Third round at Aksai Chin table

At stake is the contested 4060 km-long border, that stretches from Ladakh in Kashmir in the north, bordering the Xinjiang and Tibetan provinces of China — about 38,000 sq km called the Western Sector — down to the Middle Sector that comprises parts of Himachal Pradesh, Uttaranchal and Uttar Pradesh, and ending in the southern slope or the Eastern Sector that comprises Arunachal Pradesh, including the large swathe of territory that is Tawang.

The problem is that the Chinese have full control over the Aksai Chin region that largely constitutes the Western sector, including the 5180 sq km of territory that Pakistan illegally ceded to China west of the Karakoram in 1963 — territory that India claims belongs to itself. While on the Eastern sector, China refuses to recognise the McMahon Line and claims all 90,000 sq km that comprises Arunachal Pradesh.

That’s the raw nerve: India believes that after the Panchsheel Agreement of 1954 — and especially when India recognised that ‘‘Tibet was a part of China’’ — it was perfectly reasonable to draw up border maps with China, which placed the boundary along the northern edge of Aksai Chin. In the early Fifties, Beijing began to build a road across Aksai Chin so as to gain better access, as well as control, over both Xinjiang and Tibet. It was only in 1951 that PLA had established full control over Lhasa, forcing the then boy Dalai Lama to sign a 17-point agreement with China.

In the warm afterglow of Independence though, Nehru and his diplomats thought differently. By 1953 the erstwhile Prime Minister had already rejected the 1899 line drawn by the British, which had placed India’s boundary with China along the northern edge of the Karakoram range — as a result of which most of Aksai Chin was outside India.

The Eastern sector, on the other hand, is a completely different story. Intimately connected to the defence of India’s north-east, Indian security planners conceive of this region as a ‘‘defensive buffer’’ that will absorb the early impact of another possible PLA offensive in this area. Until Deng Xiaoping came to power in 1979, China’s covert support to the insurgencies that kept the North-East at boiling point, was a source of great irritation for Delhi. However, Beijing voluntarily withdrew to its positions behind the line from the territories it had occupied during the 1962 war, after calling for a unilateral ceasefire.

On the ground, as Mishra and Dai meet in New Delhi, China remains in effective control of Aksai Chin, while India does so in North-East. The Special Representatives have been ordered by their governments to impart ‘‘political direction’’ to the talks, leading analysts to believe that once again, for the third time in forty years, an ‘‘East-West’’ swap of territory is in the offing.

The first time China proposed such a swap was in April 1960, when after talks in Delhi with Nehru, Chinese premier Zhou en-Lai proposed a ‘‘reciprocal acceptance of realities in both sectors.’’ After the talks, Zhou told journalists that regarding Aksai Chin, ‘‘there exists a relatively bigger dispute.’’ Many took that to imply that Beijing ‘‘did not dispute’’ China’s claim in the east. Twenty years later, Deng was reviving the proposal. Speaking to an Indian journalist, Deng explicitly suggested resolution of the border dispute via a ‘‘package deal.’’ China would recognise the McMahon Line in the east, said Deng, while India would recognise the ‘‘status quo’’ in the Western sector.

According to the Indian side, two other attempts have also been made — but both shortchanged by the intervention of history. The first by Prime Minister Vajpayee, in his earlier incarnation as Foreign minister in 1979, when he visited Beijing. At the time, Indian diplomats say, Vajpayee told then Vice-Premier Deng that the time had come to put away the bitterness of history. Deng responded positively. A few days later, however, even as Vajpayee was taking the air in Hangzhou, China invaded Vietnam. New Delhi was insulted that Beijing had not even thought it polite for an Indian leader to leave its shores before insulting a friend.

The second time around was in December 1988 when Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi undertook a visit to China. Diplomats associated with the visit say that the Foreign Office prepared for the visit ‘‘with painstaking precision, like a military campaign. At the end of the visit, a joint statement said India and China would resolve the boundary in a ‘‘fair, reasonable and mutually acceptable’’ manner.

Analysts say that India’s basic problem since Nehru in rejecting the swap deals has been the following, that P V Narasimha Rao as Foreign minister in 1980 put it succinctly: ‘‘The Government of India has never accepted the premise on which it is based, namely, that the Chinese side is making a concession in the eastern sector by giving up territory which they allege is illegally incorporated into India…’’ Having been deeply aggrieved at the ‘‘seizure’’ of Aksai Chin by China, how could New Delhi be expected to conduct a swap for territory in the Eastern sector it already controlled?

There had been strong criticism of Nehru’s meeting with Zhou in 1960. As he told an official meeting at the time: ‘‘If I give them (Aksai Chin), I will no longer be Prime Minister of India. I will not do it.’’

For the third time, then, India and China are back in the ring, circling each other. Mishra was India’s charge d’affaires in Beijing in 1980, when at the famous May Day parade at Tiananmen square, Mao stopped in front of him, smiled, and said he hoped India and China would soon get back to business. Dai, while having travelled the world in recent weeks as China’s interlocutor on the North Korea question, has been in India before as a member of the Communist party delegation.