This week, there has been a thaw in India-China relations with Prime Minister Narendra Modi meeting China’s President Xi Jinping in Russia – the first bilateral meeting between the two in five years since the armies of the two countries clashed in Ladakh in 2020.
The Ministry of External Affairs set the ball rolling on Monday when it announced that India and China had reached a patrolling arrangement along the Line of Actual Control, “leading to the disengagement” of the two countries’ militaries in eastern Ladakh.
A day later, however, Indian Army Chief General Upendra Dwivedi struck a different note, saying Indian forces “will be looking at disengagement” with the Chinese military along the Line of Actual Control after the status quo of 2020 is restored.
Defence observers point out that there is a contradiction in what the government and the Army is saying. The Army chief’s comments suggest that the agreement reached between India and China does not amount to a return to the status quo that existed in the region before 2020, they say.
‘Disengagement completed’
Since mid-2020, the Indian and the Chinese militaries have been locked in a standoff at several locations in eastern Ladakh after India accused the Chinese military of incursions at several points along the disputed border. The tensions escalated in June 2020 when a violent face-off between Indian and Chinese soldiers took place in Ladakh’s Galwan Valley. It led to the deaths of 20 Indian soldiers.
Independent reports have pointed out that Beijing gained control of 60 sq km previously held or patrolled by Indian troops. The Modi government, however, has denied any loss of territory.
Since the Galwan clashes, China and India have held several rounds of military and diplomatic talks to resolve the standoff. While military disengagement had been achieved in some of the locations in the past four years, sticking points remained.
On Monday, Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri, while announcing that India had reached a patrolling agreement with China, did not provide any details. When probed by reporters further, he said that the agreement “is leading to disengagement and eventually the resolution of issues” that had arisen in 2020.
Minutes after the announcement on Monday, External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar said that the agreement would mean that “we have gone back to the 2020 position”. “With that we can say the disengagement with China has been completed,” he said at an event organised by NDTV.
But the next day, speaking at the United Service Institution of India, Indian Army Chief General Upendra Dwivedi said: “As far as we are concerned, we want to go back to the status quo of April 2020. Thereafter we will be looking at disengagement, de-escalation and normal management of the LAC...This has been our stand since April 2020.”
The “normal management” of the Line of Actual Control will be achieved in a phased manner, the Army chief said.
He also said that there are ongoing attempts to “restore trust” between the two sides. “It will get restored once we are able to see each other and we are able to convince and reassure each other that we are not creeping into buffer zones that have been created,” he added.
‘Showpiece’
Observers say the contradictions between the statements of the foreign ministry and the army chief are reasons to be sceptical about what the agreement entails.
External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar and Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri are not mentioning the return to status quo, said Sushant Singh, a lecturer of South Asian studies at Yale University. “Only the Army chief is talking about returning to the status quo,” he said.
Singh said that there has been an attempt to make disengagement the “showpiece”.
“Disengagement is to ensure that the soldiers are no longer in an eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation,” he said. “Then there is de-escalation where the soldiers move into semi-permanent camps 50-100 km away. Then comes the de-induction where you de-induct all additional troops you had brought in.”
While disengagement may have already taken place in locations such as Galwan, Gogra and Pangong Tso in 2020, 2021 and 2022, “it doesn’t mean de-escalation or de-induction,” said Singh, who served in the Indian Army for two decades.
Disengagement should not be misconstrued as a solution to the problem or as the return to status quo ante, or the state of affairs before the standoff began, “which is essentially what India has always asked for from China in all earlier crises”, Singh said.
Colonel (Retired) Ajai Shukla, a journalist and commentator, concurred with this view. “There are different things being stated by different officials,” he said. “Jaishankar is saying one thing, the foreign secretary said one thing, the Army chief is saying another thing and the Chinese spokesperson is saying one thing.”
On Tuesday, the Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson said at a press briefing that the two sides had arrived at a resolution on the “relevant matters” and Beijing will work with India to implement it. No further details were provided.
Shukla said it is “self-delusion” to say that one is endorsing another, “because they are talking about different things”.
“The Indian establishment is trying to make out as if the Chinese establishment is endorsing what the Indian establishment has claimed,” Shukla said. “Whereas, in fact, the Chinese government has not.”
Shukla said that Beijing had not corroborated the Indian claim of an agreement. “China says it will do what is required to implement the agreement. What that agreement is, the Chinese spokesperson hasn’t said.”
Pravin Sawhney, who writes for the strategic affairs magazine FORCE, said that there was no contradiction in what the foreign minister and the Army chief had said.
Sawhney said that the agreement was a positive development because there will be “a bit of certainty” on the Indian side that the Chinese People’s Liberation Army “will not grab our territory”, but added that “the point is that China has not left our territory”.
Like the other observers, Sawhney too said that de-escalation had not happened.
“It’s solely disengagement, which means the face-off is no longer there in Depsang and Demchok,” he said. “It doesn’t mean that they [China] have vacated the area they came to occupy in 2020. It only means that they have allowed us to patrol in those areas by informing them. Nothing more than that.”
‘What has India conceded?’
Observers have also asked what New Delhi had conceded in the negotiation process.
“The big question is: the Indian side is talking about India being able to patrol Demchok and Depsang again, but what has India conceded to China in return?” Singh asked. “Clearly, China has not changed its heart suddenly to concede what it was not for the last four and a half years.”
“The lack of details clearly shows that the Modi government has a lot to hide,” he added.
Shukla said that Beijing had not yet endorsed New Delhi’s claim that India had not gotten patrolling rights back in Demchok and Depsang. “We’re cherry-picking parts of the statement that suit our claims,” he said.
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The timing
In a similar vein, Singh said that New Delhi’s announcement on the agreement was “mainly headline management” because no details had been put out for anyone to assess what the arrangement really means.
Shukla said that New Delhi’s action was to “convey the impression” to the Indian public that the Chinese are cooperating with India in putting an end to the confrontation. “That opens the doors for [Prime Minister Narendra] Modi to meet [Chinese President] Xi [Jinping] and arrive at an arrangement with him,” he said.
Modi and Xi on Wednesday held a bilateral meeting on the sidelines of the BRICS summit in Russia’s Kazan, the first since the military standoff began in mid-2020.
Singh concurred that the immediate trigger for the announcement happening now was the meeting between Modi and Xi because New Delhi “needed something to show normalcy”.
However, he said, there were other factors at play as well. “The bigger underlying reason is that Modi wants to say that the crisis is over and that the political embarrassment that this is causing him vis-à-vis the Opposition and others doesn’t happen,” he added.
At the same time, the development also allows India to ward-off pressure from the West regarding the alleged plot to kill Sikh separatists such as Hardeep Singh Nijjar overseas, Singh said.
There are economic and trade reasons too, with “officials and corporate houses having asked for more investment from China and deals with China”, Singh said. “That can only be done if you say there is no crisis with China,” he added.
Singh added that the pressure on the military also needed to be relieved. The military has been overstretched because of the crisis not just in Ladakh, but also in Arunachal Pradesh, Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand where the Army was deployed in a forward posture to ensure that India does not lose any more territory to China, he said.
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