Line Of Actual Control Research Articles

Traditional or Modern Diplomatic Approaches Vis-Á-Vis Indo-Nepal Relations

Nature and destiny have put India and Nepal so close to each other that it is difficult to find a parallel example of two independent and sovereign countries which have so much multidimensional and involved relationship in common. In geographical terms, Nepal is a northward extension on the Indo Gangetic plain. The two countries share a common environment and landscape. Nepal situated on the southern - slopes of the Himalayas separates Tibetan region of China from the Indian sub-continent. It shares its border with India on three sides. Hence it has strategic importance and occupies a significant position in relation to India’s security and defence system in the north. At the same time, Nepal is a landlocked country which has posed serious limitations to its efforts economic, mobilization and development. India alone provides sea route to Nepal. It has enhanced Nepal’s economic dependence on its neighbour to a very considerable extent. In fact, Nepal’s economy is inextricably attached to the Indian economy. India and its relation with Nepal goes a long way and it is filled with cooperation and mutual understanding. Both countries have established many feats by following diplomacy and many approaches to it. Treaties like Peace & Friendship Treaty, 1950; financial aid to Nepal after 2015 earthquake, Nepal citizens serving in the Indian army, free movement of citizens across borders and many more such unique aspects that are not present anywhere else between two countries. But as always, thorns are always present in a relationship. India and Nepal have some border issues that has stretched for quite a long time without any resolve. India's latest diplomatic row with Nepal erupted on May 8 when New Delhi announced the inauguration of a Himalayan road link that passes through the disputed area of Kalapani. According to experts, with India engaged in the Galway Valley against China, the cartographic war between India and Nepal can further deteriorate the security of its borders in the North. In the backdrop of a de facto border dispute between India and China-the Line of Actual Control (LAC), a frontier that remains unmarked, there is a further barrier to that. However, the ruling Communist Party government in Nepal has approached China in recent years for investment and better connectivity, which worries India. Amid the tensions, the second in six months over Kalapani and the most intense bilateral dispute since the unofficial blockade in 2015, observers at each side have begun calling on Kalapani to pursue a diplomatic solution. A diplomatic solution is the way out and forward is believed by both sides, analysts, think tanks as well as political leaders and hence this paper studies the different approaches to diplomacy and applies them in the context of Indo-Nepal bilateral relations, thus making an argument and logically reasoning out the best diplomatic ways and approaches to take in the future.

Caring for Glaciers: Land, Animals, and Humanity in the Himalayas by Karine Gagné

Reviewed by: Caring for Glaciers: Land, Animals, and Humanity in the Himalayas by Karine Gagné Kelly D. Alley Karine Gagné, Caring for Glaciers: Land, Animals, and Humanity in the Himalayas. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2019. 258 pp. Karine Gagné, Caring for Glaciers: Land, Animals, and Humanity in the Himalayas. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2019. 258 pp. Karine Gagné's book, Caring for Glaciers: Land, Animals, and Humanity in the Himalayas, is a unique integrative account of generational and climate resiliency in the Himalayas that integrates local perspectives and memories of regional geopolitical history and environment, with reflections on loss. Gagné's study explores contemporary life in what science organizations, including NASA, refer to as "High Mountain Asia." This is a region of much interest to glaciologists and climate scientists as it is home to the world's largest reservoir of glaciers and snow outside the earth's polar ice sheets. Yet this is a story unlike the others focusing on the High Mountain Himalayas, where receding glaciers often overshadow the lives and values of people living there. Gagné's ethnography invites the reader into the lives of Tibetan Buddhists of Ladakh and especially into the perspectives of elderly residents. The book offers a rare window into their struggles and feelings. The political territory in which Tibetan Buddhists live is a sensitive border region between India, Pakistan, and China. Their homeland lies between the predominantly Muslim regions of the Kashmir Valley and Kargil on the one side and the disputed "Line of Actual Control," bordering the Aksai Chin glacial area of China on the other. The book's portrayal of Ladakhis, and specifically the Shamma or inhabitants of lower Ladakh, unfolds through a series of intimate accounts of the challenges elderly farmers and herders face, through their memories, stories, and adaptations to resource changes over the last 70 years. Like Kim Gutschow's (2004) book on the [End Page 227] Buddhist nuns of Ladakh, Gagné offers us a way to meet a neglected community through sustained participation in their way of life. Gagné collected the views and stories of Ladakhis while living in the region intermittently over several years. She takes us through their memories of military interventions of the past half-century and their responses to the recent out-migrations of Ladakhi youth. She describes the mounting challenges with animal herding and caretaking and agricultural sustenance as the elderly community members survive the harsh winters alone. In these stories, the elderly Shamma define ethics through reciprocity and think of reciprocal relations among family members as well as with animals and the non-human environment. Gagné refers to their approach as an ethics of care. Care frames their relations with the land, which is like a mother looking after her children. It frames their relations with their animals that provide farming assistance and knowledge of the landscape, and with glaciers that produce the water that sustains all. In the opening of the book, Gagné introduces her research assistant, Nyamgal, with a heap of respect. She tells the reader about the crucial role he played as a youth member of the community in opening up the communication pathways with elderly Ladakhis. She makes it clear that research is co-produced with others, and especially with research assistants. Nyamgal was able to elicit their emotional responses with his humanism and vulnerability. Gagné also brings in her own struggles adapting with Nyamgal to the high altitudes and frigid winters, huddled around the bokhari (wood stove) with limited food supplies. In the concluding chapter, she takes the reader on her own trek to see Father Glacier, where the high altitude makes breathing a life or death struggle. Gagné tacks between stories of the trauma of war, the harsh winters, and the stresses on elderly family members abandoned by migrating youth. In the midst of their struggles, we get an acute sense of their feelings of loneliness and loss. Elderly family members, alone in the long, harsh winters, are barely able to manage the agricultural work as they struggle to care for the animals they love so much. Desires to escape the pressures of autocratic regimes, the growing debt to outsiders, and confrontations with...

Boundary Standoff and China-India Relations: A Chinese Scholar’s Perspective

The China-Indian boundary and territorial dispute is one of the major issues affecting Sino-Indian bilateral relations. This issue was a legacy of the British colonialists, but unfortunately, it has been fully inherited by the Indian ruling class. Over the past 60 years, China and India have missed three opportunities to resolve this issue. The Indian ruling class wanted to achieve “absolute security” and therefore introduced a “forward policy”, which led to the 1962 conflict. After the war, India occupied almost all of the strategic commanding heights in the border area between the two countries by continuously encroaching on Chinese territory and pushing the Line of Actual Control (LAC) toward the Chinese side. After Prime Minister Modi came to power in 2014, he adopted the Doval Doctrine and “offensive defense” policy in the border area, with a view to continuing the encroachment on Chinese territory and occupying the strategic commanding heights. The aim was to force China to resolve the border issue in accordance with India’s intentions, so that India can then shift its strategic focus to the Indian Ocean. China-U.S. strategic rivalry and Hindu nationalism have fueled India’s behavior in the border region, and the peaceful resolution of the 2017 Donglang/Doklam standoff has emboldened India, making the bloodshed in Galwan Valley an inevitable incident. That India’s Home Minister Amit Shah categorically declared in August 2019 in Parliament that Aksai Chin was part of new Ladakh Union Territory shows that the Indian government has restored its position on the western sector boundary that the Vajpayee Administration had abandoned in 2003. India is using the Galwan conflict as an excuse to pursue its policy of economic de-Sinicization and strategic alliance with the U.S. and other Western countries. In the future, China-Indian border conflict is likely to become commonplace due to India’s expansionism.

Doklam Plateau and Three Warfares Strategy

India-China border has not been formally demarcated and there are areas where both sides have differing perception of Line of Actual Control (LAC), and its perception on ground have led to a number of skirmishes and standoffs, Doklam being the most recent. The differentiating factor in this standoff was that it took place in a third country, Bhutan. This crisis will remain an important indicator of Indian and Chinese strategic behaviour in any future crisis between the two emerging powers. This will also reflect on India’s relations with other countries in South Asia and vice versa. A major aspect of Indian strategic behaviour that emerged from this crisis was that India can play the game of military brinkmanship and win it. During this crisis, the Chinese strategy of Three Warfares was in full flow and all three components—public opinion/media, legal and psychological warfare—were unleashed on India. This article is based on Indian and Chinese government briefings and press releases, media both print and electronic of the two countries, social media, journals, government reports, and books of the two countries.

India 2020: The deepening crisis of democracy

During 2020, India’s foreign policy was unaffected by the COVID-19 and dominated by two key developments, on whose analysis this article is focussed. One was the turning for the worse of the India-China relation, of which the heating up of the Himalayan border, which saw clashes between the militaries of the two countries, was at the same time cause and effect. The other key foreign policy development in the year under review was the tightening of the India-US connection, which, in 2020, increasingly looked as a de facto anti-China military alliance. The India-China confrontation is tackled by dwelling on three points. The first is the history of the incidents and clashes along the Himalayan border, whose seriousness is proven by the fact that, for the first time in 45 years, there were losses of human life. Then, a main objective cause of turbulence along the China-India border, namely the undefined nature of the de facto border (the so-called LAC, Line of Actual Control) is examined. Finally, the two mirror-like explanations of the border crisis are scrutinised. Then, the focus of the analysis moves on, zeroing on the India-US connection. It highlights the bizarre situation which, during the year under review, saw the worsening of the economic connection between the two nations – a direct result of US President Trump «America First» policy – coupled, however, by their growing military closeness. The fact that this apparently contradictory process resulted in something akin to a de facto military alliance, and the institutional developments that fleshed it out are examined. Finally, the fact is underlined that, even if largely unrecognised by Indian politicians and public opinion, the tightening of the US-India military alliance resulted in India’s loss, or at least drastic diminution of its vaunted «strategic autonomy». As a proof of this, the unravelling of the India-Iran strategic ties is examined.

Doklam Standoff Resolution: Interview of Major General S B Asthana by SCMP

Doklam Standoff Resolution: Interview of Major General S B Asthana by SCMP

China’s Planning on Border Infrastructure

Rapid development of infrastructure along the Line of Actual Control (LAC) between India and China, as well as within the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) plays a decisive role in the strategic calculus of India. Despite numerous rounds of talks between India and China under the Special Representative(SR) mechanism, little concrete progress has been achieved in the direction of settlement of the boundaries. However, in terms of confidence building mechanisms much has been achieved including the 1996 CBM which promises peace along the border between these two important Asian neighbours. Unfriendly incidents like face-offs between the border forces and armies, allegations of border intrusions, and gradual build up of military on both sides of the border region suggest that the possibility of military confrontation is still alive between these two close neighbours. However, given the institutional frameworks which have been built overtime, the military confrontation has been avoided. Reports of China’s rapid infrastructure development in TAR in general and its border regions contiguous to South Asia in particular, compel a country like India try to understand China’s objectives for doing so. The more recent standoffs in Depsang in 2015 and subsequently at Doklam in 2017 are testimony to China’s increasing confidence in dealing with the border issues through show of power and deployment of armed personnel on ground. This article takes an objective assessment of the infrastructure that China has developed in the Tibet region and how it is meant to give strategic advantage to China.

IV Agreement between the Government of the Republic of India and the Government of the People's Republic of China on Confidence Building Measures in the Military Field Along the Line of Actual Control in the India-China Border Areas

IV Agreement between the Government of the Republic of India and the Government of the People's Republic of China on Confidence Building Measures in the Military Field Along the Line of Actual Control in the India-China Border Areas

Sino‐Indian ties: Moving beyond confidence‐building measures

Abstract Recently, President Jiang Zemin became the first Chinese head‐of‐state ever to visit the Indian subcontinent. This marks the completion of the first phase of evolving confidence‐building measures (CBMs) thus carrying the Sino‐Indian rapprochement forward to the next stage of concrete decisions. Given that the two sides have an interest in maintaining peaceful relations and have since been co‐ordinating their joint strategies in various multilateral forums, there seems no reason why they should not be able to resolve their problems across the table. However, their border dispute still unfortunately remains the greatest impediment to progress in Sino‐Indian ties. To start with, the two sides can initiate actions towards defining and demarcating the Line of Actual Control (LoAC) in the middle sector leading the way towards resolving the undoubtedly complex Sino‐Indian boundary question.

China-India Relations in the Post-Soviet Era: The Continuing Rivalry

In September 1993, China and India signed an agreement “to maintain peace and tranquillity” along their disputed Himalayan border. This agreement between the two Asian giants – which required both sides to respect the Line of Actual Control (LAC), that is to maintain the status quo pending a peaceful, final boundary settlement and to reduce military forces along the border in accordance with the principle of “mutual and equal security” – has been described as a “landmark agreement” and “a significant step forward” in their uneasy relations since the 1950s. It was a logical culmination of a series of developments since the late 1980s, especially the visit of India's Premier to Beijing in 1988 and the reciprocal visit of China's Premier to New Delhi in 1991; the end of the Cold War and the bipolar system following the Soviet collapse; the consequent dramatic changes in the global strategic environment; and the overall improvement in bilateral relations between China and India.However, the fact that Sino-Indian relations today seem to be better than at any time during the last four decades should not lead one to assume that all the hurdles in the relationship have been overcome. This article examines the factors underlying the current détente, and analyses Indian and Chinese perspectives on their bilateral relations as well as the wider post-Cold War Asian security environment. It concludes that a thaw in Sino-Indian relations notwithstanding, the two sides are poised for rivalry for regional dominance and influence in the multipolar world of the 21st century.

I. Agreement between the Government of the Republic of India and the Government of the People's Republic of China on the Maintenance of Peace and Tranquillity along the Line of Actual Control in the India-China Border Areas

I. Agreement between the Government of the Republic of India and the Government of the People's Republic of China on the Maintenance of Peace and Tranquillity along the Line of Actual Control in the India-China Border Areas