Twanging at Tawang

Congress leader Rahul Gandhi, following a clash between Indian and Chinese troops in Arunachal Pradesh’s Tawang sector, said China is preparing for war but the Indian government is “deep in slumber”, unmindful of the gravity of the situation. He warned that China’s preparations were not just for incursions, but for a full-scale war. Without losing a chance, the BJP accused him of trying to demoralise the military and took a swipe at his great-grandfather Jawaharlal Nehru. The Opposition, while taking to task the Narendra Modi government over its continuing reticence on the China border issue, staged a walkout after being denied a discussion in parliament.

The only time that Prime Minister Modi has said anything publicly on the India-China border confrontation since it began in April-May 2020 was following the clashes at the Galwan Valley on June 15, 2020, in which 20 Indian soldiers were killed. Modi had then simply denied that Chinese soldiers had intruded into Indian territory or were on Indian soil. It only helped China.

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Yes, a groggy-eyed Nehru was so besotted with Asianism that he thought that the common experiences of suffering at the hands of the West would cement solidarity. He miscalculated – to disastrous results – that China would return India’s support on matters of US recognition and membership in the UN with a diplomatic solution recognising the McMahon Line as India’s northern boundary. Instead, China invaded Tibet and eliminated the buffer the British had created, leaving India unable to refute China’s border claims. China hasn’t stopped there – it has since claimed Tawang, Arunachal Pradesh, too.

Nehru was also mistaken to think that both Mao and Zhou En Lai, were grateful to him for easing the way out of their country’s isolation at Geneva and Bandung. Fooled by the most spectacular reception ever arranged for a foreign visitor by any country, in October 1954, he thought China had accepted India’s leading role in Southeast Asia and it would never attack India. This assumption, co-shared by Nehru and (Krishna) Menon, led him to adopt the Forward Policy which, in its turn, led to the scarring Indo-China war in 1962.

The name-calling done, it is wiser to concede that the Indo-China border dispute is multi-layered and, therefore, subject to different ideological and historical interpretations. While history might apportion major blame on Nehru, following the debacle in 1962, Rajiv Gandhi’s historic visit to China in 1988 achieved a thawing of relations between the two adversarial nations. But it also came at the cost of a major concession -- India had to drop its insistence that there could be no improvement in relations until Beijing returned the territories taken in 1962.

Before the Galwan clash, it was like bearing an imperial itch with a grin to accept that there being no commonly delineated LAC (including territory in Arunachal Pradesh) between India and China, the sight of both sides patrolling up to their own perceptions of the LAC in some areas was par for the course, a trend since 2006. In the 1990s, India and China signed two agreements on Confidence-Building Measures (CBMs) in the border area, following which peace and tranquillity largely persisted along the LAC.

But after the Galwan clash, “agreed areas” of differing Indian and Chinese perceptions became a bone of contention. In the Arunachal sector, within Tawang itself, there are three “agreed areas” that are being contested. Yangtse (where the soldiers of the two sides clashed in early December), about 25 km from Tawang town (north of the Lungroo grazing ground), happens to be one of these areas. A site of regular “physical contact” between the Indian Army and the PLA, Yangtse seems to be on the Chinese radar especially because the high ground on the Indian side gives India a commanding view of the Chinese side.

Tawang is one of the more serious dispute points between India and China in the overall border question. With Tibet in China’s fold, Beijing claiming sovereignty over 90,000 sq km of the Sumdorong Chu Valley in Arunachal Pradesh, including Tawang, (central to Tibetan Buddhism because it is believed that the sixth Dalai Lama was born there) was the site of a major standoff between India and China in 1986-1987.

Tawang had remained under the suzerainty of Tibet till its incorporation into the Indian Union in 1951 by Major Bob Ralengnao Khathing, a Manipuri Tangkhul Naga frontier officer, and his troops. Another unsung Indian hero who played a key role in managing the integration of Tawang in the face of the Chinese annexation of Tibet was Jairamdas Daulatram (1891–1979).

Tawang sits also at the heart of the Sino-Indian conflict over riparian resources in view of China damming the water of Brahmaputra in Tibet, forcing India to consider building dams in the ecologically sensitive border district. China routinely condemns visits of any Indian or foreign dignitaries to Tawang, issues stapled visas for Indian citizens from Arunachal Pradesh, and renames places within the Indian state. Bordered by Tibet Autonomous Region of the People’s Republic of China in its north and the Druk kingdom of Bhutan in its south-west, Tawang is one of the biological treasure troves in the Indo-Burma hotspot region, home to rich varieties of flora and fauna. It is ironic that it still remains one of the inaccessible borderlands of India, bearing the brunt of the development deficit.

At the fag-end of 2022, the knowledge that Chinese troops armed with spiked clubs and bamboo sticks attempted to “unilaterally change the status quo” on the LAC in the Tawang sector and engaged in hand-to-hand combat is of little relief because indeed, as per the estimates of Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), the Chinese military expenditure in 2019 at about $240 billion is the second largest military spending in the world (behind the US), almost three-and-a-half times higher than the next largest spender, India, which, amid heightened tension along the Sino-India boundary in Arunachal Pradesh, successfully conducted a full-range trial of the intercontinental ballistic missile Agni-5 and launched a major air combat exercise in the Northeast.

Adventurism has no place in how two powerful and nuclear-armed countries conduct themselves. But China has got used to the policy mode of appeasement as opposed to strategic confrontation, and hamstrung by the structural deficits or the stagnated institutional decision-making processes, the knowledge that effective conflict management sometimes requires force in lieu of compromise dawned late on us.

(The writer is a Kolkata-based
commentator on geopolitical affairs,
development and cultural issues)