As of: February 21, 2024, 8:46 a.m
By: Christiane Kühl
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The simmering border conflict in the Himalayas between India and China is preventing the two nuclear powers from rapprochement.
Both governments are acting increasingly irreconcilably.
India held a pigeon for eight months.
The suspicion: The bird is a Chinese spy.
Mumbai police found Chinese characters on the bird's leg rings and detained it.
He was later forgotten - until local animal welfare activists remembered the fate of the pigeon.
Veterinarians then concluded that the imprisoned bird was a carrier pigeon that had escaped from Taiwan and made it to India.
The veterinarians handed the pigeon over to an animal welfare organization, which released it at the beginning of February.
What seems like a farce has a serious background.
India's distrust of China is high; relations between the world's two most populous countries have been strained for decades.
The main reason for this is the conflict along the common border in the high mountains of the Himalayas (“Actual Line of Control”/LAC).
It is based on a border drawn by the former British colonial rulers and was never accepted in its entirety by either India or China.
In 1962, both fought a short, bloody border war that China won.
It was only in the early 1990s that both sides agreed not to touch the status quo until a final solution was found.
It was quiet for decades.
India and China: border skirmishes in the Himalayas eroded trust
But in 2017 there were clashes in Doklam on the border triangle between India, China and Bhutan, which ended in a stalemate after 73 days.
In spring 2020, soldiers from both countries beat each other with clubs and iron rods and threw boulders at each other in the Galwan Valley between Ladakh and Tibet.
At least 20 people are said to have died, and some sources even put the number at 60 dead.
This incident fundamentally changed the relationship between the two nuclear powers, the think tank Crisis Group judges in a recent report.
The nervousness resulting from the geopolitical rivalry between the two countries has since spilled over into the border conflict.
This has “fueled the military buildup and increases the risk of new fighting.”
India and China have been arguing over the border for decades.
Skirmishes between their troops prevent normalization of bilateral relations (symbolic image).
© IMAGO/xtanaontex
In 2022, there were again minor incidents with injuries, including in the Tawang region on the northern border of the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh.
Indian border troops prevented, among other things, the capture of a border post by Chinese soldiers in November of that year, Reuters reported in January, citing a military honors ceremony in India.
In October 2023, New Delhi and Beijing once again agreed to maintain peace on the border.
However, a substantive solution to the border question is not in sight.
India's Foreign Minister: No normalization without resolving the border conflict
China has been demanding for years that bilateral relations should not be determined by the border issue.
But India rejects this.
"I explained to my Chinese counterpart that if there is no solution to the border, if the armed forces continue to confront each other and there are tensions, then one cannot expect the rest of relations to continue as normal," Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar said in January Meeting with China's chief diplomat Wang Yi clear.
Two larger regions are particularly sensitive.
India claims the Aksai Chin area, which China captured in the 1962 border war.
Conversely, Beijing claims the entire Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh east of Bhutan.
A new official map of China identifies Arunachal Pradesh as a Chinese territory with a new name “Zangnan”, southern Tibet.
New Delhi protested against the map.
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The Crisis Group analysis gives little reason for optimism: The lack of clarity about the border means “that hostile encounters and possibly even interstate conflicts will inevitably occur again and again - with far-reaching consequences for regional and global security,” it says .
Tensions have increased since China's head of state Xi Jinping and India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi came to power.
“Both are nationalists who see their political standing closely linked to sovereign self-assertion and power projection abroad.”
So far, China is ahead of India economically and militarily
Modi seeks increasing global role for India;
The country is developing rapidly and has overtaken China as the world's most populous country.
But the People's Republic remains economically and militarily superior.
The infrastructure in the difficult terrain of the border is significantly better on the Chinese side, which makes it easier to relocate troops or equipment.
New Delhi only started building roads to the border region a few years ago.
“There is no way India can catch up with China in the next 20-30 years,” the British
Economist
magazine recently quoted Colonel Zhao Xiaozhuo of the Chinese Academy of Military Sciences as saying.
India's general elections in April and May could further escalate tensions if Modi and his opponents take a hard line against China during the election campaign.
“Even if a solution to the conflict is difficult to imagine, China and India should protect themselves against risks,” warns the Crisis Group.
It proposes more buffer zones between its armies on the border and better crisis management mechanisms.