Border tranquility
January 18, 2012
In India, few analysts were enthused by the outcome of the 15th round of border talks between Indian National Security Advisor Shivshankar Menon and Chinese State Councilor Dai Bingguo that wrapped up in New Delhi on Tuesday.
China claims 90,000 square kilometers of Indian territory in the northeastern state of Arunachal Pradesh and occupies around 38,000 square kilometers of Jammu and Kashmir, which India claims as its territory.
The Indian army has often accused Chinese soldiers of infiltrating the Ladakh region of Indian-administered Kashmir along the Line of Actual Control that divides the two countries. There has been long-standing cross-border friction ever since 1962, when the two sides fought a brief war.
Dai Bingguo had expressed optimism before the talks and said that Sino-Indian ties had made "substantial progress.'' He predicted a "golden period" for bilateral relations.
Commerce between the two countries has flourished over the past decade, with bilateral trade increasing 20-fold to over $61 billion in 2010. It is expected to reach $100 billion by 2015.
Maintaining peace and tranquility
However, the border issue remains a sticking point. On Tuesday, the two sides issued a statement defining a working mechanism, which will be headed by Gautam Bambawale from India’s foreign ministry and Dengh Zhonghua from China’s department of boundary affairs and "will address issues and situations that may arise in the border areas that affect the maintenance of peace and tranquility."
"It will help prevent misunderstanding between the two countries arising from incursion into each other's territory, stemming from the undemarcated Line of Actual Control (LAC)."
Under the agreement, a group of diplomats and military officials will meet once or twice a year in each country to agree on areas of cooperation along the border. They will not discuss how to resolve the actual border dispute, however.
'No takeaways'
Srikanth Kondapalli, a China expert at Jawaharlal Nehru University in the Indian capital, was disappointed. "There are really no takeaways," he told Deutsche Welle.
"There might be some cosmetic changes but no substantial movement forward. The border issue will only be resolved in 10 to 15 years."
Brahma Chellaney from the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi, agreed that the working mechanism was "ill-defined."
"When they can't agree on where the Line of Control lies, how can they agree on anything else?" he asked.
However, Amitabh Mattoo, a professor in international politics, was more optimistic: "This round of talks is clearly an attempt at cooling off tensions by including armed forces in the new mechanism," he told Deutsche Welle, adding nonetheless that it was too early to say if this would be successful.
The two sides have agreed to hold the next round of border talks in China. The current round had been postponed since November when India refused to comply with a Chinese demand to cancel an international Buddhism conclave in New Delhi that the Dalai Lama was supposed to attend.
Author: Murali Krishnan
Editor: Anne Thomas