So what exactly does the dust-up with China have to do with Pakistan’s relationship with India? In short, there are five reasons why this month’s Himalayan standoff increases the likelihood of a fresh India-Pakistan crisis.
While Russia recognises the complexity of China-India relations, it has made sure to adhere to the principle of multilateral cooperation. It is inclined to harmoniously develop its relations with both countries and avoid any imprudent moves. Russia could be a better intermediary than the US given its positive relations with India and China, but it has not done so…
Narendra Modi and Xi Jinping, like other contemporaries Donald Trump, Viktor Orban, Boris Johnson, etc., are leaders with a nationalistic bent. They view their respective countries as embodiments of either Han Chinese or Hindu civilization, where the center of the world revolves around their nations in the sense that they see them as the center of history.
India’s ability to project power abroad, protect its homeland, and assemble and sustain meaningful partnerships depends on the capacity of India’s political leaders to quickly and competently get its economy back on track. The foreign policy crisis consuming the government of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in the wake of the border clash—as real and raw as it might be—cannot be resolved unless India first fixes its economic emergency.
Also Read: For India, Economic Growth Is No Substitute For Grand Strategy
The border dispute is a reflection of a deeper problem: the underlying, deep-rooted mistrust and hostility between China and India, each feeling insecure about the other nation’s growing economic and military power. The two countries, with a combined population of more than 2.8 billion people, both have nuclear weapons, strong nationalist leaders, and growing nationalist voices that demand “tough” actions and counter actions.
The problem in 1962 also began with Indian troops trying to improve their positions in the disputed territories: the so-called Forward Policy. Mao Zedong’s government decided to drive the Indian Army out of all the land under dispute, and then, after the Indians had been “taught a lesson,” to declare a unilateral ceasefire and pull all China’s troops back to their original positions. It was a major military operation, with 700 Chinese and over 3,000 Indian soldiers killed or missing. But Mao predicted that it “will guarantee at least 30 years of peace” along the frontier, and that’s just what it did.
With a still-raging pandemic, a looming economic catastrophe, and tense worldwide protests over racism and police violence, about the last thing the world needs right now is a land war between its two largest countries—which have about 430 nuclear warheads between them.
Three Indian army personnel, including a commanding officer, have been killed in a “violent face-off” with Chinese soldiers in the Himalayan region of Ladakh, an Indian army spokesman has said. The Chinese military also suffered casualties in the clash, the editor-in-chief of China’s Global Times newspaper said on Tuesday. It was the first such confrontation between the two Asian giants since 1975 in which soldiers have died.
The Sino-Indian boundary dispute is a geopolitical conundrum that has been almost two hundred years in the making. In that span of time, the region defined by the Line of Actual Control (LAC) and its twin, the Line of Control (L0C) with Pakistan has flared up as a global political issue each time there has been a paradigmatic shift in the global world order.
