All around him, the missionary Ippolito Desideri of Pistoia would remember, as he journeyed through the Depsang plains early in the eighteenth century, there was “arid, barren desolation and horror”. The bleached bones of men and animals littered the landscape, left behind by the thousands of merchants who made their way to Lhasa each summer to buy a special kind of wool, “very white, very long, and extraordinarily fine”. Kashmir’s shawls were spun from this wool and the lives that were sacrificed on the passes across the mountains.
French women, one contemporary account records, were warned against wearing Kashmiri shawls before they married for fear of leading suitors “to believe that they are possessed of an unbridled love of luxury”.
Earlier this week, China and India said they had reached an agreement to disengage troops who have been facing off for four years along the very path Ippolito traversed. Although both China and the Ministry of External Affairs have shared no details on the terms of the agreement, External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar has said it means “we have gone back to where the situation was in 2020”.
That means Indian patrols should now be able to head west to an arc of positions just east of the Line of Actual Control in Depsang, known as Patrol Points 9, 10, 11, 11A, 12, and 13. The People’s Liberation Army had blocked access to the points, halting Indian patrols at a rock outcrop called Bottleneck, east of India’s military outpost at Burtsé.
For their part, critics of the agreement have been pointing out that the PLA will retain control of the network of roads and outposts it built well west of the LAC. That means the PLA will retain the ability to choke future Indian patrols more or less at will.
The devil isn’t in the details, though: The real issue is where India’s frontier with China lies, not a few kilometres of ancient trading routes. To agree on this larger issue needs deep reflection on the claims of territorial sovereignty both China and India have made—but nationalism in both countries makes dispassionate dialogue almost impossible.
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The genesis of a crisis
Eleven years ago, the scholar Manoj Joshi recorded, four tents, nine men and a dog appeared 19 kilometres west of the LAC, on the banks of the Chip-Chap, the northernmost of three rivers which cut across Depsang. The incursion, which was discovered on the eve of a visit by former Chinese premier Li Keqiang to New Delhi, mystified many in India. Less than a month earlier, China’s President, Xi Jinping, had called for deeper cooperation between the armed forces of the two countries to “deepen mutual military and security trust”.
Faced with the PLA’s presence, India responded by despatching an Indo-Tibetan Border Police patrol, who pitched tents across the riverbank. The mini-crisis ended after India agreed to dismantle tin sheds it had erected in Chumar, south of the Depsang plains, which the PLA claimed violated agreements not to engage in new construction on the LAC.
Even though the Chip-Chap incursion generated national headlines, similar incidents had been erupting along the LAC in Depsang for several years. In September 2008, the PLA destroyed stores and fuel dumped by the ITBP at Burtsé. A similar attack took place in 2009. The PLA also began work on a road loop running south of the Chip-Chap, allowing its four-wheel-drive vehicles to respond to—and obstruct—Indian patrols headed to the LAC.
There was more friction in 2015, when a PLA patrol arrived almost at the gates of Burtsé before being detected just 1.5 kilometres from the outpost. Later that year, Indian soldiers responded by dismantling a shed put up by the PLA at Bottleneck and confiscating solar lighting panels set up in the area.
Little attention was paid to this push-and-shove, but its meaning was evident. The PLA had long been asserting, in military-to-military negotiations, that the LAC ought to run along the western-most line it occupied during the war of 1962. Following the war, Indian outposts throughout Depsang had been overrun, and even troops stationed at the ancient caravanserai of Daulat Beg Oldi had been evacuated to reinforce defensive lines along the road to Leh.
After the war, the PLA had pulled back eastwards, to positions linked by roads to the rest of the Tibet plateau. Later, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi ordered the Indian Army to expand its patrolling into some of these areas, establishing what India now asserts to be the limits of the LAC. The PLA, though, continued to argue that India could not lay claim to territories it had lost in war.
The more complex truth was that neither country had sound historical reasoning to back its claims of sovereignty. As Ippolito discovered, no one lived on the brutal heights separating Tibet and Kashmir, and where no one lived, no one troubled themselves to rule.
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Lands without lines
For centuries, nomad armies and warlords swept through Depsang, raiding caravans and trading centres. Today, a critical strategic airbase and logistics hub, Daulat Beg Oldi was merely the burial place of the medieval ruler Said Khan, who died on his way home to Yarkand, while returning from an expedition to pillage Leh. The two great empires of the nineteenth century, China’s Qing Dynasty and Britain, made no real effort to exercise direct control of the region since it yielded too little revenue to be worth the military expense.
To ward off perceived challenges from Russia, though, the British launched a murderous invasion of Tibet in 1903-1904. The invasion led to the border drawn between India’s Northeast and Tibet in 1914 by the British administrator Henry MacMahon. The border he arrived at, based on amateur cartographical work by missionaries, was never endorsed by either the Qing or Lhasa.
Expansive nationalist fictions replaced this imperialist cartography, as the Kuomintang nationalists came to power in China. Kuomintang maps claimed the borders of China lay along the Kunlun range, on the northern fringes of Tibet. In 1958, an official Chinese map asserted power over the whole of what was then India’s Northeast Frontier Agency, with the exception of Tirap, as well as parts of Ladakh, Himachal Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh.
For its part, India’s first post-Independence map, published in 1950, showed the borders with Tibet in Ladakh as undefined, in a broad wash of yellow—just, it should be noted, as Pakistan’s maps did. This act of accuracy—or geopolitical naivete—soon gave way to claims on territory India had never administered or militarily held, in response to China’s increasingly wild assertions.
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The PLA mounted there was a succession of military intrusions from 1955, seizing ground at Barahoti, the Shipki La in Himachal Pradesh, Kaurik and Hipsang Khud. Khurnak Fort, in Ladakh, was also occupied. In response to India’s protests. China insisted the PLA was on its own territory. There were lethal clashes in Galwan in 1959.
Last-ditch efforts to hammer out the border through negotiations went nowhere. From June to December 1960, Joshi records, Chinese and Indian officials met in Beijing, New Delhi, and Yangon. The Chinese negotiators came armed with a map asserting their territory ran east of Daulat Beg Oldi, cutting across the Galwan River near its confluence with the Shyok, then to where the Pangong Lake turns northwest and ends south-west of Demchok.
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The weight of power
The line approximates the positions China occupied in the war of 1962—and the ones it sought to push back to in 2020. The reasons for the assertion aren’t hard to find. Ever since the global financial crisis of 2008, China has come to see itself as a great power with the right to the deference of its neighbours and potential regional adversaries. New Delhi’s increasingly close relationship with the West, and the build-up of military infrastructure along the LAC, irked Beijing deeply. The nine men who appeared in Chip-Chap, together with their dog, were delivering that message.
Even though many military experts believe the PLA never intended for the 2020 clash in the Galwan River to spiral into a multi-year military crisis, it has served to demonstrate that protocols and agreements meant to avert armed conflict cannot guarantee peace. Ever since 2013, though, China has rejected Indian efforts to negotiate a border that approximates its claims to the LAC—and India, for its part, has refused to accept China’s 1960 claims.
The two countries both have much to gain from stability and a cooperative relationship. To develop this, however, both will have to show a political imagination that generations of their national leadership have demonstrated it lacks.
Praveen Swami is contributing editor at ThePrint. His X handle is @praveenswami. Views are personal.
(Edited by Theres Sudeep)