Indian Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri announced on October 21 that India and China had reached “an agreement… on patrolling arrangements along the Line of Actual Control… leading to disengagement and a resolution of the issues that had arisen” following Chinese transgressions “in these areas in 2020”. The question that remains to be clarified is whether “disengagement” will cover all extant areas of dispute where patrolling has been blocked on both sides, including the so-called “legacy disputes” in eastern Ladakh at Demchok and Depsang or only those areas that came into contention in 2020.
Both Misri and External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar, who spoke at another event a few hours later, were reluctant to answer direct questions on these two areas, repeatedly referring to 2020 as the year of consequence. This reluctance might have several reasons.
One easy explanation is that they were deferring to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who might make the more substantive statement following an expected meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping on the sidelines of the BRICS Summit at Kazan in Russia. But if that were so, why could the Ministry of External Affairs not have waited a few more days for him to have done so? The other possibility is that this might be the extent of information available to the public for the foreseeable future since “next steps” are still pending.
Another reason might have to do with the scale of the progress actually achieved. In September, when Jaishankar declared that “roughly… about 75 per cent of the disengagement problems are sorted out” and the Chinese followed up saying “the two countries have realised disengagement in four areas in the Western sector”, it was possible to imagine that the older disputes at Demchok and Depsang, where stand-offs continue, constituted the remainder of the “disengagement problems” that had to be sorted out. News reports since Misri’s announcement suggesting that this is the case, will need to be confirmed.
The patrolling agreement is certainly an achievement of Indian diplomacy, but it is also a limited one, for India has achieved no forward movement over the past four years — it has been devoted to the task only of reversing Chinese transgressions, not punishing them, let alone resolving the boundary dispute itself. The idea for now seems to ensure the impression of progress and the optics necessary for a “successful” BRICS sojourn by the Prime Minister. This, then, highlights other issues and implications.
One, that India’s BRICS engagement is a sensitive matter at this point in geopolitical time — Russia’s Ukraine invasion and China’s “no-limits partnership” with the former has drawn such Western opposition that it cannot fail to singe India, too. New Delhi needs more than “strategic autonomy” as an argument to explain a head-of-government engagement and that is something the patrolling agreement delivers, essentially drawing attention away from the BRICS summit itself.
Two, there are now concerns within the Indian government about the feasibility of keeping up restrictions on Chinese investments, particularly when India remains dependent on manufacturing supply chains and technology transfers from that country. Even a limited agreement on the LAC offers a face-saving way to move forward on trade and investment from China.
Meanwhile, it is worth noting that the Army was missing from the scene when the announcement of the patrolling agreement was made. Arguments could be made that the final mile had to be covered by diplomats, but for a military aiming at theaterisation, with the attendant requirement of global-level strategic and diplomatic engagements, it is rather odd that senior military officials were missing from the dais.
This is also particularly ironic for if there is one stand-out feature of India’s response to the Chinese transgressions of 2020, it is that the Army was not allowed to respond in kind — with the exception of the capture and brief occupation of the Kailash Range in August 2020. That, even as it built up along the LAC, the Army’s primary role of responding to aggression was curtailed by diplomatic tasks.
Perhaps, the Army or the government or both decided that a like-for-like response was escalatory, which begs the question why concerns about escalation must matter only to India. Or, that despite claims of multiple plans to counter Chinese moves, the Army was simply not equipped to execute them with the political leadership, preferring to focus on incremental measures, such as shoring up border infrastructure instead. This, then, raises the question of why such gaps exist or why it takes a crisis to get critical physical infrastructure development moving. Either way, the debate has not been joined in public.
If there has been “forward movement” in India in the wake of 2020, it has been in the sense that like in 1962, the events in eastern Ladakh awakened a generation or two of Indians to the long-term challenge that China will likely pose to Indian interests.
With the benefit of some distance from the events of 2020, Indians should also now be asking more questions.
Why did China do what it did? What might it do next? Why has Indian expertise been lacking in answering these questions? Or, if the expertise is available, why has it not found greater acknowledgement and public visibility? Equally important are questions of accountability surrounding the events of 2020 itself. What were the lapses on the Indian side that caused intelligence on the Chinese build-up to be ignored? Why has public accountability not been forthcoming? Without answers to these questions and more, India will remain unprepared for the next border crisis with China.
The writer is an associate professor, at the Department of International Relations and Governance Studies, and director, of the Centre of Excellence for Himalayan Studies, Shiv Nadar University, Delhi NCR. Views are personal.
