Modi’s efforts appear prescient, but the answers to the questions he posed remain equally elusive. How do you maintain stability on a border that has not been determined?
Prime Minister Modi’s remarks to the all party meeting on the Galwan issue have been clarified, chastised and analysed in great detail. The PMO’s clarification of the PM’s declaration “neither is anyone inside our territory nor is any of our post captured” was laudable, but it did not take away the enigma of the original statement.
The PM himself has had nothing more to add to his initial remarks. But as the record will show, he has in the past six years had occasion to examine the issues around the Line of Actual Control (LAC) in great detail and whatever he said must have been with some foresight and purpose. Do the remarks signal some deeper effort by Modi to rid the country of this albatross around its neck?
By now it must be clear to him, as us, that the Confidence Building Measures regime that had been established since the Border Peace and Tranquility Agreement (BPTA) of 1993 is dead. Events of the past two months have signaled that China no longer observes it. Even if the two sides disengage for now, there’s no saying when the next crisis will arise.
The regime comprised of four interlocking agreements signed over 20 years — the BPTA, the 1996 Confidence Building Measures in the Military Field Along the Line of Actual Control in the India-China Border Areas, the 2005 Protocol on Modalities for the Implementation of Confidence Building Measures in the Military Field along the Line of Actual Control in the India-China Border Areas and the 2013 Border Defence Cooperation Agreement (BDCA).
The basic background here was the belief that there existed a largely mutually accepted LAC of some 4,000 km, which needed clarification in just some two-dozen or less places. Over the years, the armies had become familiar with them and developed protocols to deal with the inevitable face-to-face contacts that took place with increasing frequency. Among them was the notion that the troops would not use their weapons in these contacts. The recent events have upturned all these agreements.
First, in the build up near Gogra, their actions in Naku La and Galwan River Valley, the PLA has created uncertainty about the agreed LAC.
Second, in building up artillery and armor near the LAC in Gogra, the Chinese have violated Article III (ii) of the 1996 agreement that had called for limits in deployment of heavy weaponry such as howitzers and tanks near the LAC.
Third, in occupying the Finger Four area in Pangong Tso in the manner they have, with semi-permanent construction and obstructions to the Indian ability to patrol to its perception of the LAC, the Chinese have violated the 2005 Protocol, which specified a peaceful banner drill in the event of meeting up with Indian formations.
Fourth, Article VIII of the BDCA has said that if the two sides came face to face in a part of the LAC where there was no common understanding, “they were to exercise maximum self control, refrain from provocative acts, not use force or threaten to use force against the other side.”
Fifth, in response to the Chinese actions in Galwan, the Indian Defence Minister Rajnath Singh approved a new set of rules that could, on occasion, enable them to use their weapons in certain tactical situations.
The basic background was the belief that there existed a largely mutually accepted LAC of some 4,000 km, which needed clarification in just some two-dozen or less places. Image © Indi Tourists/FlickrCuriously, one of the causes of the breakdown may be the fifth agreement that the Chinese have been seeking since 2011 when they saw how India had stepped up its infrastructure construction in the areas adjacent to the LAC. This was to freeze construction and deployments along the LAC. Part of this was India’s own fault in widely publicising its border road construction as being motivated by military needs, rather than the needs of the people of the area.
Beginning of the mid-2000s, India had sharply raised its profile along its borders with China through the raising of new military forces and activating old air force bases. It was not as though the PLA was sitting by idly, but the Indian effort, which was essentially to catch up with the Chinese was palpable. India rejected the Chinese proposal to freeze construction and deployments, though it went ahead and signed the Border Defence Cooperation Agreement (BDCA).
The government authorised the creation of a Mountain Strike Corps, which would very obviously provide the Indian Army with an offensive capability across the Himalayas. So, what we have witnessed in the past two months are the culmination of processes that have been around for the past two decades — the Indian effort to enhance its trans-Himalayan capability, and the Chinese efforts to block it.
The key weakness in the four CBMs was that they failed in their principal goal — working out a mutually acceptable LAC. The two sides exchanged maps of the central sector on 17 December 2001 and of the more disputed western and eastern sectors as well during the 14th meeting of the Joint Working Group (JWG) in November 2002. However, when the two sides saw each other’s maps of the western sector, they felt that the differences were so substantial that there was no point going ahead.
The Special Representatives (SR) process overtook the JWG in 2003 after the visit of Prime Minister Vajpayee to Beijing where the two sides set up a bolder agenda of actually resolving their border dispute through a political bargain. The 22 rounds have yielded the 2005 “Agreement on the political parameters and guiding principles for a border settlement.” The SRs have already got all the elements with which to craft a framework agreement for a border settlement. What it needs is a clear and simultaneous political signal from New Delhi and Beijing.
Modi and Xi have a personal history on the issue of the border. In 2014 when Xi visited New Delhi, the Indian Army built an observation post at Chumar in a disputed part of the LAC. For their part, the Chinese sought to lay a road on the territory. In the negotiations, they wanted the post demolished, and the Indians wanted them to remove the road.
According to one report, Modi brought up the issue three times at his private dinner with Xi in Ahmedabad on 17 September, and again during the one-on-one talks the next day in New Delhi. In the press briefing after the talks, Modi said: “I raised our serious concern over repeated incidents along the borders.” Modi also said that he suggested that “clarification of Line of Actual Control would greatly contribute to our efforts to maintain peace and tranquility.” He said he had requested XI “to resume the process of clarifying the LAC.” Adding that the two should also seek an early settlement of the boundary question. A week after Xi left India, the Chinese troops withdrew in Chumar, as part of a deal worked out in the flag meetings between the two militaries. India agreed to dismantle its observation post and the Chinese committed to stop building their road.
That Modi was dead serious about the issue of clarifying the LAC became evident on 14 May 2015 during the first leg of his first visit to China as Prime Minister. In his meeting with Xi, he bluntly told him that it was one thing to talk of the Asian century of India and China, and quite another to achieve it given the roadblocks between the two countries, primarily the LAC.
He reminded Xi that this was the issue that had cast a shadow over his visit to India the year before. The Chinese leader was not very happy to hear such blunt speaking, especially since it was not on the agenda. He didn’t say much in response, but in Beijing, Chinese disapproval for the idea was evident in what Premier Li Keqiang had to say in the official talks. Later a top foreign ministry official, Huang Xilian, specifically briefed journalists about Beijing’s refusal to countenance that process. The Chinese let it be known, that they wanted a Code of Conduct that would freeze border construction.
But Modi was not done. In his public remarks like his speech at the Tsinghua University on 15 May he repeated the points he was making. He said: “we must settle its boundary quickly” and in the interim while we continue maintaining peace and tranquility, “a shadow of uncertainty always hangs over the sensitive areas of the border region.” The reason for this was that “neither side knows where the Line of Actual Control is in these areas.” He said he had proposed a resumption of the process of clarifying it.
In the next two years, came Doklam and the two informal summits in Wuhan and Mamallapuram through which Modi again sought to engage Xi face-to-face. No doubt the issue would have cropped up in their discussions, but clearly nothing came out of it. In 2020, Modi’s efforts appear prescient, but the answers to the questions he posed remain equally elusive. How do you maintain stability on a border that has not been determined? Much more so now than then, the lack of clarification of the LAC has become a clear and present danger, not just to the peace and tranquility of the LAC, but the state-to-state relations between India and its powerful neighbour.
This could perhaps provide a clue to the enigma of Modi’s remarks at the all-party meet. Perhaps he has larger plans to press for a border settlement with China and get that wretched bird off our necks.
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Manoj Joshi is a Distinguished Fellow at the ORF. He has been a journalist specialising on national and international politics and is a commentator and ...
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