India-China border dispute: is Beijing's latest stance pushing both sides to the brink of conflict?

Even as India and China hold a flurry of talks to ease a months-long stand-off at their undemarcated 3,488km border, Beijing's resurrection of an old claim line and its comments on the Himalayan region of Ladakh threaten to heighten suspicions and push both back to the brink of conflict, analysts say.

On Tuesday, a day before Chinese and Indian diplomats held a regular meeting about their seven-decade-old border dispute, Beijing said it would abide only by a "very clear" border alignment first spelt out in 1959 by late Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai.

The alignment, stated in Zhou's letter to then-Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru on November 7, had proposed that "each withdraw 20 kilometres at once from the so-called McMahon Line in the east, and from the line up to which each side exercises actual control in the west".

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The proposal, however, was rejected by Nehru and has since then also been rejected by subsequent Indian governments.

The border claims by India and China. Graphic: SCMP

India's border with China spans the Karakoram mountain range in the north, to the trijunction with Myanmar in the east. In the west, the de facto border, separating Chinese-controlled Aksai Chin and Ladakh, is the Line of Actual Control (LAC) - known as the McMahon Line in India's northeastern region, a relic of the colonial era.

Joe Thomas Karackattu, an assistant professor in Chinese Studies at the Indian Institute of Technology-Madras, said that accepting the Chinese 1959 proposal would have meant an estimated loss of "over 6,000 square miles" of territory for India.

Instead, India had its own alignment that it upheld, which shifted the border significantly eastward, overlapping Chinese claims, Karackattu said.

So bitter were the Chinese and Indian differences that they led to the 1962 war and a series of military skirmishes, with the two countries suspending diplomatic ties until 1978.

But as diplomatic ties were slowly re-established, both softened their positions, said Karackattu, whose recent paper - The Corrosive Compromise of the Sino-Indian Border Management Framework: From Doklam to Galwan, published in the Asian Affairs journal - maps out the way the neighbours have shifted their perceptions of the alignments over the last two centuries.

"In the late 1980s and through the 1990s, both sides had agreed there would be some kind of a joint working group that could clarify the alignment of the LAC, a more congenial position for both to adopt," he said.

But China's comments on Tuesday, made to India's Hindustan Times via a Chinese foreign ministry statement, suggested the consensus had dissipated for the first time in decades.

"The China-India border LAC is very clear: that is the LAC on November 7, 1959. China announced it in the 1950s, and the international community including India are also clear about it," Hindustan Times quoted the Chinese foreign ministry statement saying.

The same day, Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin described India's designation of Ladakh as a centrally-administered territory - a decision made last year when New Delhi separated the mountainous region from Jammu and Kashmir - as "illegal". Wang also objected to infrastructure construction for the "purposes of military control" in the area.

Anurag Srivastava, India's Ministry of External Affairs spokesman, swiftly rejected the Chinese statement. "India has never accepted the so-called unilaterally defined 1959 LAC," he said. "This position has been consistent and well known, including to the Chinese side."

The issue was not referred to in the Wednesday meeting, where both sides agreed to maintain "close consultations" at the diplomatic and military level.

Retired Lieutenant General Rakesh Sharma, who commanded the Fire and Fury Corps responsible for the Ladakh region in 2013, said Beijing's reiteration of its 1959 position did little to ease tensions that have sharply escalated since violent, fatal skirmishes between troops in May and June sparked a build-up of positions at several points along the LAC.

Rajiv Bhatia, a former Indian ambassador and now distinguished fellow at the Mumbai think tank Gateway House, said Beijing's resurrection of its old claim could be a pressure tactic.

"The significance of the timing of the statement is that it might be hinting that the disengagement [of troops on the border] might not take place for the next few months," Bhatia said.

Indian army soldiers walk along the Line of Actual Control at the India-China border in Bumla, northeastern India. File photo: AP

Sharma said a lack of disengagement on the LAC was helping Beijing to keep its presence of troops along its old claim line.

"If one were to plot the 1959 Chinese claim line on the ground, then the People's Liberation Army soldiers have nearly occupied all those areas ... in the current stand-off," he said. "So the Chinese can turn around and dismiss India's calls for restoring status quo ante, because according to them, they are at their traditional claim line."

China's decision to reaffirm its 1959 LAC also throws a question mark over the various agreements both sides had signed on the border issue.

"Both India and China have committed to the clarification and confirmation of the LAC to reach a common understanding of the alignment of the LAC," Ministry of External Affairs spokesman Srivastava had said.

"In fact, the two sides had engaged in an exercise to clarify and confirm the LAC up to 2003, but this process could not proceed further as the Chinese side did not show a willingness to pursue it," he said.

For instance, the 1993 agreement - titled the "Agreement on Maintenance of Peace and Tranquility along the Line of Control in the India-China Border Areas" - ensured that forces and armaments were kept at a mutually-agreed minimum level, and installed border meetings between local forces on both sides to keep differences under check.

Karackattu, the academic, said these agreements were crucial in ensuring peace at the LAC, despite the differences in perceptions.

"Till now, there was a fluid understanding on patrolling and construction along the LAC, and this allowed us to have a border management system that ensured there was no loss of life," he said.

By reviving the 1959 claim line, this fluid understanding would be "harder to implement", especially if Chinese forces tried to "fortify" their positions along the old line, Karackattu said.

Such militarisation, which would see both sides dispatching military forces to defend their positions, would be dangerous and unsustainable, Sharma warned.

The retired general said the LAC was at risk of turning into the Line of Control (LOC) - the heavily militarised de facto border between India and Pakistan guarded by heavy forces on both sides, with frequent firing of arms and ammunition leading to casualties.

"If this happens, we are wading into unchartered waters," Sharma said.

This article originally appeared on the South China Morning Post (SCMP).

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