Indian and Chinese officials are holding talks to try to resolve a months-long standoff along its controversial border, where the two countries deployed tens of thousands of soldiers.
More than a dozen rounds of talks so far have failed to break the border stalemate.
Experts say India’s stripping part of the disputed Kashmir region – which lies between India, Pakistan and China – of its autonomy a year ago increased tensions with China and culminated in the deadliest clash between the Asian giants in more 45 years.
China saw this as a one-sided movement that threatened and condemned its territorial sovereignty with the United Nations.
The continuing distance in the mountains of Karakoram is about controversial parts of an uninhabitable landscape that has the highest landing strip in the world, a glacier that feeds one of the largest irrigation systems in the world, and a critical reference to China’s massive “Belt and Road” infrastructure project.
Some important backgrounds on the issue:
Where is Kashmir and who controls it?
The Himalayan territory of Kashmir is divided between India and Pakistan. The eastern edge, the cold desert region at high altitude of Ladakh, borders China on one side and Pakistan on the other and is home to the only three-way, nuclear-armed junction in the world.
Experts and some Chinese commentators have said that the unilateral changes of New Delhi in Kashmir brought the border tension between the Asian giants [File: Danish Ismail/Reuters]
Pakistan and India have rival claims against Kashmir dating to the British Raj Party in 1947, and have twice gone to war over them. Each country manages a part of the region.
Many ethnic Kashmiri Muslims on the Indian side support an armed movement that demands that the territory be united either under Pakistani rule or as an independent country.
In August 2019, New Delhi Kashmir stripped Indian administration of its state, demoted it to a federal territory, and claimed dissent.
The region’s decades-old semi-autonomy, which protects jobs and land from outsiders, was also shocked.
New Delhi also cut out Ladakh as a separate federal territory.
How does China view Kashmir?
China and India went to war over their disputed border problems in a 1962 conflict that played out in Ladakh and ended with a restless ceasefire.
Since then, troops from opposite sides have preserved the undefined, mountainous 3,500 km (2,200 miles) border area, sometimes brawling.
At least 20 Indian soldiers were killed on June 15 in a suspension with Chinese soldiers in Galwan Valley [File: Reuters]
They agreed not to attack each other with firearms. But on June 15, soldiers from both sides fought with clubs, stones and fists, leading to 20 Indian soldiers undergoing their injuries in the freezing point. It was the deadliest fight between the sides in 45 years.
Experts and some Chinese commentators have said that the unilateral changes of New Delhi in Kashmir brought the border tension between the Asian giants.
The change “forced China into the Kashmir dispute,” Wang Shida, a South Asian expert at the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations, a think tank in Beijing, wrote in a recent report.
The Chinese Foreign Ministry made clear its opinion the day after the change of status: “India has continued to undermine the territorial sovereignty of China by unilaterally changing its domestic law … Such a practice is unacceptable and will not come into force.”
China later joined Pakistan in condemning India’s relocation to the UN Security Council.
Perhaps more vital to Beijing, parts of Kashmir fall within its “Belt and Road” initiative, a massive, continental continental development project aimed at expanding China’s commercial connections worldwide.
China’s extensive road network crosses through Aksai Chin, a region that has held it since 1950 and is claimed by India as part of Ladakh.
It connects the restive, Chinese-controlled provinces of Tibet and Xinjiang before swirling north of Indian-administered Kashmir and cutting through the Pakistani-controlled part of the region to the Gwadar port of Pakistan in the Arabian Sea.
“China regards constitutional changes in Jammu and Kashmir as a threat” to Chinese interests in the region, specifically infrastructure projects that connect China to Pakistan via Kashmiri-controlled areas of Pakistan, said Lt Gen Vinod Bhatia, India’s director general for military operations from 2012 to 2014.
He said calls by the powerful homeless minister of India and other leaders of Prime Minister Henry Nationalist of Narendra Modi Bharatiya Janata Party for the “liberation” of Aksai Chin further provoked China’s “aggressive behavior”.
The American factor
A growing strategic alliance between India and the United States has ruffled feathers in Beijing, which sees the relationship as an attempt to block the rise of power.
Native American soldiers walk at the foot of a mountain peak near Leh, the capital of Ladakh [File: Tauseef Mustafa/AFP]
Now, the India-China conflict threatens to increase tensions between China and the US. The two have been ringing horns this year over a range of issues, from trade disputes and human rights to Hong Kong status and the first response to the coronavirus pandemic.
While New Delhi unilaterally has Kashmir’s constitutional status as a “direct provocation to China”, according to Pravin Sawhney, a Chinese defense analyst and expert, his military posture along the disputed border in Ladakh is also a “compelling narrative that India siding with the United States. “
Wang Lian, a specialist in India at Beijing University in Beijing, said China expects to see Modi use the recent border clashes as a way to enlist more US support.
“He can use the current complicated China – US relations in an attempt to get a better position that maximizes India’s interests,” Lian said, adding that Modi may be “trying to use his domestic and international situation to get a better position. to be found in border negotiations with China. “
How Kashmiris view the power struggle
Since the mid-June clashes between China and India, residents of the cities of Ladakh, clad in Buddhist temples and mountain tourist cafes, have looked uneasy as Indian troops introduced fighter jets, artillery and building materials. The activity has marked one of the most important military build-ups in decades.
“We’ve never seen anything like it. Even in 1999, when Indian and Pakistani soldiers fought in neighboring Kargil Heights for months,” said Tsering Angchuk, a wool trader.
Feelings are different in the Muslim-majority Kashmir Valley, where tensions between India and China have fueled anti-India sentiment.
In Kashmir’s capital, Srinagar, protesters chased Indian soldiers on June 21, shouting, “China is coming!”
“We hope that the powerful Chinese involvement will help us to end India’s occupation of Kashmir,” said Nazir Ahmed, dried fruit.
An Indian fighter jet flies over Leh after the deadly border clashes between India and China [File: Tauseef Mustafa/AFP]
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