To pave the ground for a possible meeting between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and President Xi Jinping during the BRICS summit in Kazan, the Chinese interlocutors had offered disengagement, patrolling and grazing arrangements to their Indian counterparts at the 31st meeting of the Working Mechanism for Consultation and Coordination held in Beijing on August 29.
India bided its time to convert this offer into a ‘supposed breakthrough’ to justify Modi’s meeting with Xi on October 23.
This is the reason why foreign minister S. Jaishankar’s announcement was not matched by a similar statement by his Chinese counterpart. From their perspective, there was nothing to announce. They offered India an opening to reignite the relationship that had been in cold storage since the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) made multiple deep incursions into east Ladakh in April 2020.
According to a high-level source, the Chinese offer was to be implemented in two phases. In phase one, both sides could patrol and send cattle for grazing two kilometres inside each other’s territory from the present positions in Depsang and Demchok (the two remaining friction points in east Ladakh) by informing the other about their patrolling plans – the number of troops, time and duration of the patrol.
This, the Chinese side said, would help ‘avoid misunderstanding’ on the limits of patrolling allowed to each side.
In phase two, both sides would start the disengagement of forces and create a four km-buffer zone where both could conduct regular patrolling without informing the other side.
Once disengagement was done, the two sides could start work on new confidence-building measures for the management of ‘border areas’ since the Line of Actual Control would be replaced by buffer zones. This was agreed to by both sides through the joint statement signed on September 10, 2020, by foreign ministers Jaishankar and Wang Yi in Moscow. The joint statement does not mention the de-escalation of forces.
There will, therefore, be no de-escalation of forces, implying the PLA vacate (according to media reports) the over 2,000 square kilometres of territory that it came to occupy in April 2020. In any case, it has no reason to do this after Modi himself told the nation on June 19, 2020, that nobody had entered or occupied Indian territory.
The PLA’s occupation of Indian territory by moving to its claim line of November 1959 was in response to India creating new maps of the Union territory of Ladakh showing Aksai Chin as its part. The Chinese had told Jaishankar this on August 11, 2019, when he visited Beijing, that India’s cartographic aggression was unacceptable to them.
China’s offer accepted by India in toto is evidence that China is keen to normalise relations with India. By showing the Chinese offer as its initiative accepted by Beijing, the Modi government has sought to tell its support base that it has bested China after the disaster of June 2020 Galwan incident.
But on this vast wasteland of different requirements, trust cannot be built. The reasons for this are simple.
China and Russia want India to strengthen BRICS, which will help bring stability to the global geopolitics where there is a once-in-a-century contest between two entirely different models of global governance.
If India as a Global South nation was to wholeheartedly support the Chinese and Russian-initiated model which promises development and prosperity to Global South nations based on equality and win-win outcomes, two things would happen.
One, the US-led governance model followed by Global North nations and based on hierarchy and balance of power politics and which believes in zero-sum game outcomes would weaken. And two, the US plan to build India as a military bulwark against China in the Indian Ocean region would come a cropper.
India, of course, with its so-called multi-aligned foreign policy believes it can manage to be in both governance models. This helps project the image of the prime minister as a world leader sought by all major and medium powers in the world to the domestic audience.
Specific to the 16th BRICS summit, Modi could not have refused Putin’s invitation to Kazan since Russia is India’s time-tested partner. Not meeting Xi in Russia would have embarrassed the host, who in the past had played peacemaker between India and China. Given this, Modi had no option but to meet Xi.
Yet, the government had to demonstrate to both its constituency in India and to the US that there was a compelling motivation for this meeting. Hence, the charade of a breakthrough.
With this run of duplicity, which wouldn’t have escaped China, it is unlikely that much would emerge from the bilateral between Modi and Xi. Both sides are treading parallel paths with no meeting point.
The writer’s latest book is The Last War: How AI Will Shape India’s Final Showdown With China.