Syed Qamar Afzal Rizvi
ACCORDING to the India’s Today ( 6 August 2019), ‘’asking India and Pakistan to exercise restraint, China said they should avoid actions that “unilaterally” change the status quo and exacerbate tension between them as it voiced “serious concern” over the situation in Kashmir. China also expressed its opposition to India’s move to create a separate Union Territory of Ladakh.’’ Though senior Indian policymakers have emphasized that their August decision involved only the political question of Jammu and Kashmir’s relationship with the rest of India; but this assertion is by no means acceptable to both China and Pakistan. Chinese state media has reported the PLA is conducting joint military exercises “aimed at the destruction of key hostile hubs in a high-elevation mountainous region”. The PLA Tibet military command conducted live fire drills with heavy artillery on June 16, with reports linking the PLA’s preparedness for high elevation combat to the clashes with India.
Realistically, India’s decision to revoke J&K’s special status and firmly integrate Jammu, Kashmir and Ladakh with the rest of India generated a strong response from China. In an August 6 statement, the Chinese Foreign Ministry asserted: “China is always opposed to India’s inclusion of the Chinese territory (Ladakh) in the western sector of the China-India boundary into its administrative jurisdiction. Recently India has continued to undermine China’s territorial sovereignty by unilaterally changing its domestic law…’’
According to the BBC, China has accused Indian troops of a “deliberate provocation” in its first official comments on June 15 deadly clash at a disputed Himalayan border. Foreign Ministry spokesman Lijian Zhao said the troops had crossed into Chinese territory and attacked, triggering “fierce physical conflicts”. The simmering dispute along the Himalayas has been a ‘puzzling’ paradox’. The basic democratic right of exercising political freedom too has been robbed off as more than half of political leaders are under the house arrest.” China is always opposed to India’s inclusion of the Chinese territory in the western sector of the China-India boundary into its administrative jurisdiction,” reiterated the Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, Hua Chunying, following India’s Kashmir move.”
Though seen from the Indian perspective, Galwan area – a key strategic junction – is particularly important for India due to its proximity to the Nubra valley, which is a feeder station for the Indian forces deployed in Siachen Glacier. Pakistani forces are also deployed at in parts of Siachen – dubbed the highest battlefield in the world at 6,000 metres (20,000 feet). The Galwan valley beginning from the confluence of the Galwan and Shyok rivers to the LAC where both sides had been observing runs east of the confluence. China is demanding an Indian withdrawal from the entire valley and limiting India’s presence to the “Galwan estuary”, where it meets the Shyok.
China’s claims to the entire Galwan valley in Ladakh, attributed to a Chinese strategic expert to “historical rights” going back to the Qing Dynasty, is being seen as a pragmatic Chinese move to proclaim its sovereignty in the area. Currently, a leading Chinese strategic expert on border affairs at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), an official think-tank, made the claim to the entire valley in an interview with State media, citing “multiple accounts from the Qing Dynasty” that showed “historical rights”. “Multiple accounts from the Qing Dynasty [1644-1911] and Western literature have recorded that the Galwan valley was China’s territory. So far, Beijing has pointed to sharp differences on where the LAC lies in Galwan valley. China has justifiably opposed India’s decision to turn Ladakh into an administrative territory directly ruled by the central government via its Reorganisation Order 2019. China claims a 90,000-square-kilometre chunk of Arunachal Pradesh and Ladakh — because of New Delhi’s mala fide intent over Aksai Chin. Since 1963, intermittently, Chinese military troops are used to patrolling along the Line of Actual Control (LAC) over the Ladakh region including the Galwan valley.
Based on the principle of ‘historic rights,’ China has jurisdiction over the valley area,” Zhang Yongpan, a research fellow of the Institute of Chinese Borderland Studies at CASS, told the Global Times. This followed a recently made statement by the People’s Liberation Army’s Western Theatre Command spokesman Colonel Zhang Shuili, that “China always owns sovereignty over the Galwan valley region”. Hu Xijin, the editor of Global Times, currently tweeted: “Indian society needs to rid two misjudgments: (1). it underestimates China’s will to prevent Indian troops from crossing LAC; (2). it thinks India has the military capacity to beat China in a border war. Correct understanding of each other is the basis for China-India friendly coexistence”. While a Chinese map of 1962 extends its boundary up to the Shyok river-—objecting the construction of India’s Darbuk-Shyok-Daulat Beg Oldi (DSDBO) road is the bone of contention between Beijing and New Delhi.
Geostrategically, the Chinese control over the Galwan valley provides Beijing with a strategic cushioning against India’s any future offensive. By virtue of its expanding soft power influence in Central Asian and South Asian regions, Beijing’s growing control over the Galwan region is pivotal not only to safeguarding China’s geopolitical and economic interests but also meaningful for balancing Modi’s perceived unilateral agenda of declaring Kashmir, a part of India’s union territory.
Though apparently Kashmir dispute seems a UN’s recognized bilateral issue between India and Pakistan, yet geopolitically, it is understood that China is also a de facto party to the dispute and whenever Kashmir’s territorial issues are settled between India and Pakistan, the relevant sovereign authority will also need to renegotiate the final delineation of international borders with China. That said, a realistic probability is that futuristically if the Kashmir Vale will be aligned with Pakistan’s Azad Kashmir, the Eastern Ladakh will have to be aligned with the Tibet region. Even though the current standoff between India and China may be resolved with diplomatic intervention whereby concerns of China, Pakistan over Kashmir are justly addressed, the future of India-China peace, in the Chinese view, depends on India’s ability objectively pursuing its regional policy of peaceful relations with its neighbours, particularly its perusing an independent China policy not under the pretext of the growing U.S.-India alliance.
—The writer, an independent ‘IR’ researcher-cum-international law analyst based in Pakistan, is member of European Consortium for Political Research Standing Group on IR, Critical Peace & Conflict Studies, also a member of Washington Foreign Law Society and European Society of International Law.
