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New Delhi: The Modi government’s decision to agree to establish an expert group for exploring China’s ‘early harvest’ proposal in the recent India-China Special Representatives talks represents a reversal of India’s longstanding position that betrays decades of careful diplomacy and strategic thinking.

This concession – to explore fast-tracking a settlement of the India-China boundary in the Sikkim region – comes at a time when China has been systematically using the border dispute as leverage while offering cosmetic solutions that primarily benefit Beijing’s strategic objectives.

What are the origins and evolution of China’s ‘Early Harvest’ proposal?

Even though the ‘early harvest’ in Sikkim idea had been broached by Beijing with Indian officials earlier, it first surfaced publicly in 2017 when Chinese Ambassador Luo Zhaohui cryptically mentioned it during a think tank event at New Delhi. This was a couple of months before the 2017 Doklam standoff, when Indian soldiers had crossed from Sikkim into Bhutan to stop the Chinese from constructing a road to the sensitive Jhampheri ridge. ‘Early harvest’ involves exclusively settling the boundary in Sikkim –a proposal which the then foreign minister Sushma Swaraj had described as the Chinese equivalent of saying a ‘low-hanging fruit’. This would separate the Sikkim boundary from the three other sectors on the disputed  Sino-India border: western, middle and eastern.

Chinese military analyst senior colonel Zhao Xiaozhou later clarified in 2017 that the proposal essentially sought to replace the 1890 Great Britain-China convention with a new agreement signed directly between China and India. “For China, early harvest means, we want to have a new agreement with India, because the 1890 convention was signed between Great Britain and China,” he explained, adding that China wanted to “start from........

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