By Dhruva Jaishankar
This column was originally published in Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy’s “China-India Brief #179”.
There is a lot that is still not publicly known about what transpired along the disputed India-China border in eastern Ladakh over the past 18 months. What is clear is that the crisis led to the worst violence between forces of the world’s two most populous countries since 1967. The future implications are also far from certain. Perceptions about recent developments vary, not just between India and China, but also within both countries. Unfortunately, this suggests that differences between India and China are likely to remain, contributing further to what had already become a more competitive relationship.
The boundary between India and China has been unsettled since 1950, when the People’s Republic of China annexed Tibet. The western sector in Ladakh was always the least-clearly demarcated portion due to the complex geography and insufficient cartography inherited from the time of the British Raj and the Qing Empire. Even after their 1962 border war, India and China held different perceptions of the Line of Actual Control (LAC), with significant areas over which their competing claims overlapped. Following a series of agreements beginning in the early 1990s, the countries effectively allowed for overlapping patrols in some of these areas while normalizing their relationship along other facets. But the prerequisite for these arrangements was that certain protocols would be adhered to by both sides that limited the use of deadly force and did not alter the territorial status quo.
Read the full article here.
Dhruva Jaishankar is Executive Director, Observer Research Foundation America.