LAC patrolling may be back to pre-2020 level, but India-China ties are headed to new normal

After an understanding was reached between India and China at the highest level, the two militaries have broadly disengaged in the Depsang and Demchok regions of eastern Ladakh and coordinated patrolling is now expected to start soon.

As patrolling is reinstated to the pre-2020 level, is the bilateral relationship also reverting to the pre-2020 period?

Until 2020, the Narendra Modi government invested heavily in managing the relationship with China. India respected Chinese red lines on Taiwan and Tibet and Modi held two much-publicised summits with Chinese President Xi Jinping. There was little reciprocity from China.

In 2017, China triggered a monthslong stand-off at Doklam at the India-China-Bhutan trijunction and opened a territorial dispute in Sikkim that was settled for decades. But India’s broader approach remained the same till 2020 when China mounted coordinated incursions across the Line of Actual Control (LAC) and triggered multiple clashes — the worst being at Galwan Valley in June 2020 in which 20 Indian soldiers were killed.

The Chinese aggression in 2020 at the LAC deeply affected India’s perception of the border dispute and the bilateral relationship. While China insisted on separating the border conflict from the broader bilateral relationship, India stressed that peace and tranquillity at the border were the basis of the broader bilateral relationship and it could not be business as usual with aggression at the border.

In addition to responding to the incursions and attacks with fury unprecedented in decades by inducting several thousands of soldiers and war-waging equipment, such as tanks, armoured vehicles, and warplanes in Ladakh, the Modi government systemically reworked the relationship with China.

India restricted investments from China, doubled down on boosting manufacturing under the production-linked incentive (PLI) schemes, mounted a renewed self-reliance initiative, stepped up diplomatic and military alignment with the United States and West to counter rising Chinese expansionism and muscle-flexing in the Indo-Pacific, and beefed up engagement with the ‘Global South’ to counter China’s outreach to developing nations that serve its hegemonic designs and ongoing efforts to turn developing nations into anti-West bloc at the beck and call of China.

As such a fundamental realignment cannot be undone, there is no reverting to the pre-2020 status, says Anushka Saxena, a China researcher at the Takshashila Institution.

“India and China have structural faultlines that a border agreement cannot resolve. India will not give up enhancing the partnership with the United States or the relevance of Quad in the Indo-Pacific. India is not going to relax its stance easily on investment and trade, so the securitisation of economics is not going anywhere. We must not expect that business and foreign direct investment (FDI) sentiment will be eased soon after relative normalisation on boundary issues,” says Saxena.

What was behind China’s aggression in 2020?

In 1962 and 2020, China gave India the worst blows after periods of publicised outreach and without a stated reason.

In the 1950s, there was the ‘Hindi-Chini Bhai Bhai (Indians and Chinese are brothers)’ bonhomie and this time there were summits in Wuhan and Chennai.

Scholars have linked the aggression at the LAC to broader Chinese aggression in the cover of the Covid-19 pandemic, including subjugating Hong Kong, intensifying coercive actions around Taiwan, increasing activity in the Indo-Pacific, and ramping up the subversive campaign against the West.

In his book ‘Smokeless War: China’s Quest for Geopolitical Dominance’, Manoj Kewalramani noted that China was “being opportunistic amid a global crisis to exploit and coerce others while furthering its strategic objectives”.

While 2020 indeed marked the ramping up of globalised aggression by China, there were surely India-specific reasons as well. Even as India had engaged and accommodated China consistently over the years, China never lost sight of the fact that India’s ties with the United States were on a constant upward swing and India was slowly and steadily building capacities from defence modernisation to border infrastructure.

For China, which has never treated India as an equal, such behaviour was “inexplicable”, notes Manoj Joshi in his book ‘Understanding the India-China Border: The Enduring Threat of War in High Himalaya’.

“Instead of accepting that it was now irretrievably behind China in almost all aspects of national power, New Delhi insisted on intensifying its efforts to match Chinese capabilities on the Sino–Indian border. Beijing saw this as a somewhat impertinent attempt to destabilise its military posture of dominance along the Line of Actual Control on account of its superior infrastructure,” notes Joshi.

India-China deal neither barter nor surrender but a negotiated trade-off

In the latest border agreement, neither India surrendered to Chinese aggression nor China relented fully to Indian demands. Instead, both countries negotiated to arrive at a middle ground.

Beyond headlines proclaiming Indian success in getting patrolling reinstated in eastern Ladakh, which is indeed a success, and commentary that China has been made to see reason is the reality that both sides made concessions, there lies a nuanced deal.

For one, even as Indian patrolling is being reinstated in Demchok and Depsang in eastern Ladakh, China’s patrolling is also being reinstated in India-controlled Yangtse in Arunachal Pradesh’s Tawang.

Saxena, the China scholar at the Takshashila Institution, tells Firstpost that it is clear that there was a trade-off.

“In exchange for India’s demand for pre-2020 patrolling in the Depsang region beyond the Y-junction area, the Chinese have sought the right to continue their own pre-2020 patrolling in Yangtse region. Since Yangtse is a big plateau region, we don’t know exactly where Chinese patrolling will resume, but we do know India considers the region to be part of Arunachal Pradesh,” says Saxena.

Secondly, patrolling remains halted in regions that witnessed disengagement in 2022: Pangong Tso, Galwan Valley, Patrolling Points 15 and 17A in Gogra Hot Springs area. The buffer zones created in these areas continue to remain.

With the continuation of buffer zones, China appears to have partially achieved what it set out to do. In his book ‘Understanding The India-China Border’, Joshi noted that China wanted India’s patrolling to stop in these areas.

Joshi noted, “Now both sides were calling for a negotiated solution to the crisis, but their perspectives varied: India wanted status quo as of April 2020, while China wanted India to disengage, de-escalate, create buffer zones and negotiate ‘new confidence building measures’ based on the new positions. The creation of the ‘no-patrolling zone’ in Pangong and Galwan suggested that they had, to an extent, succeeded.”

A notable success of the deal has been to address areas that China had long declared to be off-the-table, says Saxena.

“During negotiations, China often termed patrolling at Depsang and Demchok and the issue of grazing areas as out of the scope of talks. Even though disengagement earlier happened in Pangong Tso and Gogra-Hot Springs, the issue of Depsang and Demchok remained deadlocked as China dubbed them ‘legacy issues’. So, it is a win for Indian negotiators that patrolling and grazing rights there have been secured,” says Saxena, a Staff Research Analyst at Takshashila’s Indo-Pacific Studies Programme.

No going back to 2020, India & China headed to new normal

While India’s trade with China has continued through the tensions and the thaw in the relationship is set to usher in more engagement, it is expected to be cautious engagement instead of pageantry in the run-up to the conflict in 2020.

In his book ‘Smokeless War’, Kewalramani flagged the shallowness of the yearslong India-China engagement and said the Chinese aggression in 2020, particularly in Galwan Valley, was “a watershed moment”.

“For New Delhi, there were echoes of 1962, when the two sides had fought a brief war after the bonhomie of the early 1950s rapidly gave way to abiding mistrust. Like then, as now for New Delhi, two years of the pageantry of informal summits and positive rhetoric at the highest levels had apparently yielded little more than China’s perfidy and opportunism, and that too at a time when India was struggling to tackle a historic crisis. Diplomacy and military posturing would continue at different levels, but the two sides now seemed to be locked into a dynamic of deeper strategic competition for the foreseeable future,” noted Kewalramani.

Even as several quarters have urged the Modi government to revisit the restrictions on Chinese investments, Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman earlier this month reiterated that the restrictions are not going away anywhere.

“I cannot blindly receive foreign direct investment (FDI) because I want money for investment, forgetful or unmindful of where it is coming from. We want business, we want investment, but we also need some safeguards, because India is located in a neighbourhood which is very, very sensitive,” said Sitharaman.

The days for ‘normal’ Chinese trade and investment are over and the ‘new normal’ would rest on a risk factor, says Saxena, the China scholar at Takshashila.

“After careful assessment, domains and import items that pose strategic vulnerabilities to India’s national security should continue to remain off-limits to China, while domestic alternatives should receive a boost. But if far and wide-sweeping restrictions are adopted, our consumer welfare, sustainability goals, and export and manufacturing ambitions are all going to be drastically affected,” says Saxena.

Referring to the Economic Survey 2024, Saxena said that the view within the government also suggests there is a realisation that you cannot completely de-link supply chains from China because that will be detrimental to India’s growth.

India is much more closely aligned with the West when it comes to China than to historical partners like Russia. Even if New Delhi does not mention it, the approach of ‘cooperate where you can, compete where you should, and challenge where you must’ has defined India’s dealings with China and the world lately and it is expected to continue. Saxena says that India’s approach to China is defined by structural faultlines and not a limited border deal.

“In recent years, India has supported the role of the Quad as a security guarantor in the Indo-Pacific region even as China has critiqued it as a way for the United States to continue interfering in regional dynamics. Similarly, India has made efforts to de-risk, if not de-link, from China economically, of which elements like the restricting Chinese investments and the ‘Make in India’ campaigns inclusive of the many PLI schemes are a part. Both of these factors, China’s issues with the Quad and India’s anxiety with burgeoning trade imbalance with China, are not issues a patrolling rights agreement will solve,” says Saxena.

India and China have some fundamental differences that would disallow any rapprochement beyond a certain point. In a fundamental divergence, while India seeks a genuine multilateral world, China seeks to usurp the world order and impose its own hegemony on the world.

For this, China has already created a bloc of authoritarian regimes comprising Russia, North Korea, and Iran, which undermine the United States and the West.

Moreover, while India sees groups like BRICS and Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) as ‘non-Western’ multilateral forums, China uses them as ‘anti-Western’ institutions in the campaign against the West. Similarly, India’s engagements with the developing world differ from that of China.

While India seeks to be a bridge between the developed and the developing worlds with the goal of maximising growth, China seeks to convert the developing nations into a bloc against the West.

Such fundamental differences contribute to structural faultlines that a border agreement cannot bridge, says Saxena.

The fact that China has negotiated a border deal is encouraging and the Modi-Xi meeting indicates India’s willingness to resume high-level dialogue, but one should not overread these developments. Even as India cautiously engages with China, India will continue to develop partnerships to counter China, such as the Quad, and strengthen military and intelligence capacities to deter and stand up to China better. This is the new normal.