Rajesh Basrur
Between June and August of 2017, a major military confrontation occurred between Indian and Chinese troops at Doklam, an area close to the Sino-Indian border disputed by Bhutan and China.1 A Chinese attempt to build a road in Doklam led to a quick deployment of Indian forces and a faceoff that lasted until late August, when both sides agreed to disengage. The confrontation marked a high point in the friction between India and China, two of the world’s nine known nuclear states, that had been rising for well over a decade.2 Similar frictions raising the specter of a holocaust have occurred periodically between nuclear-armed states since the early Cold War days, some involving significant armed clashes, notably between China and the Soviet Union in 1969 and between India and Pakistan in 1999.
Tensions subsided further in late April 2018 when Chinese president Xi Jinping and Indian prime minister Narendra Modi met informally at Wuhan in China. At the ten-hour meeting, the two sides agreed to improve communications and strengthen numerous confidence-building measures (CBMs) already in place.4 Since then, India and China have held a number of ministerial meetings, restarting a delayed maritime dialogue in July 2018 and resuming their joint military counter-terrorism exercises after a two-year gap. In April 2019, the Indian Navy took part in an international fleet review hosted by the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN).5 The new warmth between China and India appears to confirm the judgment of many analysts that the competition has been well managed by a process of regular political engagement between the two nuclear powers.6
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