The Sino-Indian Border Dispute

Among a host of rivalries in the post–World War II era, the Sino-Indian rivalry remains one of the most enduring. As is well known, it resulted in a sharp, short, and brutal war in October 1962 when a battle-hardened People's Liberation Army mostly routed woefully underprepared and hopelessly ill-equipped Indian forces for conflict in high-altitude areas. From India's standpoint it lost thirty-six thousand square kilometers of territory in the war. Over the past several years the People's Republic of China (PRC) has also formally laid claim to another ninety thousand square miles of territory, essentially the present Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh.Despite multiple rounds of border talks, at various levels, starting in 1981, the territorial dispute is no closer to a resolution. Worse still, notwithstanding the existence of a range of confidence-building measures agreed upon in 1993 and 1996, Chinese and Indian forces clashed in the Galwan Valley in Ladakh in the spring of 2020, resulting in casualties on both sides. This was the first such incident that involved a loss of life since another conflagration in 1975. The precise precipitants of this skirmish remain contested.There is no paucity of work on the Sino-Indian War of 1962 and on the border dispute. However, much of it involves personal accounts or is based upon sources in the public domain. One of the rare accounts to actually draw on the classified operational analysis of the Indian military debacle, the Bhagat-Brooks report, is Australian journalist Neville Maxwell's India's China War. Maxwell's book, however, is widely believed to be a blatantly pro-Chinese discussion of the origins of the 1962 war.The two books discussed here, the first of which is based upon the substantial use of American, British, and other archives, make a significant contribution to the long-term origins of the Sino-Indian rivalry as well as its recrudescence in the recent past. The first book, Nirupama Rao's The Fractured Himalaya, is the contribution of a noted Indian diplomat who had dealt extensively with the PRC in her career and retired as the apex official in India's Ministry of External Affairs. A sprawling, complex, and exceedingly well-researched work, the book is a remarkably fair-minded account of the sources of the rivalry that culminated in the 1962 border war.Unlike a number of China scholars who have fecklessly argued that the Sino-Indian rivalry is mostly one-sided, Rao demonstrates in considerable detail that the PRC has actually viewed India as a rival since the early 1950s. In substantial part, she shows that much of this rivalry stemmed from two sources: first, from the selective Chinese historical memories of the deployment of Indian troops in China under the British in the nineteenth century; second, and more important, from the contested status of Tibet after the Chinese takeover of the country in 1950.Rao's discussion of the latter issue is nothing short of masterful. She carefully traces the convoluted trilateral diplomatic maneuvers that ensued following the Chinese invasion; the callousness of the great powers when it came to the plight of Tibet; and the tangled bureaucratic politics that shaped India's timorous and, ultimately, deeply flawed response to the Chinese invasion and occupation. In this context, it is most refreshing to see that she shares some misgivings about Nehru's diplomacy during this period with the Indian archivist and amateur historian Avatar Singh Bhasin. Nehru, convinced that he could appease the PRC leadership and concerned about India's limited military capabilities, made significant concessions to the Chinese without obtaining any recompense.Rao's sweeping account, based on a combination of personal knowledge and deft research, highlights the choices and decisions that led to the military debacle of 1962. Among other matters, she carefully outlines that the border dispute, in large measure, stemmed from two fundamentally different conceptions of boundaries and borders. For Nehru, she argues in keeping with the prior work of American scholar Steven Hoffman, India's borders were historic. From his perspective, the country's frontiers, she argues, could be traced to tradition, geography, custom, and usage. For the PRC, however, borders stemmed from strategic imperatives. For its postrevolutionary leadership, firming up defensible borders was critical. These two conceptions of border demarcation were basically irreconcilable. Consequently, she argues that when the Chinese premier Zhou Enlai visited New Delhi in 1960 a modus vivendi proved to be impossible.Despite all the obvious strengths of this massive volume, it could have used the services of an adroit editor. Parts of the discussion are needlessly turgid, the book follows a mostly predictable chronology, and on occasion some matters appear repetitive. That being said, since this work is not the product of a professional historian these lapses do not detract from the sheer substantive contribution that it makes in terms of illuminating the historical record.The other book, Manoj Joshi's Understanding the India-China Border, is more directly focused on recent developments in the Sino-Indian rivalry. Joshi, who was initially a journalist and lately has been an analyst at a prominent think tank in New Delhi, has a supple grasp of his subject. He briefly covers some of the same material about the origins of the border dispute. However, his principal focus is on recent developments in Sino-Indian relations.Joshi's work, like that of Rao, is also quite thoroughly researched. To that end, he has made extensive and deft use of sources in the public domain. However, he has also drawn on official documents that have been declassified as well as a range of prior scholarly analyses. To his credit, unlike various Indian nationalist commentators, he does not attribute the recent breakdown in bilateral relations to Chinese perfidy.Instead, he proffers a far more nuanced argument. Pared to the bone, his argument contends that, after decades of successful bilateral management of the troubled relationship, matters deteriorated in the last decade or so owing to a number of compelling reasons. Most importantly, the relationship, owing to the PRC's rapid economic growth, became increasingly asymmetric. Yet, India's leaders were unwilling to quietly accept the strategic implications of this asymmetry. Instead, they made concerted efforts to bolster the country's own capabilities along the disputed border with an emphasis on the development of infrastructure. Furthermore, when the People's Liberation Army made small incursions and embarked upon roadbuilding activities in the Doklam plateau in the neighboring state of Bhutan in 2017, India mounted a vigorous military response—coming to Bhutan's aid. Both of these bold choices on New Delhi's part not only surprised but piqued Beijing. It was in the wake of these two developments that the People's Liberation Army adopted a far more aggressive posture along the disputed Himalayan border. It then embarked upon what scholars of international relations refer to as “limited probes”—small, reversible actions designed to test the alertness and capabilities of the adversary in disputed areas. These eventually culminated in the hostilities of 2020.Sino-Indian relations are unlikely to see any breakthrough, certainly in the foreseeable future. At best, given ongoing diplomatic efforts to alleviate tensions, the two parties may be able to return to a state of a managed rivalry. These two books, in concert, provide ample evidence of the intractability of this dispute and, concomitantly, the very limited prospects of conflict resolution

Colonial History and Postcolonial Studies · History · Indian and Buddhist Studies · South Asian Studies and Conflicts