India’s evolving approach toward China’s border incursions
India’s evolving approach toward
China’s border incursions
WRITTEN BY KUNAL SINGH
2 August 2021
More than a year has passed since the clash between Indian and Chinese troops in the Galwan Valley. Since then the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) and the Indian Northern Command have carried out a disengagement around the Pangong Tso but remain locked against each other at Gogra, Hot Springs, and the Depsang Plains.
With this as the context, it’s the right time to ask the following: What is India’s evolving approach to the threat of China in the light of two major incursions in recent years — the Doklam Standoff in Bhutan in 2017 and Ladakh in 2020-21? To be clear, I am not trying to answer what should be India’s approach. Rather, my answer to the “what is” question lies in three parts.
Military caution
First, India’s response is characterised by military restraint. In both Doklam and Ladakh, the Indian leadership calculated that some sort of stalemate on the ground is enough to make room for negotiations. The stalemate could be inefficient, given the high altitude and number of troops required, and even be favourable to China — after all, the PLA continues to occupy territory India claims as its own.
A New Delhi which is less interested in balancing China will be less useful to its partners in the Quad, and India is indeed the only Quad country to have engaged China in military combat for many years.
What is needed is for Indian forces to stand their ground and prevent further Chinese ingress after whatever territory had been gained by the PLA through initial surprise. The exception to this trend was India capturing the heights on the southern bank of Pangong Tso in August 2020. However, India used those heights to very moderate ends. It negotiated away those strategically useful positions in return for a disengagement around the north and south of the Pangong Tso in February 2021. New Delhi has also largely not shown any interest in using military force against the PLA on the contested border.
India’s negotiation strategy
Second, India has held the bilateral relationship with China hostage to arrive at a resolution to the border crises. During the Doklam crisis, India reportedly used the card of pulling out from the BRICS summit to be hosted in Xiamen to negotiate an end to the standoff. During the Ladakh crisis, India has placed the entire bilateral relationship hostage to the resolution of the standoff.
One can point out that bilateral trade between the countries is still increasing but trade also has a decentralised logic of its own. India has taken many steps such as excluding Huawei from the 5G trials, imposing limits on foreign direct investment from China, and banning Chinese apps. Some of these decisions are not very useful for coercing China into a negotiated resolution of the border crisis. For a coercive threat to be successful, India has to assure China that punishment would be rolled back if the latter complies. However, India may not want to, and hence be unable to assure, that decisions like excluding Huawei will be rolled back. The contradictions and problems notwithstanding, the negotiating strategy is clear: S Jaishankar, India’s external affairs minister has repeatedly emphasised that Sino-Indian relations cannot go back to normalcy as long as the border crises are not resolved.
External and internal balancing
Third, India has used external partnerships with the US and the Quad (US-Japan-Australia-India) in a limited way. Despite facing an overwhelmingly hostile and superior power on long stretches of a contested border, India is still showing no interest in a military alliance with the US.
All New Delhi wants is a political alliance with the US and the Quad to achieve three objectives: 1) use the partnership with Washington to get a better intelligence picture of the adversary (satellite data, reconnaissance platforms); 2) show China that the political alliance can be converted into a full military alliance if Beijing doesn't change its behaviour on the frontier, and 3) demonstrate that China's aggression is being explicitly called out and that India is being supported by key actors in the international community.
Not only is India not rushing to enter a military alliance with the US, but it is also not significantly increasing its military budget to balance China internally. Why? I speculate that India doesn't consider China to be an existential threat. Rather, the perspective in New Delhi is that India has rough parity on the land border with China. If the PLA has to meaningfully penetrate Indian defences on the land border, Beijing will have to send a strong enough invading party and even that won’t guarantee success because both the military balance and the terrain do not favour the offence. Moreover, India is a nuclear power, which would allow deterring an invasion above a threshold of magnitude. So, India might have calculated that the threat would remain limited to small land grabs by China near the border areas and New Delhi can tackle those by creating a stalemate on the ground and using the bilateral relationship as a bargaining chip to force a negotiation.
A risky approach
This approach carries several risks. First, by eschewing hard balancing, India is assuming that the balance of power will remain the same in future. As China continues to grow powerful, this approach might leave India in a bad place. The PLA might be tempted to bite off bigger chunks of territory and India would have to either accept those acts of aggression or escalate militarily without being thoroughly prepared.
Second, India’s negotiation strategy shows that it does not possess good bargaining cards. In a way, threatening bilateral relations is costly and, hence, credible. New Delhi benefits from trade and investment linkages with China. On the flip side, it means that severing all those links will be difficult and not worthwhile for small territorial disputes in uninhabited and harsh terrain. India will need sharper tools and a coherent strategy for military coercion.
Third, India’s external partners might begin to lose interest. A New Delhi which is less interested in balancing China will be less useful to its partners in the Quad, and India is indeed the only Quad country to have engaged China in military combat for many years. With a long-contested border and overlapping spheres of influence in South Asia, India has conflicts of interests with China that go beyond abstract debates on the rules-based international order. However, an India that does not invest adequately in its security will inevitably become a less attractive coalition partner to counter China.
DISCLAIMER: All views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent that of the 9DASHLINE.com platform.
Author biography
Kunal Singh is currently pursuing a PhD at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Image credit: Wikipedia.