China and India dig in at Himalayan border, with an eye on Washington

[FOOLS_NIGHTMARE]

• There is no resolution in sight in the months-long border stand-off, with both countries’ militaries reinforcing their positions and no talks scheduled
• Analysts say Beijing is trying to get a better feel for what US President-elect Joe Biden’s China policy might be before making its next move

Eight months after it began, a bitter, tense border stand-off between tens of thousands of Chinese and Indian troops in the Himalayan region of Ladakh shows no signs of a resolution.
Talks between the two countries have all but been derailed since military officials last met two months ago – the longest gap in such negotiations since May – with both sides reinforcing their positions and digging their heels in.
Unverified images that have surfaced on Chinese social media recently show Indian and Chinese tanks and other armoured vehicles lined up in a face-off metres away from each other.

Chinese troops have already moved forward in strategically sensitive areas like Depsang, so they don’t need to do anything nowDeepak Sinha, retired Indian Army general

On Monday, Indian Army chief M.M. Naravane spelt out India’s position on the stand-off, saying at a press conference that his country was “ready for the long haul” and that its troops were prepared to “hold our ground as long as it takes”.


In the last two days, India’s chief of defence staff, General Bipin Rawat, and air force chief, R.K.S. Bhaduria, have visited forward areas along the Line of Actual Control (LAC), the unmarked, de facto border separating Ladakh from the Chinese-controlled Aksai Chin region. Around the same time, online videos have surfaced of Chinese troops conducting drills in the area.

Intelligence analysts later identified the area to be just 36km (22 miles) away from the Indian region of Depsang in northern Ladakh.


With tensions rising and talks unlikely any time soon, the stand-off is likely to continue through the harsh winter that engulfs the Himalayan region of Ladakh until April, with temperatures dropping to minus 40 degrees Celsius (minus 40 degrees Fahrenheit).

An Indian Air Force Apache helicopter flies over Leh, the joint capital of the union territory of Ladakh bordering China, on Thursday. Photo:
The stand-off dates to last May, after troops from both sides clashed on the banks of Pangong Lake. The skirmish led to a military face-off at a number of points along the LAC. The two countries share a 3,488-kilometre (2,167-mile) land border, much of it undemarcated and often the cause of disputes between the two, including a full-blown military war in 1962.

Since the stand-off began, tensions have only mounted. Soldiers clashed in the Galwan river valley, north of Pangong Lake, on June 15, resulting in the deaths of at least 20 Indian soldiers and an undisclosed number of Chinese troops.

In November, Indian media said the two sides were in the final stages of an agreement to disengage troops, but the Chinese were quick to deny the reports. Since November 6, there has been no contact between the two sides’ military commanders.


Analysts in New Delhi believe the current pause in talks might be a strategic manoeuvre by Beijing as it casts an eye on Washington to get a better sense of what US President-elect Joe Biden’s policy toward China will entail.

“If Biden’s policy towards China is going to be as tough as Trump’s China policy and if China perceives a higher level of threat from the US, then it is unlikely to want to open up another front with India,” said retired Indian Navy commodore C. Uday Bhaskar, the current director of the Society for Policy Studies, a New Delhi think tank.

India pushes to build roads near Chinese border, in a bid to boost infrastructure in border areas
Two recent events may be shaping Beijing’s considerations of US policy. Last week, the outgoing US ambassador to India, Kenneth Juster, disclosed that the two countries had been working “in close coordination” through the border stand-off, to help India counter what he said was “sustained … aggressive Chinese activity on its border”.
Indian media reports have said that New Delhi was relying on Washington for satellite imagery as well as emergency purchases of cold-weather equipment for its personnel in the Himalayas.
On Monday, a 2018 US document on its Indo-Pacific strategy was declassified, laying bare Washington’s view that India was “pre-eminent in South Asia” and that a “strong India” would “act as counterbalance to China”.

It added that in light of strengthened US-India ties, the US should act to “accelerate India’s rise and capacity to serve as a net provider of security and Major Defence Partner”.
The warmth between its two rivals has not gone down well with China. Responding to Juster’s remarks, China’s ambassador to India, Sun Weidong, tweeted, “We firmly oppose any third party meddling in China-India border issue and hope US relations with others not target any specific country.”

Bhaskar, the retired Indian Navy commodore, said Beijing might now be wary about any escalation in tensions with New Delhi.
“China wants to project itself as a status quo power, not wanting to rock any boats, and a power that is willing to negotiate and have normal relations with other countries,” he said. “Challenging India militarily might not be the best card to play right now.”

But others said the current stalemate between China and India might have tactical benefits for both countries.
Deepak Sinha, a retired Indian Army brigadier who has had extensive experience carrying out counter-insurgency and airborne special operations in India’s northeast region, said the stalemate could benefit Beijing in the long term.


Pointing to reports of People’s Liberation Army exercises in a region close to Depsang, Sinha said the proximity of Chinese troops to sensitive Indian positions did not “bode well” for New Delhi.

“Chinese troops have already moved forward in strategically sensitive areas like Depsang, so they don’t need to do anything now,” Sinha said. “Instead, they could choose their opportunity maybe even in two or three years to mount a military challenge to India in these areas.”

Manoj Joshi, a distinguished fellow at the New Delhi think tank Observer Research Foundation, said that China “may not want a resolution” to the stand-off any time soon because of the cost to New Delhi.
“China has locked India into an expensive and a long-term deployment, which is very expensive,” Joshi said, adding that such a stand-off also forces India to focus much more on land rather than on maritime security and the Indian Ocean, a situation that benefits Beijing.
But some analysts have argued that the stand-off could prove to be beneficial for India’s image, especially among other smaller Asian nations.
Writing in Hindustan Times, Harsh Pant, a professor of international relations at King’s College in London, said: “By standing up militarily to China on the Himalayan borders, India also made it possible for smaller nations at the receiving end of Chinese aggression to envision the possibility that subservience to China is not the only option.”
But for now, foreign-policy analysts in New Delhi believe India is unlikely to make any aggressive manoeuvres. Instead, as Bhaskar pointed out, its recent act of returning a Chinese soldier captured on the Indian side of the LAC at Chushul came with a message for Beijing.
“I think India wants to convey that it does not want to aggravate things any further, even if it has the opportunities to,” he said.

China and India dig in at Himalayan border, with an eye on Washington

There is no resolution in sight in the months-long border stand-off, with both countries’ militaries reinforcing their positions and no talks scheduled.

www.scmp.com

 

[FOOLS_NIGHTMARE]

• US support for Tibetans also has implications for Nepal, which China has grown closer to in recent years
• India and Nepal will hold a bilateral meeting on Thursday, where Kathmandu aims to secure supplies of Covid-19 vaccines

New US legislation passed by Congress last month to support Tibetans, even those in Nepal, and India’s vaccine diplomacy will fuel a simmering geopolitical contest for influence in the landlocked country, analysts say. On one side is Beijing, which has in recent years cemented stronger ties with
Nepal’s ruling Communist Party and offered large infrastructure investments and economic aid to the country. On the other are India and the US, both traditional partners of Nepal who are increasingly united in a bid to counter Beijing’s rising influence in South Asia.
All eyes in this tug of war will be on New Delhi on Thursday when External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar hosts his Nepali counterpart Pradeep Gyawali. India, which is likely to be a key manufacturing centre for Covid-19 vaccines, is expected to offer Nepal supplies at the meeting, the highest-level official contact between the two men since a diplomatic spat over a map and a disputed area of territory last year. Along with AstraZeneca’s locally branded Covishield, India’s drug regulator has also given approval to an indigenous vaccine developed by Bharat Biotech and a government institute. Four more vaccines are in clinical trials in India, including Zydus Cadila’s ZyCoV-D and Russia’s Sputnik V.

As part of the new US legislation, Washington will ask Kathmandu to grant legal documentation to exiled Tibetans who have been living in Nepal, which shares a border with China’s Tibetan Autonomous Region. There will also be funding worth US$6 million from this year to 2025 to support younger Tibetan leaders in India and Nepal and preserve Tibetan language and culture, which will come from the US’s Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC). About 70,000 Tibetan refugees live in Nepal with thousands more in India and around the world.


The Tibetan Policy and Support Act of 2020, which was signed into law by President Donald Trump, calls for the establishment of a US consulate in Lhasa and the absolute right of Tibetans to choose a successor to the Dalai Lama. China has denounced it, saying Tibet-related issues are domestic affairs.

Ashok Swain, who researches peace and conflict at Sweden’s Uppsala University, said the new Tibet bill raised the possibility of increasing US involvement in Nepal and its neighbourhood.“If the US-China rivalry develops into a Cold War of the 21st Century, there is every possibility that Nepal might become another Afghanistan,” said Swain, referencing how the former Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, then a fellow communist country, in 1979 to prevent it from switching its allegiance to the democratic West.

Avinash Godbole, an assistant professor at India’s Jindal Global University who studies Chinese foreign policy, said given the number of Tibetan refugees in Nepal, it was inevitable that China’s efforts to burnish ties with Kathmandu would also include keeping an eye on the Tibetan refugee community.

“China has always felt that Kathmandu is the place where Tibetans communicate with the rest of the world,” he said. “One can say from a Chinese view, a lot that happens in Kathmandu goes unnoticed and that’s why they want to be there in a proactive way.”China’s strategic interests in its neighbour Nepal, which in 2017 signed up to be part of President Xi Jinping’sambitious connectivity project, the Belt and Road Initiative, have grown in recent years.

Beijing’s foreign aid agency, the China International Development Cooperation Agency (CIDCA), between 2014 and 2018 pumped about US$1.63 million into various health, education and transport sectors in Nepal’s northern districts bordering Tibet.

A young Tibetan monk exits the monastery at the Boudhanath Stupa in Kathmandu. Photo: AFP
In addition, Chinese companies are building cement factories and highways, including one linking Nepal’s capital in the east with Terai in the south.

On December 20, after Prime Minister K.P. Sharma Oli sparked a political crisis by dissolving parliament, citing a lack of unity between squabbling factions of his party and calling for fresh elections, China sent a senior Chinese Communist Party (CPP) official to assess the situation.
Seven ministers have since quit Oli’s government, while protesters angry at political infighting as the country battles the Covid-19 pandemic burnt effigies of the prime minister.

Guo Yezhou, a vice-minister in the CCP’s International Liaison Department, which manages relationships with foreign political parties, met politicians and government leaders.
Ram Karki, a Nepal Communist Party politician from the non-Oli faction, said China was concerned about the party as a “reliable and trustworthy partner”.

“I sensed that there are some concerns in Beijing over whether Nepal will approve the [US funding via the] MCC,” said Karki, who attended a meeting with Guo and the Chinese delegation.

“Such a move could lead to a change in the geopolitical dynamics, and China’s concerns from its point of view are not entirely wrong,” he told The Kathmandu Post last month.
In comments to This Week in Asia last Friday, Karki, referencing the MCC, said Nepal “should only approve grants that will not harm our relations with our immediate neighbours like China”.
He added that as parliament had been dissolved, the caretaker government was unlikely to discuss the implications of the US legislation for Nepal.
Mohan Malik, a professor of strategic studies at India’s National Defence College, said given China’s success at “elite capture” in Nepal, Kathmandu was unlikely to act in a way that would antagonise Beijing or jeopardise its investments.
“This great Himalayan battle of wits is likely to intensify in the years to come as China, India and Nepal prepare for the post-Dalai Lama era,” he said.
Additional reporting by Reuters

China faces battle of wits in Nepal as US backs Tibetans, India dangles jabs

US support for Tibetans has implications for Nepal, which China has grown closer to in recent years. India and Nepal will hold a bilateral meeting on Thursday, where Kathmandu aims to secure supplies of Covid-19 vaccines.

www.scmp.com