Opinion National Interest PoV 50-Word Edit

ThePrint On Camera Videos In Pictures

Society & Culture Around Town Book Excerpts Vigyapanti The Dating Story

More Judiciary Education YourTurn Work With Us Campus Voice

Opinion National Interest PoV 50-Word Edit

ThePrint On Camera Videos In Pictures

Society & Culture Around Town Book Excerpts Vigyapanti The Dating Story

More Judiciary Education YourTurn Work With Us Campus Voice

Support our Journalism

9th Anniversary: Free Tote & Mug

Lines on a map won’t resolve the India-China conflict. It began as a Cold War contest

The India-China border conflict has never been about the few dozen kilometres of desolate earth and ice that separates their claim lines.

The bones of the dead lie heaped in piles, steaming blood is everywhere plastered, the earth is scorched dry, and no matter where you look, your heart aches,”  wrote the harmonium-playing warlord General Ma Zhongying, also famously known as General ‘Big Horse’. “The celestial garden of refuge has become nothing more than the home of tearful gods and wailing spirits.”

Twenty-three years old in 1933, the General had spent the previous four years trampling across the cities and oases of Xinjiang, urging Kazakh, Uighurs, and Hui Muslims to rise against the ethnic-Han and recreate the kingdom of the medieval conqueror Taimur. Thousands died of war and famine; American diplomats reported that cannibalism had become commonplace.

Ever since last month’s meeting between National Security Advisor Ajit Doval and Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi, speculation has mounted that the two countries are close to an interim agreement on marking the border in sectors where their claims converge. To some Indian commentators, it appears that China is using Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s too-eager reach for a diplomatic triumph to enshrine the gains it made in the war of 1962.

The China-India border conflict, though, has never been about the few dozen kilometres of desolate earth and ice that separates their claim-lines. Faced with the irreparable fracturing of its relationship with the Soviet Union, and the need to forward-deploy units in Xinjiang, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) was also preparing for an American-backed invasion from Taiwan in the summer of 1962. Less than six months before the 1962 war broke out, tens of thousands of Kazakh and Uighur families fled Xinjiang for Kazakhstan, brushing aside border guards and Communist Party officials.

Yet, Beijing chose not to moderate its border claims. “Arrogant, devious, hypocritical and thoroughly unreliable,” Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru fumed, as he ordered Indian troops to........

© ThePrint