s current policy with China is enough to withstand Chinese aggression, and it has to be really innovative in its diplomacy and take a clear stand on Taiwan, Hong Kong and Tibet, which will hurt the Chinese,” he says.

Jacob says India “certainly” does not want to aggravate China, but that trying to stay on their good side internationally is not going to help India in the long run. “If you go easy with the Chinese they will keep coming at you,” he says.