China, India: No ground given in border
talks By Pallavi Aiyar
BEIJING - India and China on Monday began
an eighth round of talks on their long-standing
border dispute, with the focus this time on
devising a framework for a settlement of the issue
on the basis of the "political parameters and
guiding principles" finalized during Chinese
Premier Wen Jiabao's visit to India last year.
The demarcation of the border can only
begin after the framework is realized, official
sources say.
Indian National Security
Adviser M K Narayanan and Chinese Vice Foreign
Minister Dai Binguo met in Beijing for the first
day of talks, which were expected to conclude on
Tuesday, in what is seen as another step forward
on the slow road to resolution.
After the
last round of talks between Narayanan and Dai,
held in
March
in India, the former said he was hopeful of
arriving at a basic framework for resolution
"within the next two to three rounds".
As
in the case of the preceding seven rounds, this
week's talks were being held behind closed doors
and details of what was discussed were not being
made public.
The discussions come amid a
background of steadily warming relations. In the
past year the two neighbors have entered into
broad cooperation in areas where they have usually
been portrayed as rivals: energy, security and
defense. Trade is galloping ahead and expected to
touch US$20 billion before the end of this year.
China is widely expected to overtake the United
States as India's largest trade partner within a
few years.
Cultural ties are also being
strengthened after a 40-year deep freeze. India
and China are currently celebrating a "Year of
Friendship" and Chinese President Hu Jintao is
expected to visit New Delhi later in the year.
The unresolved border issue, however,
remains a sharp thorn in this otherwise rosy
picture. Despite hope for a quick solution
expressed by both sides, there is little evidence
that such a solution is close.
The current
set of talks began in 2003 after then Indian prime
minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee's visit to China,
when it was decided to "explore from a political
perspective" the overall "framework of a boundary
settlement". However, even before the decision to
give a political touch to the negotiations, eight
rounds of border talks had already been held
between 1981 and 1987 as well as an additional 14
joint working-group meetings between 1988 and
2003.
Despite all these discussions at
varying levels over the past 25 years, little
innovative thinking on the boundary is in
evidence. The two sides have not even been able to
agree on the line of actual control or the
verification of alignments of respective areas on
mountaintops and in rivers and lakes.
China's traditional position has been to
resolve the dispute on the basis of a territorial
"swap", exchanging Aksai Chin in the west with
Arunachal Pradesh in the east. This solution has
been talked about ever since the 1950s, even
before the 1962 war, and was reiterated by the
late Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping in 1980.
India, however, has ruled out any
"populated areas" as part of a border deal, which
makes concessions in Arunachal Pradesh
unacceptable. The area of Tawang is a particular
sticking point since the Chinese claim it to be
central to Tibetan Buddhism given that the sixth
Dalai Lama was born there.
The entrenched
positions of the two sides thus make the idea of a
"swap" enormously complicated either to agree on
or execute. However, few fresh ideas on resolving
the issue seem to have evolved.
The
Chinese mainland borders 14 countries. China has
had boundary disputes with all of them. However,
following an active policy that puts pragmatism
ahead of ideology, Beijing has managed to settle
all but two of its land-border disputes to its
considerable advantage. In 2004, for example,
Russia and China made a final and comprehensive
settlement of their border dispute. Since then
strategic and economic ties between the neighbors
have greatly strengthened.
For the past
several years China has been focusing on the
development of its economically backward interior
regions, including Tibet and Xinjiang. Massive
infrastructure projects are being carried out,
including a railway line from Golmud in Qinghai
province to Lhasa, the capital of Tibet. It is in
this context that Beijing is looking to settle the
boundary issue with India as well.
On July
6, the historic Nathu La Pass between Sikkim and
Tibet will be reopened for trade (see India, China reach new trade
heights, June 22). The 4,545-meter-high
pass is only some 500 kilometers from Lhasa and
Kolkata. Currently, China-India trade is mostly by
sea. Indo-Tibetan imports and exports are usually
routed through Tianjin - a port city north of
Beijing - involving a detour of thousands of
kilometers. The reopening of the trade route
through Nathu La thus has significant potential
for invigorating the economies of both
northeastern India and western China by linking
Tibet to Kolkata port.
However, given the
continued boundary problem, trade will be limited
to the border region, and only a list of 40 items
largely unchanged from the days of the Silk Road
has been approved for import and export. (The
original Silk Road was an ancient trade route
between China and the Mediterranean Sea extending
some 6,400km and linking China with the Roman
Empire.)
Without a settled boundary it is
understandable that the military establishments of
both sides are reluctant to move too fast, too
soon. Opening borders to full-blown trade would
have a concomitant effect in increasing the ease
of intelligence gathering and military maneuvers.
In the new millennium the border problem
has ceased to have the kind of centrality to
Sino-Indian bilateral ties it once had. Both sides
are focusing on developing healthy economic,
cultural and even military ties, even as talks on
the boundary continue only to result in more
talks. Nonetheless, resolving the border issue
remains key to developing a truly strategic
partnership across the Himalayas. No number of
memoranda of understanding can fully chase out the
ghost of the 1962 Indo-China War until there is
clarity on the boundary.
Pallavi
Aiyar is the China correspondent for The
Hindu.
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