India-China dispute: Shadow of 60-year-old war at border flashpoint
- Published
Indian soldiers near Tawang in Arunachal Pradesh, an Indian state which China claims
The fighting began early on a bright autumn morning 60 years ago.
On 23 October 1962 Chinese solders entered and engaged in intense artillery fire in what was then a far-flung Himalayan region in north-eastern India called North-East Frontier Agency (NEFA), bordering China and Bhutan.
Today it is Arunachal Pradesh, an Indian state with more than a million people that China continues to claim as its territory, and where the latest flare-up between the two sides in more than a year took place.
"Explosions lit up the sky and echoed between the mountains," Indian army personnel told Bertil Lintner, a Swedish journalist and author of the China's India War: Collision Course on the Roof of the World.
Chinese soldiers overran an Indian position, killing 17 Indian soldiers and capturing 13 others. Facing little resistance from the surprised and ill-equipped Indian forces they forged ahead. Next day, they seized Tawang, a Buddhist monastery town nestling in a nearby valley.
The Chinese marched south. By mid-November, they had reached the town of Bomdila, a monastery-town near a hill and barely 250km (155 miles) away from Assam, home to India's thriving tea gardens, oil fields and jute plantations.
And then, on 21 November, the Chinese declared a ceasefire and swiftly withdrew to 20km north of the hazy, de-facto border between the two countries, known as the Line of Actual Control and delineated by maps made in British ruled-India.
"The war was over. Within a couple of weeks PLA soldiers were back on the Chinese-controlled part of the mountains," noted Mr Linter. Indians counted the loss of 1,383 soldiers and nearly 1,700 "missing in action". Chinese records put Indian casualties at nearly 4,900 dead and another 3,968 captured alive.
Manoj Joshi, an Indian defence analyst and author of a new book Understanding The India China Border, says it is unclear why the Chinese withdrew.
"Was it because their supply lines were extended? Were they afraid of US intervention? Or was it the fact that they were not too serious about their eastern (border) claims?" he said.
The contentious Sino-Indian border is divided into three areas: the western sector around Ladakh; the middle sector made up of the boundary between India's Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand states with Tibet; and the eastern sector consisting of the boundary at Arunachal Pradesh.
Experts say it is a really a "notional line" - Indians say it is 3,488km long; the Chinese say it is a little over 2,000km.
India claims the plateau of Aksai Chin, an area of the size of Switzerland that China controls in the western part of the border. China claims Arunachal Pradesh.
Indian soldiers with artillery guns near the de-facto border in Arunachal Pradesh
The eastern border - 1,126km long, according to India - and never recognised by China at Arunachal Pradesh is formed by the McMahon Line. It is named after a British man - Henry McMahon - who was the Indian foreign secretary in 1914.
Asia's two biggest countries - and nuclear-armed neighbours - have developed agreements to stop skirmishes in what is one of the longest-running border disputes in the world. The two sides have largely kept the peace, but have also routinely blamed each other for transgressions and incursions.
But China has not given up its claims on Arunachal Pradesh and still refers to most of the region as "South Tibet". Last year the Chinese ministry of civil affairs renamed several places in the disputed area, with state media saying that China's territorial claims had a "historical and administrative basis".
Some analysts say Beijing sees Arunachal Pradesh as playing a role in an eventual border deal with India that would see Delhi accepting Chinese sovereignty over Aksai Chin - the strategically-located ice desert rich in minerals which has been occupied since the 1950s - in return for Beijing accepting Indian sovereignty over Arunachal Pradesh.
But experts like Dr Tsering Topgyal of the University of Birmingham in the UK believe this is no longer the case.
"There may be a connection between the confidence of Chinese control over Tibet and the appeal of a swap between Arunachal Pradesh and Aksai Chin for Beijing. Now, I think China approaches the border dispute not just in terms of territorial gain or loss at the local level, but increasingly with wider national and foreign policy interests in mind," Dr Topgyal told me.
Previously ruled directly from Delhi, Arunachal Pradesh was made a state in 1987, much to China's chagrin. Over the years India also beefed up defences and infrastructure along the border and is building villages close to it.
Visits by Indian leaders to Arunachal Pradesh have annoyed Beijing. China formally protested when former PM Manmohan Singh visited the state in 2008 and announced a raft of roadbuilding projects. Beijing has also opposed loans by the Asian Development Bank (ADB) loan to the state and denied visas to Indian military officials and officers based in the area.
In 2014, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced a plan to build 2,000km of new roads and develop Arunachal Pradesh's remote and neglected areas.
"We are not doing anything to disturb relations. It's not in terms of challenging or competing with China, but in terms of securing our own territory," Kiren Rijiju, a federal minister who comes from the state, told Bloomberg then.
From China's point of view, it might make "strategic sense to keep the border dispute with India, alive, including the claim over Arunachal Pradesh, as a means to restrain India's ambitions and regulate its behaviour, for instance the growing ties with the US," according to Dr Tsering.
"Why is it that, of all the border disputes that China had with all its neighbours, only the India-China dispute is still open?" he says.
Yangtse, where the latest skirmish took place, is a sparsely populated place, barely 5km away from a village on the Chinese side, according to experts. It is among the dozen or so contested areas along the disputed border which have overlapping claims from both sides.
"The eastern border seems to be hotting up again," says Mr Joshi. "And it is really no surprise."
- Published14 December 2022
