It is not entirely wrong to link escalating border disputes in the Himalayas between India and China to the gradually intensifying US policy to contain a rising, assertive, and belligerent China.
India is faced with a conundrum. Its great power status in the new century will be enhanced by its political and military competition with China. – Robert Kaplan, 2010
Prophetic words. Even more prophetically, highlighting India’s pivotal role in the US national strategy in the South Asian region, Kaplan goes on to say in his landmark article “South Asia’s Geography of Conflict” that if Americans do not grasp India’s age-old, highly unstable geopolitics, especially if it concerns Pakistan, Afghanistan, and China, “they will badly mishandle the relationship.” The article recommended as a must-read for American policymakers, further emphasizes that as “China and the United States become great power rivals, the direction in which India tilts could determine the course of geopolitics in Eurasia in the 21st century.”
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Nearly a decade ago in September 2012, two Asian superpowers Japan and China – ranked as the world’s number two and three economies – were on the verge of getting entangled in a punch-out over five tiny islands spread over an area of barely four square miles. The source of the escalating tensions over the disputed islands was Tokyo nationalizing the disputed islands, provoking an angry Chinese response that accused Japan of “stealing” the islands. To make matters worse, rising nationalism in China at the time – coinciding with the 81st anniversary of Japan’s brutal attack on China in 1931, had led to anti-Japan and anti-Japanese riots breaking out in over 80 cities across China.
The situation had become so volatile that the whole world, particularly countries in Southeast Asia and in the Asia Pacific, was nervously asking: could the two East Asian neighbors, with over a century-old history of military aggression and mutual woke feelings, be caught in an ugly warfare if someone makes a misstep? Among other factors such as “a devil’s brew of suspicion, anger and ham-handed diplomacy” in Japan and China, an additional and leading cause for the escalating tensions was the growing US military presence in the region. It is pertinent to recall, the US announcement amidst its growing military presence in the region to deploy a second anti-ballistic missile system (ABM) in Japan had outraged a nervous China.
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However, to everyone’s relief, nothing dreadful happened, no shots were fired and the tension eventually de-escalated. But notwithstanding far lower stakes along the disputed border between China and India in the Himalayan region, a series of ugly, eye-to-eye major and minor military skirmishes and standoffs took place during the past little over five years with the latest one reported on last December 9 at Yangtse in the Indian northeastern state Arunachal Pradesh’s (China calls it Zangnan or South Tibet) in Tawang sector.
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To return to our original theme of rivalry between India and China from the China-Japan islands row in the East China Sea, following the birth of the notional term “Indo-Pacific,” it seems the Americans have indeed paid heed to Kaplan’s prescription and so far handled the relationship with India rather efficiently. Remember, in the same article, Kaplan also expounded on the nature of the India-China rivalry and called it not only fundamentally different from India’s rivalry with Pakistan but also unlike as in the case of Pakistan “with no real history behind it.” “India’s rivalry with China is more abstract, less emotional, and (far more significantly) less volatile,” Kaplan observed.
Interestingly, though totally unrelated, around the same time as Japan-China tensions started showing signs of de-escalating, a chasm was developing in India-China bilateral relations due largely to their half-century-old border dispute in the Himalayas. While the Chinese regard the border dispute with India as largely a British colonial legacy, in India, its (border dispute with China) background is largely viewed as the Chinese invasion of Tibet in 1950. After the Tibetan spiritual leader sought refuge in India in 1959, India and China fought a brief border war lasting over a month in the winter of 1962. The battleground was the Aksai Chin region near Kashmir in the northwest at an altitude of 14000 feet where no one lives and in Arunachal Pradesh near Bhutan in India’s northeast.
In fact, what now appears to be a preemptive wake-up call to Washington D. C., and looking beyond the Obama administration’s strategy-less “pivot” and “rebalance” policy, much before the US introduced the Indo-Pacific security strategy, an article published by a Washington-based think tank urged the US allies “to act” as part of the new US Grand Strategy to prevent China from “pushing the US out of Asia.” Among the real actions suggested as a part of a new strategy (which now completely resembles the Indo-Pacific strategy), India’s role was envisaged as to “escalate the Himalayan border dispute with China.” Not at all surprising, the December 9 Tawang border clashes with India along the Line of Actual Control (LAC) in the Himalayan region – the latest in a series of such clashes occurring along the border since 2013 – had been cited by some Chinese commentators as linked with the upcoming Blinken (now postponed, in the fallout of the “spy balloon storm”) visit to China. Aimed at putting Beijing under mounting pressure on all fronts, the Chinese claim.
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Indeed it is not known if the Depsong faceoff in 2013 between India and China in the Himalayan region was a part of the US 2013 Grand Strategy objectives. What is certain is that the 2013 border standoff was the first major incident in nearly three decades, and also the start of a series of frequent order face-offs between India and China. What is even more significant is that notwithstanding the change of government in New Delhi in the following year, the frequency and intensity of such border standoffs have kept on increasing. Quite intriguingly, the standoff in 2013 had occurred a month before the maiden visit of the Chinese Premier Li Keqiang to New Delhi, the subsequent border skirmishes resulting in a faceoff happened just on the eve of Chinese president Xi Jinping’s first visit to India.
Finally, as the US reacted to the violent, bloody border clashes between India and China in Galwan Valley in the summer of 2020, both the Pentagon and the US State Department supported India in the recent clashes in Tawang as part of a pattern of provocative behavior of China. The Pentagon stated “It fully supports India’s ongoing efforts to de-escalate this situation”; the US State Department in a statement said, “It opposes any unilateral attempts to advance territorial claims by incursions, military or civilian.” We don’t know for sure whether China’s policymakers are familiar with the Kaplan prognosis. However, an article in Beijing’s semi-official Global Times last month leaves no one in doubt about what Beijing is thinking: will New Delhi make the right choice as Washington pushes it as a proxy for war?
