New York- The incremental incursions across the LAC and subsequent calls for talks suggest a long-term strategy by China with no clear endgame, according to a report in Newsweek.
“The long-running border dispute between India and China is partly informed by China’s anxiety about political instability in Xinjiang and Tibet where Beijing has spent over a decade systemically cracking down on religious freedoms and sentiments of self-determination,” the report added.
The repression has worsened with technological advancement which gives access to facial recognition software, vast databases of biometric data and enables widespread surveillance.
Galwan Valley and Pangong Lake in the west of the LAC, have hosted flashpoints in recent years. In the east in Tawang, the site of the latest stand-off, there are discussions about Buddhist holy sites whose control can have implications for China’s authority over Tibet and its next spiritual leader.
Vijay Gokhale, India’s former foreign secretary in a recent paper, argued that Beijing’s policy throughout the Cold War was to detach India from other great powers, first the United States, then the Soviet Union.
“It’s now once again seeking to reduce risk to its security by keeping India nonaligned and to reduce India’s threat to its periphery,” Vijay Gokhale wrote in the report for Carnegie India, the New Delhi-based center of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace think tank, Newsweek reported.
Sana Hashmi, a postdoctoral fellow at the Taiwan-Asia Exchange Foundation think tank in Taipei said: “China used to think that India was the only country in the South Asian region that could contain China, so it presented a two-front threat to India.”
“China has gone for boundary dispute resolutions with countries that were less friendly than India. But with India, it’s in its interest to keep the dispute alive,” Sana Hashmi told Newsweek.
According to Sana Hashmi, resolving the poorly demarcated border was “a matter of intent”. “I think this is one realization that has changed India’s policy. Now India is definitely sure of the fact that China doesn’t want to resolve the dispute,” she said.
Recently, India and China held the 17th Round of Corps Commander Level Meeting at the Chushul-Moldo border meeting point on the Chinese side on December 20 and agreed to maintain security and stability on the ground in the Western Sector.
“In the interim, the two sides agreed to maintain the security and stability on the ground in the Western Sector,” the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) said in a statement.
The MEA statement said the two sides agreed to stay in close contact, and maintain dialogue through military and diplomatic channels and work out a mutually acceptable resolution of the remaining issues at the earliest.
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