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Will 18 Prove to be Lucky for India and China?

India and China meet once again to resolve their border dispute.

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Over 30 years and 17 rounds of talks in the making, the Indo-Chinese border dispute is a complex and festering one. That said, this is the first border meet between the two nations since the Modi-led NDA came to power and expectation runs high that national security adviser Ajit Doval and his Chinese counterpart Yang Jieche, will be able to resolve something their predecessors couldn’t.

The heart of the matter between the Asian superpowers is primarily a cartographical one. Both countries lay claim to territories along the 3,000 odd km border they share. There are sections along the northern, western and eastern frontiers that are not just disputed but have seen incursions by the Chinese military, because there is no mutually-accepted border or Line of Control (LoC) between the nations.

As Shishir Gupta writing in Hindustan Times says: “India’s position is that its northern borders stretch from north-west tip of Jammu and Kashmir (tri-junction of India-Afghanistan-China) in the west to the north-east of Arunachal Pradesh or tri-junction of India-China-Myanmar — a total of 3,488 kilometres.

The Chinese claim is that the Indian boundary starts from west of Karakoram Pass with India in adverse possession of 500 square kilometres of land in Demchok in eastern Ladakh.

Bejing, India claims, is in adverse possession of 33,000 square kilometres of land in Aksai Chin and apart from that Pakistan has ceded 5,180 sq km of land to China in Shaksgam Valley in 1963,” said a China expert.

So deep-rooted and contentious is the territorial dispute that India and China have refused to accept and recognize maps prepared by each other since an expert group meeting in 2002.

The Economist in its Banyan editorial says: China no longer seems content with what it has. Of 14 sections of the border where agreement is elusive, one seems to matter very much: around Tawang in Arunachal Pradesh. It was there that the 1962 war started. It is also the site of an important Tibetan monastery… China now seems intent on incorporating Tawang, the birthplace of the sixth Dalai Lama, and, it argues, central to Tibetan Buddhism.

Perhaps a solution lies in furthering economic and cultural ties rather than trying to resolve the vexatious border issue. Trade and tourism can be promoted across borders as they exist.

C Raja Mohan writes in Redoing India-China Sums: Delhi can build on China’s Silk Road initiatives, which call for trilateral and quadrilateral transport and industrial corridors between western China on the one hand, and northern and eastern India on the other. Beijing has been pressing Delhi to cooperate in the development of the BCIM corridor (running through the Yunnan province of China, Myanmar, Bangladesh and India) in the east. It has also suggested a trans-Himalayan corridor between Tibet, Nepal and India. More recently, the Chinese ambassador to India, Le Yucheng, put out an intriguing idea — of extending the China-Pakistan economic corridor to India.

Perhaps this will help in improving relations not just with China but with another neighbour with whom India also shares a border and a vexed history: Pakistan.

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India and China meet once again to resolve their border dispute.
A man walks inside a conference room used for meetings between military commanders of China and India, at the Indian side of the Indo-China border at Bumla, in the northeastern Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh, November 11, 2009​ (Photo: Reuters)

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Topics:  India   China    Border dispute 

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