Rajeswari Pillai Rajagopalan
It’s not just the border. India has a deeper problem with China, and it looks like it’s part of the same problem that other countries have with China: the country has become much more aggressive.
Indian policymakers and commentators routinely assume that if New Delhi could only resolve the dispute over the line of the Himalayan border, other issues would fall into place. In fact, there’s not much reason to believe that. Just look further afield to the Western Pacific or Ukraine.
For the past several years, New Delhi has said there can be no progress in other aspects of the relationship as long as China refuses to concede on the border problem. This was initially an effort at pushing the border problem to the centre, presumably in the hope that China would not want to risk the entire relationship over it. But China has not budged and does indeed seem willing to risk the relationship instead.
There has been some recent speculation that India and China are on their way to resolving their standoff at the border, where military confrontations have sometimes become violent. India’s External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar said last month that 75 percent of the disengagement problems had been resolved. The holding of a round of Sino-Indian border talks in August and a meeting between Indian National Security Advisor Ajit Doval and Chinese Foreign Affairs Minister Wang Yi also added to hope. But Jaishankar has since clarified that his reference was only to disengagement, not to issues of militarisation of the border or the larger state of relations.
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