Line of actual conflict

Onus in Ladakh is on military-level disengagement

As a reiteration of broad negotiating principles, the five-point joint statement issued by External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar and China’s State Councillor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi in Moscow on September 10 on the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Agreement is unexceptionable. It is an open question, however, whether the statement will offer a practical or durable framework for re-establishing peace along the Line of Actual Control (LAC). The joint statement broadly suggests that dialogue remains on the table, based on the “consensus of the leaders on developing India-China relations including not allowing differences to become disputes”. It may be assumed that this is a reference to the Wuhan Consensus, which emerged from an informal summit between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and President Xi Jinping in Wuhan in April 2018.

Coming soon after the two-month stand-off at Doklam, the Wuhan consensus marked a joint commitment to maintain peace and tranquillity over the entire India-China border. Key to this was the resolve that both militaries would avoid provocative behaviour, implement confidence-building measures, and strengthen communication links at all levels — principles that were reiterated at another high-profile informal summit hosted by Mr Modi at Mammallapuram in October 2019. That those principles have been wilfully violated by the Chinese army since March this year underlines the limited value of informal summits.

The Jaishankar-Wang joint statement, thus, can best be seen as a signal that disengagement has to take place at military level. The problem is that talks at this level have not yielded much so far. Escalating tensions, with hand-to-hand combat in June and an exchange of fire this month on a border that has been relatively conflict-free for the past 45 years, suggest that there is significant distrust on the ground, and it is not clear if China will agree to pull back easily, given the absence of a formal agreement on the outer limits of the LAC. A significant part of the problem for India is the lack of visibility of Chinese intentions. Beijing has consistently declined to clarify its interpretation of the LAC, an issue that ensures that relations are permanently destabilised. Nor is there any clarity on the Chinese endgame, which appears to be prey to shifting political priorities.

In 2018, the relatively conciliatory post-Doklam Wuhan meet took place against the backdrop of fresh challenges for China from the US administration, which had fired the opening salvoes of the trade war, begun its unilateral outreach to North Korea’s Kim Jong-un and was about to scrap the nuclear deal with Chinese ally Iran. Since then, those issues have been swamped by China’s responsibility for the Covid-19 pandemic and escalating global tensions over the practices of Chinese companies — the multi-country ban on Huawei being a case in point. India’s responses in banning Chinese foreign direct investment and several popular apps even as it deployed forces along the LAC may signal the limits of New Delhi’s forbearance. But these moves, too, have limited value, given the well-known economic and military asymmetries between the two countries. These multiple factors make it likely that the odd sideline meeting here or informal summit there will offer the relief of temporary de-escalations at best, suggesting that the Indian government will need to be prepared to dig in for the long haul.