Last week’s agreement between the Indian armed forces and the People’s Liberation Army on disengagement from the Gogra-Hot Springs area has not come a day too soon. This area is the last of the friction points created by deliberate Chinese aggression in the Ladakh sector of the Indo-Tibetan border in the summer of 2020. Since then sustained talks at the military level has seen the two armies step back a bit from the face-off points. PLA’s surprise incursions in April 2020 across the Line of Actual Control in Ladakh were in violation of a range of bilateral agreements negotiated by Delhi and Beijing over the last three decades to stabilise the disputed frontier. This shattered Delhi’s political trust in China that was already weakened by the earlier military crises in the high Himalayas during 2013, 2014, and 2017. To make matters worse, the Galwan clashes between the two sides mid-June 2020 saw blood shedding for the first time on the China frontier in nearly five decades. Since then the bilateral relationship has been in a deep chill.
The completion of disengagement has raised hopes for renewing high level political dialogue between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the Chinese leader Xi Jinping on the margins of a regional summit in Samarkand, Uzbekistan this week. Delhi would like to see the disengagement followed by de-escalation of the military confrontation by pulling the troops on both sides to their peace time locations. Delhi would also want the resolution of two other points of confrontation in Ladakh — in the Depsang plains in the north and the Demochok valley in the south — that preceded the 2020 crisis. Meanwhile, China is ramping up its military and logistical modernisation in Tibet and building new settlements right on the edge of the border. Put simply, India’s challenges on the border are daunting, amidst the growing military power gap with China; there is no easy return to the border that was once peaceful. Yet, PM Modi should be open for a political engagement with Xi in Samarkand and lay out clearly India’s terms for the normalisation of bilateral relations.
