India, China put Himalayan border dispute on hold

NEW DELHI — For more than 50 years, two militaries have skirmished. A brief, bloody war has been fought. And today, thousands of soldiers from both countries sit deployed along their shared frontier, doing little but watching each other.

As Beijing confronts countries across the South China and East China seas, displaying its diplomatic and strategic strength in a series of increasingly dangerous territorial disputes, the India-China stand-off over who should control a swathe of land larger than Austria, however, has resulted in almost nothing beyond regular diplomatic talks and professions of international friendship.

“The Chinese are not pushing further (into the disputed regions) and neither are the Indians,” said Mr Sujit Dutta, a China scholar at New Delhi’s Jamia Millia Islamia University. “Today, India and China have a new context for their relationship,’’ he said.

That context comes down to two key components: An understanding that the disputed land has lost its strategic lustre, and money.

Only a couple of decades ago, India and China were dismissed as nations hobbled by widespread poverty and hopelessly lagging behind the West. Today, China has the world’s second-largest economy and an immense, well-equipped military. Meanwhile, India, though economically far behind China, has become a global centre for information technology and sees itself as a major player in Asia and elsewhere. Though both nations still struggle with widespread internal troubles, the rest of the world can no longer write them off.

China says the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh, an immense territory of nearly 84,000 sq km, is part of China. India, meanwhile, insists China is illegally occupying the region of Aksai Chin, a rocky and largely empty 37,000 sq km region far to the east.

The two fought a month-long border war in 1962 that left about 2,000 soldiers dead following a surprise Chinese attack that still embarrasses India. While border squabbling occurs every year or so, often when Chinese soldiers are reported spotted in Indian territory, there have been few serious showdowns since the late 1980s.

While experts believe diplomatic infrastructure has helped keep things calm — there are now regularly scheduled border talks, military hotlines and designated meeting areas deep in the Himalayas to ensure that unexpected incidents do not flare into warfare — both countries also have more to gain by increasing trade and cooperation.

Underlying everything else, the Himalayan border region does not have the strategic importance it once did.

The 1950s and 1960s were a time when tensions regularly erupted in the region: The Dalai Lama fled across the Himalayas into India after a failed uprising in Tibet in 1959; American-supported Tibetan rebels made small-scale raids into China from secret bases in Nepal; China secretly built a strategically important road linking two of its most restive regions — Tibet and Xinjiang — through a deeply isolated part of India.

Since then, the Central Intelligence Agency has abandoned the Tibetan rebels, India’s support for the Dalai Lama has waned and China now has plenty of roads to Tibet and Xinjiang. But if things are peaceful now along the Indo-Chinese border, plenty on both sides believe trouble could flare anew.

Mr Willy Lam, a political scientist at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, noted India has become the world’s largest arms buyer as it tries to catch up to China’s growing military might. China’s military presence along the border with India has been growing for years, and India has recently rushed to catch up: Refurbishing air strips, deploying more armoured units and frantically constructing new roads high in the Himalayas.

“Although both sides have been very scrupulous and careful not to produce new incidents, the prospects for a solution are nowhere in sight,” Mr Lam said. “The arms race is going on despite the obvious improvement of economic and financial relations between the two countries.” AP