The recent Chinese incursion into areas in Ladakh is a warning to India not join the US and side with Trump on the ‘punish China for the Wuhan virus’ episode. Lake Pangong Tso in Ladakh is one of the most peaceful borders that China and India share. On the Chinese side of the border a lot of infrastructure has come up, whereas, on the Indian side, there are just a few military establishments with a sprinkling of locals engaged in mountain farming. History is a great teacher but politicians often prefer to forget history and deal with issues as if they were created yesterday. History is a grim reminder that in 1993 there was an Agreement on maintaining peace and status quo along the Line of Actual Control (LAC) along the India-China Border. This Agreement was an outcome of Rajiv Gandhi’s visit to China in 1988 and his meeting with Chinese President Deng Xiaoping. Later, Indian Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh also signed an Agreement for Border Defence Cooperation in 2013 with Chinese premier Li Keqiang. After the 1962 misadventure when the Chinese came right up to Tezpur in Assam but retreated for reasons best known to the Indian military establishment, no such aggression was repeated.
Experts believe that if the Ministry of External Affairs were to faithfully follow up on the successive treaties then the Doklam face-off of 2017 where the Chinese violated the LAC and made incursions into Ladakh would not have happened. Strangely, the Chinese continually reveal their inscrutable nature. In September 2014 when Chinese President Xi Xinping visited India, the Chinese made a surprise move with major troops build-up along the LAC. The Chinese don’t seem to worry too much about treaties. Their sole preoccupation is to secure China’s territorial and economic future at any and all costs. The present stand-off too is a warning to India, not join the anti-China campaign of the western world and not especially to align with the US which has vowed to pull out all economic investments from China to punish it for releasing the Coronavirus (Covid19) on an unsuspecting world in November –December 2019.
At no time in history has any country been censured as China has today. From allegations of manufacturing the coronavirus in the virology institute at Wuhan and spreading it to the world, to threats of pulverizing China’s economic interests, Xi Xinping has had to take it all. For India, the Chinese incursions along the over 2,100-mile LAC is but an attempt to put pressure on the Modi Government not to join the western, anti-China lobby.