Less than a year since Operation Sindoor, where China provided not only weapons but satellite intelligence on India to Pakistan, Delhi and Beijing are moving forward in a host of areas, including trade.
This is not about the Indian government having a short institutional memory, rather it is a decision based on a careful weighing of the pros and cons of normalising (to a point) with China, which would boost the domestic economy.
Some critics say $100 billion trade deficit of India with China is a warning not to allow normalisation to go too far. As Atul Kumar, China scholar at the ORF, said during a recent discussion, “If economic dependence goes far more than required, strategic autonomy also suffers.”
Add to that, China’s approach to treaties is not the same as India’s. Witness how the range of confidence-building agreements signed since the 1990s was torn up by the Chinese at Galwan.
“India sees the treaties as a commitment. We believe in all the lines and regulations of the treaty, but the Chinese take it to the floor. And on that, they build up whatever their capabilities are.”
Meaning the Chinese have never been constrained by treaties, whether bilateral or multilateral. After signing the UNCLOS (UN Convention on the Law of the Seas), they refused to abide by it when it came to ensuring their writ runs over the South China Sea.
The same is visible in how they see treaties with India, says Air Marshal Diptendu Choudhary (Retd), former commandant of the National Defence College.
“Every time we resolve the border issues in a short time, it seeds China’s strategic space to build up its infrastructure. In fact, they have already built villages on the border, and that brings in a new dimension,” he said.
Any conflict in the future now means that it will no longer be a talk about military space but also about collateral and civilian spaces coming in.
“Every time China has done salami slicing, where it sets up a new normal somewhere. And every time we get into a discussion, and we de-escalate, we buy time for ourselves, but we give them strategic space,” Choudhary argued.
China’s ambiguity, driven by the opaque nature of its state system, makes reading its intentions difficult, says Kumar.
“We believe that, you know, over time, we will have far more solutions with China. We develop a lot of norms and regulations with China. But what the Chinese officials do is, they use time as a weapon. It’s not to create a solution, but rather to become a solution for that.”
The refusal to discuss any resolution of the boundary dispute indicates Beijing is comfortable with that unsettled situation, even if it triggers sudden crises that escalate.
