India-China ties: can Modi, Xi arrest slide in Xiamen?

Prime Minister Narendra Modi was in a panel discussion at the St. Petersburg Economic Forum in Russia on June 2 when he was asked about the India-China boundary dispute. “It is true that we have a border dispute with China. But in the last 40 years, not a single bullet has been fired because of the border dispute,” Modi, who was sharing the dais with Russian President Vladimir Putin, replied.

Nobody knew at that time that the Chinese People’s Liberation Army had just a day before asked the Indian Army to immediately remove two bunkers at Lalten near the India-Bhutan-China tri-junction in the Sikkim Sector. On June 5, Beijing welcomed Modi’s “positive remark,” but the next day, PLA soldiers went ahead and demolished the Indian Army bunkers.

Four day later, Modi had a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping on the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit at Astana, Kazakhstan. Xi told Modi that he had liked watching Aamir Khan’s ‘Dangal’. The “very cordial and positive” meeting raised hopes in New Delhi that India-China relations might be getting back on track.

Modi posted on Chinese social media site Sina Weibo on June 15 to greet Xi on his birthday. It was just the next day that Chinese Army personnel arrived on Doklam plateau, a disputed territory between Bhutan and China, and started building a road, brushing off protests by Royal Bhutan Army soldiers camping nearby. Two days later, Indian soldiers from nearby Doka La post in Sikkim intervened, in what became a 72-days long face-off.

It was not the first time that the Modi-Xi personal bonhomie seemed out of step with the situation on the ground along the India-China border. In September 2014, when Modi was playing the good host to Xi and his wife, sitting on a swing on the banks of Sabarmati river in Ahmedabad, Xi’s army was transgressing the Line of Actual Control at Chumar in Ladakh, resul-
ting in a face-off with Indian soldiers. The standoff was resolved more than a week after Xi concluded his maiden visit to India.

With the “Doklam Dangal” over for now, Modi and Xi are likely to meet again — this time on the sidelines of the BRICS summit in Xiamen, a port city in south-eastern China. Will it help ease the strains in India-China ties? The two sides will, of course, discuss the face-off in Doklam, and a fair share of blame and counter-blame is likely to go around. Xi may reiterate Beijing’s position that Doklam is an integral part of China and not a disputed territory between China and Bhutan, and therefore the Indian Army had trespassed into Chinese territory. He may once again invoke the 1890 Britain-China convention to claim that Mount Gipmochi (a.k.a Mount Ji Mu Ma Zhen) is not only the eastern starting point of the China-India boundary in Sikkim Sector, but also the China-India-Bhutan tri-junction boundary point.

India will argue that the Chinese PLA sought to change the status quo at the Doklam tri-junction by trying to build a road there and so the Indian Army had to intervene, because the road would have serious security implications for the Siliguri Corridor, which links India’s north-eastern states with the rest of the country. Modi will make it clear that India sent its troops to Doklam plateau on the basis of its agreement with Bhutan.

It will be pointed out that while the 1890 convention may have provided the basis for settling the Sino-India boundary in the Sikkim Sector, New Delhi and Beijing still had to take some steps before finalising the actual border in that stretch.

No major outcome
The Indian side will also cite the 2012 understanding between India and China that they would settle each tri-junction boundary point in consultation with the third country involved — be it with Bhutan, Nepal or Myanmar — and call out China for violating that agreement.

Modi and Xi are eventually likely to agree, however, that it is important for both nations to maintain peace and tranquillity along the disputed border. “They will most likely try to leave the face-off behind and look forward, but no major outcome is expected from the Xiamen meeting,” says Srikanth Kondapalli, who heads the Centre for East Asian Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.

They are likely to ask their Special Representatives on boundary negotiations — currently National Security Adviser Ajit Doval and China’s State Counsellor Yang Jiechi — to continue the work they were assigned and hold the 20th round of negotiations in New Delhi this year as they had agreed upon during the previous round in Beijing last year.

Beijing, however, could insist on a separate mechanism for the Sikkim section of the boundary, as it maintains that this stretch is already settled by the 1890 convention and that the Special Representatives are mandated to hold negotiations only over the unsettled stretches.

New Delhi argues that while the status of Sikkim as a part of India has long been settled, both sides are yet to demarcate the India-China boundary in that sector. China wants to start negotiations on an “early har-
vest” agreement on the Sikkim section, but India does not want a “piecemeal appro­ach,” rather a “comprehensive settlement” for the entire length of the boundary.

Several other irritants also plague India-China relations. Beijing was irked by New Delhi’s opposition to its Belt and Road Initiative and India’s decision to allow Dalai Lama to visit Arunachal Pradesh. India’s growing strategic synergy with the US and Japan in the Indo-Pacific has raised China’s hackles. New Delhi, on the other hand, has been upset over Beijing blocking India’s entry into the Nuclear Suppliers’ Group and its persistent shielding of Pakistan-based terrorists from United Nations sanctions. New Delhi is also opposed to the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, which is proposed to pass through parts of Kashmir illegally occupied by Pakistan and will thus infringe on India’s sovereignty.

Jayadeva Ranade, president of the Centre for China Analysis and Strategy in New Delhi, says that the face-off in Doklam is just “a symptom of the steady slide” in India-China relations over the past three years. “Both sides will try to keep the atmospherics temperate in Xiamen, but the (Modi-Xi) meeting is unlikely to deliver a breakthrough.”