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India-China border talks |
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Little progress was made at the latest round of border talks between the Special Representatives (SRs) of India and China which ended in Beijing on Sept. 19. The two-day boundary talks held after a year-long hiatus amid some tension in bilateral ties in the wake of attempts by China to block the NSG nuclear waiver for India in Vienna, ended without reaching any specific agreement. The next round will be held in India. The 12th round of talks was led by India’s National Security Advisor M.K. Narayanan and Chinese State Councilor Dai Bingguo. A blank statement at the end of the talks said they decided to continue the talks to pursue their goal for a “fair and reasonable solution” acceptable to both sides. The statement said the two sides exchanged in-depth views on a framework to solve the boundary issue. But it did not indicate whether any progress had been made during the negotiations.
The two countries had appointed the SRs to look at the boundary issue from the political perspective during then Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s visit to Beijing in June 2003. Though officials on both sides claim that they are making progress, not much seems to have been achieved by the two sides in the 11 rounds held so far. Strategic experts say mutual suspicion between the two sides is so intense that it would be a Herculean task for them to arrive at an understanding. The NSG episode has only added to the problems between the two sides. China, which had all along given an impression to New Delhi that it would not come in the way of NSG amending its rules to allow India to undertake nuclear commerce, openly sided with those countries which argued against the 45-member cartel giving a clean waiver to New Delhi. Beijing’s stand at the NSG came as a rude shock to India, which conveyed its unhappiness to the Chinese side when Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi visited New Delhi last week.
The latest round of talks, the twelfth since the Special Representatives were appointed in 2003 to hammer out a solution to the almost half-century-old dispute at a political level, takes place against a geo-political tapestry of burgeoning complexity. On the one hand, booming bilateral trade, increasing people-to-people contact, and a sustained exchange of high-level visits indicate a maturing of ties. India-China trade for the first six months of the year was worth $29 billion, a 69 per cent increase over the figure for the same time period in 2007. Earlier this year Prime Minister Manmohan Singh visited Beijing. The leaders of the two countries have also had ample opportunities to meet on the sidelines of multilateral forums. In addition, the second in a series of joint military exercises is currently being planned, a development that is rich in symbolism. The last two years have also seen some resurgent suspicions emerge in the cross-Himalayan diplomatic dance the neighbouring countries are engaged. In India, the sincerity of China’s intentions has been called into question following alleged incursions across the eastern sector of the border by Chinese troops and a perceived hardening of Beijing’s stance on Arunachal Pradesh. These have now been compounded by the claims of some senior Indian officials about Beijing’s allegedly obstructionist stance at the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) meeting in Vienna earlier in the month. China denies these charges. In turn, strategies in Beijing are concerned about the implications of New Delhi’s increasing closeness to Washington. The worry is that India might ultimately become part of an alliance of like-minded democracies aimed at containing China. There are also concerns over Tibet.
Despite the acknowledged centrality by all sides of the boundary negotiations, expectations regarding any substantial progress are minimal. India says China is illegally occupying 43,180 square kilometres of Jammu and Kashmir, including 5,180 square kilometres ceded to Beijing by Islamabad under the Sino-Pakistan boundary agreement of 1963. Beijing, in turn, contends that India is in possession of some 90,000 square kilometres of Chinese territory, mostly in Arunachal Pradesh.
The two countries spent more than a quarter of century before the Special representatives were appointed to give a political touch to negotiations. Eight rounds of border talks between 1981 and 1987 and 14 Joint Working Group meetings between 1988 and 2003 were held which produced no results. The idea that has long been doing the rounds as the basis for a border settlement is that of a territorial slap with New Delhi recognizing Aksai Chin in the west as part of China and Beijing doing the same for India and Arunachal Pradesh in the east. While this solution was put forward by China in the 1950s and reiterated by Deng Xiaoping, New Delhi rejected it at the time. There are some indications today that India is finally ready to consider the swap solution. Beijing, however, no longer seems as keen on the idea, with the area of Tawang in Arunachal Pradesh emerging as a sticking point. The Chinese now say that given Tawang’s centrality to Tibetan Buddhism- the sixth Dalai Lama was born there- it is impossible for them to give up claims to the region. New Delhi has firmly ruled out any concessions on Tawang, since this is an area with a settled population. “Tawang is an area with substantial populations. Not a small number. It flies in the face of guiding principles and political parameters,” M.K. Naryanan said in an interview in August this year. According to the parameters for the settlement of the dispute established in 2005, any final agreement needs to take account of the “interests of the settled populations” of the two countries. This was widely interpreted in India as a Chinese concession on Tawang . However, from China’s point of view, the issue of population is an important one but it is not the sole criterion for deciding anything. South Asian experts believe that while China does not want the whole of Arunachal Pradesh, the border will remain an intractable problem in the absence of a genuine give-and-take.
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