China, India Stoke 21st-Century Rivalry

[MBI Munshi]

The Wall Street Journal – October 23, 2009

By PETER WONACOTT

LEH, India -- In the brewing discord between two giant, ambitious nations, even a remote meadow in the Himalayas is worth fighting over.

Some two-dozen Chinese soldiers converged earlier this year on a family of nomads who wouldn't budge from a winter grazing ground that locals say Indian herders had used for generations. China claims the pasture is part of Tibet, not northern India. The soldiers tore up the family's tent and tried to push them back toward the Indian border town of Demchok, Indian authorities say.

Chering Dorjay, the chairman of India's Ladakh Autonomous Hill Development Council, says he arrived on the scene with a new tent and Indian intelligence officers and urged the herders to stay put. "The Chinese, it seems, are gradually taking our territory," he says. "We will feel very insecure unless India strengthens its defenses."
Dueling territorial claims along this heavily militarized mountain border, coupled with economic tensions between the two nations, are kindling a 21st-century rivalry. The budding distrust has created a dilemma for the U.S. about how to court one nation without angering the other.

China and India cooperate occasionally. But in recent years, they have competed vigorously over trade, energy investments, even a race to land a man on the moon. Some Indians want their nation to move closer to the U.S. as a hedge against a rising China -- a strategic shift that's likely to complicate ties among all three.
"China is trying to become No. 1," says Brajesh Mishra, a former national-security adviser for India. "This is the seed of conflict between China, India and the U.S."

The prime ministers of India and China are expected to meet this weekend at a summit of Asian leaders in Bangkok, following several weeks in which their nations traded barbs over trade and disputed territory. "Both sides will exchange views on issues of mutual concern," China's assistant foreign minister, Hu Zhengyao, told reporters Wednesday.

Next month, after a planned visit to China, President Barack Obama will host a U.S. visit by Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, a meeting meant to highlight what the White House says is a "growing strategic partnership." Commercial and military ties between the two countries have been getting stronger. Last year, the U.S. loosened restrictions to allow India to buy sensitive technology and nuclear equipment for civilian use. Soldiers from both countries are participating this month in a joint defense exercise.

Indian defense analysts say India needs closer U.S. ties to hedge against potential hostilities with China. "If China's rise is peaceful, and it integrates into the global economy, everything should be fine," says retired Indian Brig. Gen. Gurmeet Kanwal, director of the Center for Land Warfare Studies, an army think tank. "Should China implode, it's better to have a friend like the U.S."

In addition to the defense concerns, trade friction is growing between India and China. India leads all members of the World Trade Organization in antidumping cases against China. India has banned imports of Chinese toys, milk and chocolate, citing safety concerns, and has launched investigations into export surges of Chinese truck tires and chemicals, among other products.

On Oct. 15, Indian heavy-industries minister Vilasrao Deshmukh asked the finance ministry to impose taxes on imports of inexpensive Chinese power equipment. "We don't want India to be turned into a dumping ground," he told reporters.

At the moment, the biggest threat to India-China relations may be their competing claims for big swaths of territory along their border. In recent years, China has settled border disputes with a host of nations, including Russia, as part of what it calls its "good neighbor policy." But China and India have made little progress, despite 13 rounds of meetings since 2003.

China says the eastern Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh is historically part of southern Tibet. India wants China to hand back territory it calls Aksai Chin, desolate high-altitude salt flats that residents of Ladakh claim as part of its ancient Buddhist kingdom. India's discovery of a Chinese-built road in the region helped spark a border war in 1962.

Earlier this month, China objected to a visit by Indian Prime Minister Singh to Arunachal Pradesh to campaign for local elections, saying it was disputed territory. "We request India to pay great attention to China's solemn concerns, and not stir up incidents in the areas of dispute," Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Ma Zhaoxu told reporters.

India's foreign minister countered that Arunachal Pradesh is Indian territory, and demanded that China stop investing in infrastructure-related projects in the Pakistan-controlled part of Kashmir. Both India and Pakistan claim the whole of Kashmir.

The 1962 border war, which India lost, complicated the boundary between the two countries. These days, Chinese and Indian forces in some border areas have agreed to go out on different days to patrol contested territory. "We want to avoid an eyeball-to-eyeball conflict," says Gopal Pillai, India's secretary for the home ministry, which oversees the border police.

India and China are intent on turning fast economic growth into national strength. When their interests have converged, they have proven a powerful combination. On Wednesday, they announced plans to cooperate at December's climate-change talks in Copenhagen, a pact likely to see both fighting carbon-emission caps proposed by industrialized nations. During global-trade talks, they both resisted Western pressure to open farm markets.

"China's economic and military growth is not a threat to India. And India's shouldn't be a threat to China," says Cheng Ruisheng, a former Chinese ambassador to India. "We should be an opportunity to one another."

But many Chinese resent any comparison with India, still a largely poor agrarian nation with only about one-third of China's per-capita income. And they're generally wary of India's warming ties with the U.S.

Indians, for their part, bristle over the flood of Chinese imports and China's increasingly cozy ties with India's neighbors, including Nepal, Sri Lanka and arch-rival Pakistan. In a speech last November, Indian Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee, then its foreign minister, identified an expansionist China as one of India's top challenges.

"Today's China seeks to further her interests more aggressively than in the past," he told the National Defense College in New Delhi.
The Indian government has closely scrutinized proposals by Chinese companies to invest in India. It recently demanded that thousands of Chinese citizens in India convert short-term business visas into employment visas -- a move that effectively boots unskilled Chinese workers from the country.

The Chinese government has objected to a proposed Asian Development Bank program that India hoped would help fund a water project in the disputed territory of Arunachal Pradesh. This year, the Chinese embassy began issuing visas to residents of Arunachal Pradesh and Jammu and Kashmir in a manner that Indian officials say leaves China with a way to later claim that it isn't recognizing the visa recipients as Indian citizens. A spokeswoman for the Chinese embassy in New Delhi says "every country has the right" to set its own visa policies.

U.S. defense contractors could benefit from India's desire to modernize its military. While the U.S. has banned weapons sales to China, it has ramped up such sales to India. Lockheed Martin Corp. and Boeing Co. are among the defense contractors competing to supply India's air force a new fleet of jet fighters -- a deal that could be valued at $10.4 billion.

Some Chinese analysts say friction between India and China are playing into what they say is a U.S. wish to contain China. "If border tensions between India and China continue to simmer, I can't say the U.S. will be displeased," says Shi Yinhong, a specialist in Sino-U.S. ties at People's University in Beijing.

The contested territory in northern India lies in the state of Jammu and Kashmir. The region abutting China, known as Ladakh, consists largely of rocky mountain terrain with isolated green pastures grazed by yaks, goats and horses. Many of the herders and traders living on both sides of the blurred border share the same Tibetan heritage and Buddhist faith. The main town on the Indian side, Leh, was an ancient caravan stop.

Today, the area crawls with Indian soldiers. Indian border police tightly regulate visitors traveling east toward China.

The Indian army has accelerated a road-building program in the region.

The roads, which run beside Indian army camps and over a pass above 17,000 feet, are dotted with offbeat signs: "I'm curvaceous, be slow," warns one. "I like you darling, but not so fast," says another.

India intends to use the new mountain roads in part to move military supplies. In September, an Indian cargo plane landed at a new high-altitude airstrip near the border.

Indian villagers near the border have been caught in the middle of the conflict. When villagers were constructing an irrigation canal a few years ago, Chinese soldiers tried to wave them off, says Rigzin Spalbar, chairman at the time of the Ladakh Autonomous Hill Development Council.

The villagers hurled abuse at the soldiers, but were angry at Indian soldiers for doing nothing, he says. The Chinese "are pestering us to test India's reaction," he says.

Indian residents of the area claim Chinese soldiers have painted Chinese characters on rocks in territory that India claims as its own. The residents say the border has never been as tightly patrolled as it is now.

Konchok Gurmet, 70 years old, lives in Spangmik, a village ringed with Tibetan prayer flags on Panggong Lake, beside the border with China.

He says that until a few years ago he was able to smuggle horses and wool across the border in exchange for Chinese crockery, clothes and thermos bottles.

These days, locals say, border forces on both sides turn smugglers back. After violent protests in Tibet last year, China has been sensitive about who crosses over. Indian police worry that herders and smugglers may be offering the Chinese information on military positions and infrastructure projects, locals say.

According to Mr. Pillai, the Indian home secretary, infrastructure development on both sides of the border has heightened interest in establishing an exact line.

The confrontation between the Indian goatherds and Chinese soldiers, which occurred in January, began after the herders crossed a river to reach a pasture they'd used for generations, Mr. Pillai says.
The Chinese viewed the river as the border line. Indian security forces haven't pressed the claim, he says, because the pasture now is encircled by Chinese sentry posts. "We'd find it difficult tactically to hold that land," he says.

China's ministry of defense declined to comment on the incident, and the Chinese foreign ministry has denied any incursions into Indian territory. "China's border patrol is always conducted in strict accordance with rules," said a foreign ministry spokeswoman last month.

Mr. Pillai says more troops are moving to the border with China, which he describes as a "gradual" buildup of "defensive positions."
Some residents of Arunachal Pradesh -- the Indian state that China claims -- say it's about time.

"India needs to wake up. China is going to flex its muscles," says Kiren Rijiju, a former member of parliament from Arunachal Pradesh. "Being one of its largest neighbors, we are a soft target."

China, India Border Stokes Rivalry - WSJ.com

[MBI Munshi]

The Bull In China’s Shop

MILITARY PREPARATION AND DANGEROUS BRINKMANSHIP RAISE THE STAKES ON BOTH SIDES OF A TROUBLED BORDER. A SINO-INDIAN AFFAIRS VETERAN DISSECTS A VOLATILE SITUATION
PREM SHANKAR JHA

Tehelka – October 23, 2009

BARELY FIVE weeks ago, when the Indian air was thick with media speculation over China’s aggressive designs in Arunachal Pradesh — in an off-the-record interaction with the prestigious US Council on Foreign Relations in New York, which was devoted almost entirely to relations with China — Indian Foreign Minister SM Krishna stonewalled every question on the recent increase in tensions along the border, insisting instead that relations between the countries had never been better. Council members, some of whom had driven or commuted two hours to hear him, could be seen clutching their heads in frustration.

This state of denial is not only new but seems to pervade every facet of Indian policy. For three years after China abruptly reminded India, on the eve of President Hu Jintao’s visit in December 2006, that it had not given up its claim on Arunachal Pradesh, almost the entire Indian intelligentsia continue to insist that relations with China had not changed fundamentally. China’s protests, supposedly, were pro forma reminders of its unsettled claims, no more and relations between the two countries had improved steadily, with trade and investment leading the way.

This belief did not change even when China steadily began a planned campaign to unravel the status quo in the region and go back on the agreements it had reached with India since 1993. In the past three years, it has

• encroached beyond the 1962 Line of Actual Control (LAC) at places in Ladakh,
• denied a visa to an official from the government of Arunachal Pradesh,
• begun to issue visas to Indians from Arunachal Pradesh and Jammu and Kashmir on separate pieces of paper,
• gone back on the 1996 agreement not to patrol or even over-fly areas within 10 km of the partially demarcated LAC
• gone back on the agreement “On Political Parameters and Guiding Principles for the Settlement of the India–China Boundary Dispute” that was signed on April 11, 2005, which bound the two sides “to safeguard the interests of the settled populations in the border areas” in reaching a boundary settlement.

In addition, barely days before the UN General Assembly convened in New York last month, China got the board of the Asian Development Bank to agree that future loans for projects in disputed areas would be denied. It will doubtless use this as a precedent to try and prevent all aid to such areas from the World Bank as well. In the first eight months of 2009, Chinese border patrols troops crossed the LAC (as understood by India) no fewer than 270 times. But all this has only hardened our official state of denial.

This denial is partly tactical. New Delhi did believe, to start with, that if it kept a low profile, the problem might again just go away, as it seemed to have done after 1993. Later, when it became apparent that the Chinese had no intention of allowing it to do so, it has used denial to buy time for strengthening its defences. Beijing has promptly latched onto these efforts to accuse India of bad faith and trying to engineer a fait accompli in a disputed area and used them to justify its reneging on the understandings reached in previous rounds of talks on the border issue. But the fact is that it was Beijing that started the escalation when it began to build a railway line paralleling the LAC from Lhasa to Shigatse in July 2007. When this line is completed next summer, it will give China an overwhelming logistical and tactical advantage in the region. India had no option but to take precautions. But this has led to a further rise in tension on the Himalayan border.

Delhi’s room for denial and, one strongly suspects, its time for taking military precautions, ran out abruptly on October 13. That morning, the Global Times, an English language adjunct of the Chinese government’s mouthpiece The Peoples’ Daily quoted a foreign office spokesman by name as having stated that “Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh made another provocative and dangerous move by visiting the East Section of the China-India Boundary, which India calls Arunachal Pradesh, on October 3, ahead of a local legislative election.” The Global Times quoted the spokesman, Ma Zhaoxu, as saying that China was “seriously dissatisfied” with the prime minister’s visit to “Southern Tibet”.

The foreign office statement deliberately broke several diplomatic taboos: it referred, for the first time ever, to the Indian prime minister by name, instead of making generalised statements of protest or displeasure. But it was the choice of words — “provocative,” “dangerous,” “seriously dissatisfied” — that was most ominous. Those schooled in the arcane language of diplomacy know that these words have often been used as preludes to war.

But what on earth is biting the Chinese? Why are they picking on India at a time when they are battling recession at home with a manifestly uncontrolled and unviable economic stimulus programme and facing something close to revolt in Xinjiang, chronic discontent in Tibet and rising social unrest in even the core Han areas of the country? The answer, as seen from Beijing, is that it is being forced down a road it does not wish to travel because India simply won’t let things be. In the past twenty months, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has visited Arunachal Pradesh twice and former defence minister Pranab Mukherjee once to declare Arunachal an integral part of India. With blunt statements such as one made recently by Mr. Krishna, — that there is nothing to discuss — China’s protests have simply been brushed aside as routine and legalistic.

There is, in fact, quite a lot to discuss, but it has very little to do with the Arunachal border. The real bone of contention is Tibet. It was responsible for the 1962 war. It could be responsible for another one in the near future. This war is by no means unavoidable. The mere fact that it was Premier Wen Jiabao who suggested the Bangkok meeting shows that China does not want a conflict any more than India. But for the two countries to avoid one, it is imperative for New Delhi to fully understand the significance of Tibet for China.

China has been giving hints and showing increasing perturbation over Delhi’s failure to appreciate its concerns over Tibet for some time. In November 2006, less than a month before President Hu Jintao’s visit, Zheng Ruixang , a senior fellow at the China Institute of International Studies told The Times of India bluntly that China wanted India to “dissolve” the Dalai Lama’s government–in-exile in Dharamsala. “The Tibetan problem,” he said, “is a major obstacle in the normalisation of relations between China and India.” If Delhi even noticed the news item, it most certainly did not appreciate its significance. That is, not till the Chinese Ambassador to Delhi turned the clock back on Arunachal a month later on the eve of Hu’s visit.
It made a far more pointed reference in mid-November last year, only nine days before the Mumbai terror attack of 26/11, when a Chinese foreign office spokesman stated that China expected India to “ban activities aimed at splitting Chinese territory.” This was a reference to the meeting of eminent Tibetans that the Dalai Lama had called in Dharamsala on November 17 to chart a course of action after the failure of the eighth round of talks on Tibetan autonomy in April 2008. Delhi ignored the warning.

The most recent linking of the two issues is to be found in the Global Times’ editorial of October 13: “India’s recent moves — including Singh’s trip and approving past visits to the region by the Dalai Lama — send the wrong signal. That could have dangerous consequences.”

THE CENTRALITY OF TIBET IN SINO-INDIAN RELATIONS

Why is Tibet, and not Arunachal or even the monastery at Tawang, the key issue? The short answer is that China has not been able to assimilate Tibet and blames India for its failure because, by giving the Dalai Lama shelter, it has kept the Tibetan political and cultural identity alive.

China’s belief that its hectic programme of Tibetan modernisation — what the nowdestroyed Gongmeng Law Research Centre described as ‘The Great Destruction and the Great Construction’ — had assimilated the Tibetans received a shock on March 10, 2008, when first Lhasa and then towns in three other provinces erupted into unrest that bordered on a mini-insurrection.

According to the Chinese authorities, this led to 18 civilian deaths, mostly of Chinese settlers. In all, the Chinese authorities claim that they arrested 1,315 persons. The Dalai Lama’s people, however, had a very different tally. According to them, the Chinese security forces killed 220 Tibetans, injured 1,300 and detained nearly 7,000.
Beijing blamed what it called the “Dalai clique” for launching a carefully planned plot to discredit China before the Olympic Games. It published a detailed account of how the unrest had been planned during meetings in Brussels, New Delhi and Dharamsala over the previous ten months and accused the Dalai Lama and, tacitly India, of blessing it by allowing them to do their planning in Dharamsala.

It claimed that five India-based and two international Tibetan organizations had met in Delhi in January 2008 and issued a “Declaration of Tibetan People’s Uprising Movement’ in which they had claimed that China and Tibet were two different countries. Three of the seven organizations were youth and women’s organizations and a fourth was an organization formed by former prisoners of the Chinese authorities. Although Beijing lost no time in blaming what it called the “Dalai clique,” its diatribe against the Dalai Lama hid a belated realization that the Tibetan autonomy movement was slowly passing into the hands of younger people who had fewer inhibitions against resorting to violence than their elders. Beijing’s anger against India stemmed from the sanctuary that India, perhaps unintentionally, had begun to provide to these newer organisations.
Throughout the following year Beijing continued to dismiss the Dalai Lama and his supporters as remnants of a feudal, oppressive, and predatory regime that the vast majority of the Tibetans were glad to be rid of. But its actions belied its words. In March this year, in the lead up to the 60th anniversary of the Dalai Lama’s flight, it blanketed every known and potential trouble spot in Greater Tibet with soldiers and riot police in gear that made them look like space invaders, closed schools and colleges and confined monks to their monasteries for weeks before the event. As a result, nothing happened. But China’s leaders cannot have failed to wonder if they will have to turn Tibet into a pressure cooker year after year. They cannot be blamed for feeling that something needs to change.
The other cause of the shrillness of Beijing’s reaction, both towards the Dalai Lama and India, is its changed perception of the Tibetan autonomy movement. In the past two decades, this has undergone a transformation that no one could have foreseen even as recently as a decade and a half ago. The spread of the mobile telephony and the Internet across the world and across China has enabled Tibetans in exile to establish and maintain continuous contact with Tibetans within China. It has also connected Tibetans living all around the world. This has eroded the capacity of the Chinese state, as indeed other states, to manage discontent by isolating the discontented from each other. On the contrary, the Tibetan nationalist community is no longer just a group of refugees who sought shelter in India and other countries from Chinese oppression and would like nothing better than to find a political arrangement with Beijing that would enable them to return and live in peace. It has, instead, become a new kind of nation – a nation without a geographical territory – but one that is capable of communicating and coordinating action across international boundaries. Tibet, in short, is slowly emerging as a ‘virtual’ nation, with Dharamsala as the seat of its ‘virtual’ government.

THE FLAW IN THE PROPOSAL FOR GENUINE AUTONOMY

Beijing cannot but view this with some consternation. For the alternative to forced assimilation — some kind of accommodation with the Dalai Lama — has, so far, remained shut because of the nature of his demand for ‘Genuine Autonomy.’ Through nine rounds of talks the Dalai Lama has steadfastly maintained that autonomy needs to be granted not only to present day Tibet (TAR) but also to Greater Tibet. This includes the whole of Qinghai, the southern part of Gansu, the western part of Sichuan and the northwestern part of Yunnan.

The second is “the right of Tibetans to create their own ‘government institutions and processes that are best suited to their needs and characteristics.’” The Dalai Lama wants the administration thus created to be responsible for 11 subjects including not just language, religion, culture, education and domicile but also protection of the environment, the utilization of natural resources, economic development, trade and public health.

Beijing considers both as poison pills that are stepping-stones to splitting China. The first involves the vivisection of four provinces. The second involves the creation of a second political system within the same country, in which power does not flow down from the State to the people, but flows up from the people to the State. It would be difficult for any government to make such wrenching changes in its constitution except over a considerable period of time. But it is all the less feasible for the Chinese State, which embodies not only the totalitarian traditions of communism but also the absolutist traditions of the Confucian state that preceded it.
Beijing cannot, therefore, understand why, when professing friendship, India is prepared to let the Dalai Lama make proposals from Indian soil that are essentially subversive. This accounts for the sudden eruption of anti-Indian rhetoric on Chinese internet sites immediately after the March 2008 Lhasa riots.

New Delhi seems singularly unaware of the peril into which it is being dragged by the changing equation between Beijing and the Dalai Lama. This is at least partly because of the vast asymmetry in the importance China and India attach to Tibet. To India, the Tibetans in exile remain refugees who sought political asylum and have now only to be discouraged from taking hostile political actions against China from Indian soil. Beijing, however, regards them as a well-knit insurgent group based in India that skillfully mobilizes international sympathy and uses the internet to reach Tibetans within China, to foment an insurgency. To understand how seriously Beijing views this, one has only to compare it’s problem in Tibet with India’s problem in Kashmir. Both the Tibetan and Kashmiri communities are of the same size – about 6 million. But while Kashmir valley accounts for only 0.13 percent, or 1/800ths, of India’s land area, Greater Tibet accounts for a quarter of China’s.

Mutual incomprehension reached a peak in November 2008, when India ignored a warning from a spokesman of the Chinese foreign office that China expected India to “ban activities aimed at splitting Chinese territory.” To India, the meeting was a way of allowing the Dalai Lama to retain control of the Tibetan movement and steer it away from violence. But China saw it as the provision of another opportunity for the “Dalai clique” to work out strategies for fomenting insurrection in Tibet.

TIME IS RUNNING SHORT

The latest, explicit statements by the Chinese foreign office show that time is running short. The point of no return will almost certainly be the Dalai Lama’s visit in November to inaugurate a hospital. Both China’s newfound self importance and its explicit claims to Tawang as the second most important monastery in Tibet will make it difficult for it to do nothing.

Delhi can still gamble on carrying off its bluff. But the danger to both its economy and its political structure is too great for it to hang all of its hopes on this slender thread. Militarily, India may no longer be a pushover in Arunachal Pradesh or Ladakh. But the economic consequences of even a minor war would be catastrophic. Foreign capital would rush out, the share market would collapse, our already high interest rates would soar into the stratosphere, and growth would grind to a halt and unemployment rise by the tens of millions in the unorganised sector.

The alternate — indeed the right thing to do — is to turn the impending crisis into an opportunity for helping both China and the Dalai Lama arrive at an acceptable formula for Tibetan autonomy within China. The starting point should be for India to persuade the Dalai Lama to postpone his visit to Tawang. The next step should be to dissociate itself explicitly from the demand for autonomy in Greater Tibet, as opposed to the TAR. This is not to cast doubt on the cultural validity of the Dalai Lama’s claim, but simply to find an acceptable second best solution that will meet the Tibetans’ core demands without requiring a changing of political boundaries in China. For the plain truth is that India cannot afford to be seen as supporting, even tacitly, a demand that it would not countenance on itself under any circumstances.

Should China show any interest in India playing a mediatory role, New Delhi can use its unique position as the de facto protector of the Tibetan national identity to persuade the Dalai Lama to make three amendments to his blueprint for Genuine Autonomy. The first is to drop his demand to create a Greater Tibet by redrawing the borders of the four neighbouring provinces and limit his proposals for Tibetan governance to the TAR. Should the experiment succeed, it can be replicated in Qinghai, and in Tibetan-dominated prefectures in Yunnan and Sichuan, again without redrawing provincial borders, at a later date.

The second is to reduce the number of subjects to be devolved upon the administration of the TAR from the present eleven to four: religion, culture, education and personal and customary law. The third and, in many ways, most important, is to drop the demand for an immediate shift from the present system of ‘government from above’ to ‘government from below’ and to propose a time frame within which the democratic procedures required to make the shift should be introduced.

New Delhi should not find it too difficult to persuade the Dalai Lama that this is the best way to proceed. He has admitted that the failure of the eighth round of talks has made it necessary to look for a new approach. That was the purpose of the Dharamsala conference. He also recognizes that the conference has, in effect, put a limit on the time within which he must devise his new approach. His observation after the conference last November, that “India has been too cautious” on the issue of Tibet should therefore be read as a call for help – an invitation to Delhi to shed its reticence and help him find a solution.

Beijing’s reaction to an Indian offer of good offices is likely to be more complex. It will first need to shed more than a century of suspicion of any initiative on Tibet that originates south of the Himalayas. But if the statement made by Zhu Weiqun, the head of the Communist Party’s United Front Work Department — who led the team that examined the Dalai Lama’s proposal — is to be taken at face value, China has not altogether closed its doors on dialogue and may still be receptive to a proposal that does not, in his words, “aim at revising the constitution so that this separatist group could actually possess the power of an independent state.” So Beijing may welcome a proposal that takes the form described above. Even if it does not do so immediately, India’s constructive approach will buy time and open new avenues for the resumption of a constructive dialogue on the border, among other issues.

Tehelka - India's Independent Weekly News Magazine