There is a reality of a power differential, and these negotiations have been hard: Jabin T. Jacob

Jacob, where do India and China stand as far as the Line of Actual Control is concerned now?

Essentially, there appears to be some forward movement in terms of the disengagement process. Both the Foreign Secretary and more explicitly the Foreign Minister have said that the disengagement process has been completed. The five points where friction erupted in 2020 which were new locations of friction were resolved largely in 2022. But we’ve had these outstanding issues at Depsang and Demchok for a while now.

When the Indian Foreign Secretary made his initial remarks on the eve of the Kazan summit (BRICS summit) announcing that a new patrolling agreement had been made, he didn’t answer specific questions about it. This led observers to wonder where exactly the disengagement or new patrolling agreement was actually about. We all assumed it was about the buffer zones created at these five friction points—Galwan, Pangong, Gogra-Hot Springs, and so on.

Subsequently, just before the Prime Minister’s arrival in Kazan, Russia, the Foreign Secretary clarified—though not explicitly mentioning Depsang and Demchok—that yes, the agreement pertains to these areas. Frankly, we’ve only been depending on news media sources about Depsang and Demchok.

Our current understanding is that Indian patrols that were blocked from going to their patrolling points in Depsang and Demchok will now be allowed to do so. But before patrolling resumes, the temporary and permanent structures built by the Chinese in those areas will have to be removed. The army has been very careful in saying that there is no timeline for this. While October 29 is the provisional deadline, given the altitude and terrain, we can’t really expect to stick to a deadline. To assess whether this new patrolling agreement or return to the pre-2020 status quo has been operationalised, we will have to wait several months until next summer.

What is your sense of why India is so diffident? The Chinese do what they do, and for someone sitting in New Delhi, it’s pretty difficult to understand their statements. But why this diffidence on the part of the Government of India from even directly naming these friction areas?

I think it’s a matter of expectations. There is a reality of a power differential, and these negotiations have been hard. One of the sticking points has always been about disengagement, de-escalation, and de-induction. The problem is that on a like-for-like basis, it’s not possible because it just takes us longer to re-induct our troops in this terrain.

You can never tell where the Chinese will go in terms of these negotiations. I suppose the government, having been burnt now at least a couple of times since Doklam and the informal summits, doesn’t want to create or raise expectations about what this disengagement is about. There is still a very high degree of mistrust. The Army Chief was on record, in fact, the same day that the Foreign Secretary announced the Patrolling Agreement, expressing concern that even in the buffer zones, Chinese patrols shouldn’t be creeping back in. So a generous explanation would be that the idea is to keep expectations low and to avoid receiving flak if something were to go south.

What’s your sense about the deployment of many more troops than normal over the last few years? Do you think this agreement could actually lead to withdrawal? As you mentioned, there is a lot of distrust that was openly stated by the Army Chief as well.

No, I don’t think so. This is only, in the Foreign Ministry’s words, a disengagement process. De-escalation and de-induction, as the Foreign Secretary pointed out at Kazan, are steps for the future that will be taken “at an appropriate time”. So that’s not happening yet. We still have to first and foremost operationalise these patrolling arrangements in Depsang and Demchok. The next step would be to operationalise patrolling arrangements or the removal of the buffer zones in the other five friction points.

What is interesting is that the talks are now no longer limited only to the western sector. We’ve had news reports saying that areas in Arunachal Pradesh are also being discussed. At least one report says clearly that at Yangtse in Arunachal Pradesh, Chinese troops are once again going to be allowed to patrol as before. So it’s become a much wider issue, and I suppose that’s another reason why the government is exercising caution. Though, to return to your question about diffidence – caution is fine, but I think information exchange and transparency are also very important in a system like ours because then you also preempt or prevent mistakes from happening due to lack of information or proper analysis.

What’s your sense of the change in relations? From the 2000s, we had reasonably good developing relations with the Chinese under Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Manmohan Singh. We had an entire series of agreements and confidence-building measures. Indian diplomats used to take great pride in saying there hadn’t been a single death along the disputed frontier between India and China. What do you think changed when we had this incident in June 2020? Is there a change in the larger strategic considerations that China has towards India, or is it something that the Indians did? Some theories suggest that the August 2019 change in Jammu and Kashmir and the creation of this new union territory and publishing of new maps really bothered the Chinese.

There’s a lot to unpack there. Let me start with the so-called change in status quo that the Chinese keep referring to in J&K. I recently met a Chinese scholar who said they refuse to use the word “Ladakh”—that conveys that this is a political approach the Chinese are taking. Materially, the dilution of Article 370 did not make any change on the ground on the LAC. Therefore, this is just another way the Chinese use to interfere in India’s internal affairs.

In terms of why the Chinese have changed—this is a kind of chicken and egg question. The Chinese have a starting point, we have a different starting point. Objectively speaking, the starting point for all of these tensions comes from the Chinese reordering or review of the world following the global financial crisis. They finally seemed to think that Western democracies and Western capitalism essentially had feet of clay—that the West wasn’t as strong or growing in a linear path as they expected. So they decided this was their moment, their time, and therefore, they needed to make the necessary changes on the ground.

That worldview extends to India. When India is also improving its ties with the West, this becomes a matter of concern for the Chinese because their one big black-and-white framework is that the Communist Party of China is in an existential conflict with the Americans and Western-style democracy. From that simple black-and-white perspective, India is part of this Western-led coalition.

Plus, of course, there’s the power differential. The Chinese economy has grown leaps and bounds, and the gap between India and China has actually grown in this period. So the Chinese seem to have decided they can afford to do what they do with the Indians, and our responses have been poor. By the way, it’s not just 2020—the signals began appearing in 2013 onwards, at least from the first Depsang crisis, and then we’ve had a series of events since then: Chumar, Doklam, all of this. The Chinese very clearly started targeting India post-Doklam because our response to Doklam in a third country was a particular surprise for them.

Do you think it has something to do with the new Chinese leadership as well? President Xi Jinping’s approach seems different from his predecessor’s. Is it an issue of leadership, or is it that the Chinese are prepared to be more assertive internationally because they feel they’re big enough and powerful enough?

It’s a bit of both. There is a structural reason—it’s incorrect to say that Xi Jinping is responsible for everything. Xi Jinping has been enabled by what his predecessors have done. If you look at 2005, we signed the Agreement on Political Parameters and Guiding Principles. But almost immediately after, the Chinese began trying to walk back from the clause on settled populations in the Agreement. This predates Xi Jinping. Take the South China Sea – the Chinese have been attempting to capture or militarise it well before Xi Jinping came to power.

But there’s also the leadership aspect. Xi Jinping has been particularly conscious and vocal about anti-corruption, about regaining the strength or centrality of the Communist Party in Chinese political life and discourse. He’s been insistent that the PLA convert itself into a combat-ready army. He’s also used language such as calling this “sacred territory” specifically with respect to the LAC or the disputed areas with India. So there’s a change of language and emphasis which has followed a change in power and economic capacity in China. In many ways, this is a natural progression given the nature of the regime in Communist China.

Since you mentioned military men knowing about business and business persons knowing about strategic issues—what is your sense about the Special Representatives mechanism? Has it now outlived its utility?

Given the weight of the Special Representatives in their respective political systems, and because the top leaders can’t be talking to each other always, we need a mechanism where multiple issues can be raised. In a way, it’s a misnomer to call them special representatives on the boundary dispute—they’re special representatives on general India-China issues.

But then the question arises whether the Special Representative, at least on the Indian side, is adequately supported in terms of inputs on the economy, security, and other aspects of the relationship, including China’s global presence. If you’re going to have a discussion with the Chinese, we cannot ignore what they’re doing not just in South Asia but globally. We have to have a holistic approach.

We have to ask questions about whether the National Security Advisory Board, for example, does an adequate job or is allowed to do an adequate job. Because we are at a standstill on the boundary dispute, other issues will naturally creep in. But that might not necessarily be a bad thing. The question is about support—it cannot be that the same people are doing everything. They need a proper secretariat. We do have a National Security Council Secretariat and so on, but crises like these with the Chinese are always useful to re-examine our systems and ask what we can do better, what strategic communications within the system, within the government are required.

India is active globally, particularly with the Quad, while also participating in BRICS and SCO where China has significant influence. How do these global dynamics, including India’s relationships with the US and Russia, affect India-China bilateral relations?

Global and regional factors inevitably impact bilateral ties. China faces multiple pressures right now—their economy is struggling, they have pressure from the US in the east, the Taiwan situation, and unexpected Western resentment over their support of Russia in the Ukraine conflict. These challenges help Xi Jinping’s regime create a sharper “us versus them” division with the West, but they also limit China’s room for manoeuvre on the global stage.

As for India, with our involvement in both Quad and BRICS, we’re like the Chinese saying about “crossing the river by feeling the stones”. But sometimes I wonder if we’re just stuck mid-river, feeling the stones without moving forward. We have commitment issues stemming from a lack of clarity and analytical capability. We can say we’re friends with the US and Vietnam, but what’s our real understanding of American politics or Vietnamese economic and security issues? Without deeper expertise, we can’t effectively engage on the global stage.

The core issue isn’t just about maintaining various international partnerships—it’s about developing the capacity to make these partnerships meaningful and productive. We need to build our analytical capabilities to better understand and engage with these complex global relationships.

Looking ahead 20 years—how do you see India-China relations progressing?

The same factors that have driven changes over the past 20 years are likely to apply—structural factors, global politics, and internal economic capacity. The Chinese economy is going to see some kind of marked shift sometime in the next 10-15 years, given demographic change and economic issues. If India continues at least at whatever rate of growth we have on paper, and if we are able to manage to educate, train, and ensure a healthy young population, then even if the gap remains—some projections say we’ll only reach the Chinese level by 2050—we are in a good position to manage our problems and rise on the global stage.

The power differential might narrow, the way China thinks about us will change, and that will create opportunities and at least prevent conflict from breaking out. But there are a lot of ifs there. A 20-year cycle requires us to do much more. It’s less about foreign policy and the external environment as much as it is about our internal balancing and tackling our internal challenges.

One thing you learn from the Chinese is that all their foreign policy and security policies are based on very strong domestic drivers and fundamentals. I sometimes find that relationship harder to find in India because we tend to separate these into silos and seem to think we can somehow leapfrog our neighbourhood in becoming a global power. It has to be internal, neighbourhood—the mandala theory basically—go out from inside to the outside in order to achieve our goals. And that will affect how we engage with China as well.