Kashmir: Three is a Crowd

By Shashank Joshi

Mention Kashmir, and the two states that come naturally to mind are India and Pakistan. But for nearly a half-century, this territorial wrangle has been a threesome. The interloper is China, which recently shocked India by refusing a visa for a senior Indian general as part of a military exchange, saying his responsibilities included the restive Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir. But behind this apparently trivial dispute are much bigger geopolitical issues for China, India and the United States.

China is no latecomer to the Kashmir party. It captured huge tracts of the uninhabited Aksai Chin, at the northwest of the Tibetan plateau, during the 1962 war with India. A second humiliation for Delhi came a year later, when Pakistan ceded to China the Trans-Karakoram Tract, just over two thousand square miles of territory along the Shaksgam River. India claims both of these as part of Jammu and Kashmir, which has once more erupted in a familiar cycle of sporadic protests and bloody crackdowns.

In total, China and India dispute territory amounting to more than three and a half times the size of Taiwan. The other major disputed section lies in the east, where China claims the entire Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh, which it calls South Tibet.

The Sino-Indian relationship has been thawing for thirty years. The two countries resumed diplomatic relations in 1976, and began cautious talks in the 1980s. In 1988, India's then-Prime Minister, Rajiv Gandhi, made a landmark visit to Beijing, after which a Joint Working Group was established to find a potential settlement. Following a couple of confidence building measures in 1993 and 1996, the major breakthrough was a 2005 joint declaration during a visit to India by the Premier of the State Council, Wen Jiabao in which the two sides at least promised to map out the line of actual control.

Not ready for concessions

The dispute is at an impasse. China will not cede Aksai Chin, which hosts China National Highway 219 connecting Xinjiang to Tibet, both troubled and supposedly 'autonomous' regions which suffered riots in 2009 and 2008 respectively.

For India, control of Arunachal Pradesh ensures the safety of the plains to the south, as unlikely as a repeat invasion may be. Giving up even a part of the state would produce an even greater latent military advantage than at present by placing Chinese advanced positions forward of the toughest terrain.

A swap of claims - China's in the west for India's in the east; in other words, acceptance of the status quo - was proposed by China in the 1950s and again in the early 1980s. This is the most plausible outcome, though public opinion in India is certainly unready for the concessions. A 1962 parliamentary resolution commits the government to recovering every inch of claimed soil.

More importantly, the dispute flickered back to life from 2006, when the Chinese ambassador to India insisted that 'the whole of what you call the state of Arunachal Pradesh is Chinese territory and the key town of Tawang is only one place in it and we are claiming all of that'. Tawang is of great importance to Tibetan Buddhism; it is where the Dalai Lama crossed into India after his flight sixty years ago. The ambassador's statement could be an opening negotiating position, although it seems to violate earlier understandings that settled areas would not be uprooted.

The Indian media - often with wild hyperbole - documented rising border incursions by Chinese patrols, and last year the dispute shifted up a gear. China tried to block a $2.9 billion loan to India from the Asian Development Bank, partly destined for Arunachal Pradesh, and complained vehemently about Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's election campaigning there. Despite the best efforts of Delhi to insist that all was well, the change in rhetoric and posturing was unmistakeable.

Hostile and ominous

India accelerated plans to upgrade its Sino-centric infrastructure including landing strips, and said it would deploy two mountain divisions and a squadron of fighters to the northeast.

Meanwhile, China consolidated its influence around India's periphery, in states such as Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh and Burma or Myanmar, in ways that many in Delhi thought hostile and ominous.

Strangely, China's Kashmir policy has acquired more and more balance over the decades, from favouring Pakistan in the 1965 war to relative neutrality in the 1999 Kargil war. China remains Pakistan's single most important ally but, petrified of encouraging separatism in its own unstable periphery, and increasingly wary of Islamic extremism in its west, China has refrained from writing Islamabad a blank cheque or, even worse, setting unwelcome precedents around 'self-determination'.

The visa refusal was therefore a strange move. Generals in charge of the same and more sensitive areas have been granted visas before, and no notable Indian provocation seems to have preceded the Chinese shift; though the Chinese Consul General in Kolkata had been prevented from delivering a speech in Manipur, a state wracked by multiple insurgencies.

For nearly a year, China has been refusing to issue ordinary visas to residents of Jammu and Kashmir. One explanation is that, since India and the United States agreed a civil-nuclear cooperation agreement in 2005, which came to fruition only last month, China has tried to deter India from entering into any hostile balancing coalition with Washington.

Many Indians see Beijing's behaviour in even more general terms, interpreting the package of Chinese actions in Kashmir, the northeast, and the Indian Ocean as part of a calibrated containment of a rising India.

The situation is likely to be more complicated. Much of China's diplomacy is focused on ensuring its future energy security; this is central to its activities in Pakistan and Burma, for instance. The People's Liberation Army's furious pace of modernisation is mainly directed at frustrating an American defense of Taiwan. Yet both its diplomacy and modernisation cannot but reduce India's security, and Beijing must be aware of the hostile signals it has been sending over the past five years.

More importantly, it is the border dispute that remains the open sore. India will never recover its lost territories, and although the government has worked hard to play down disagreements, it has done nothing to prepare public opinion for the inevitable mutual concessions in any territorial settlement.

One more grievance

China, whose grand strategy depends on reassuring Southeast Asian states of the peaceful nature of its rise, does its image no favours by renewing claims that had been put aside for decades. It is a fact that Kashmir is disputed, and that China is a party to that dispute. But in broadcasting this, China sends a signal which bucks the conciliatory and cautious trend.

In denying the General a visa, it has added one more grievance and, ironically enough, prevented the sort of military-to-military contacts that are the best guard against misunderstandings becoming crises.

Most worryingly, these pointless gestures simply inflame Indian public opinion and lend unfortunate credence to the view that China would prefer to keep its rising neighbour off-balance than vindicate those who favour engagement.

China, far wealthier and better armed than India, can afford to arm the hardliners, but whether this is a wise and far-sighted policy is another matter entirely.

via The World Today, Volume 66, Number 10