When Rajiv Gandhi traveled to Beijing in December 1988, the first prime ministerial visit since his grandfather, he returned with a framework for negotiating a solution to the border dispute that has overshadowed India-China relations since the 1962 war.
When P V Narasimha Rao flew to Beijing in September 1993, both nations signed an agreement to maintain peace and tranquility along the Line of Actual Control, as the India-China border is called.
When Atal Bihari Vajpayee visited Beijing in June 2003. India and China decided to deploy Special Representatives to find solutions to the boundary problem; China also recognised Sikkim as part of India.
Complete Coverage: Dr Singh in China
That no such substantial achievement beyond what the prime minister stated -- "We had a very detailed discussion on the boundary issue. It is a complex and complicated issue and we both recognised that it will take time to resolve this issue, but both of us resolved to instruct our Special Representatives to accelerate their efforts, work out an agreed framework for the resolution of the boundary problem" -- has been recorded has been brandished by Indian hawks to declare Dr Singh's visit a failure.
Perhaps the most impressive feat is that the border issue -- the huge elephant in the room whenever the two sides meet -- is no longer allowed to overwhelm the proceedings. That is not to say it is no longer an issue. It is, and it will stay that way, I think, for my lifetime. Always discussed, always in quest of resolution.
What do the Chinese want? They want 43,180 square kilometers of Aksai Chin, an area bordering Tibet, in Jammu and Kashmir, which they seized after the 1962 war, (including 5,180 sq km of the Sakshgam valley which Pakistan gave the Chinese) plus all of Arunchal Pradesh, especially Tawang. The Chinese don't talk of giving India any territory in return.
In the last 14 months, the Chinese have been particularly forceful about their claims to Arunachal. I do not believe, as some China specialists do, that then Chinese ambassador Sun Yuxi's declaration to CNN-IBN about Arunachal Pradesh being Chinese territory was uncalculated. Chinese diplomats don't stray from the script. Sun's comments were designed to bring Arunachal upfront, and commenced a series of similar claims by other Chinese officials and actions, including the denial of a visa to an Arunachal bureaucrat on the ground that he didn't require such a document since he was a Chinese national in any case!
Chinese soldiers have crossed the Arunachal border 140 times the last year according to the Indo Tibetan Border Police. A senior Indian diplomat, speaking in Beijing, played down these transgressions, indicating that it was part of a Chinese ritual to reiterate their claims to the disputed territory.
During Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao's visit to India in April 2005, both nations declared that populated areas would not be transferred during any resolution of the dispute. National Security Adviser M K Narayanan told my senior colleague Sheela Bhatt and myself last January that "what we have agreed upon is that where there are settled populations we don't want to have a Partition-kind of situation."
There was speculation before the prime minister's visit that the Chinese wanted to renege on the Singh-Wen agreement on populated areas. Asked about it a day before the official talks began in Beijing, a senior Indian diplomat said, "We have an agreement on this, why should we rake it up with them?" In the event, the Chinese did not raise the issue, at least on record.
A China watcher in New Delhi believes Beijing raised Arunachal Pradesh -- what he describes an extended claim area -- to buttress its claim to Aksai Chin. The Chinese believe Aksai Chin, which adjoins Tibet, is strategically vital and probably surmise that India would be more likely to let go of an area where not a leaf of grass grows rather than populated Arunachal. But can any Indian government dare to give away territory? After the 1962 war, Parliament passed a resolution that it would take back all the land China had seized. Forty-five years later, that remains an Indian ambition. No government can risk political suicide by bartering away Indian land.
China knows that seizing Arunachal by force is no longer an option. India is a nuclear power. To use force would risk an atomic conflict. Moreover, our soldiers have conventional superiority in the area -- 11 Mountain Divisions of 220,000 crack Indian troops confront lesser trained 400,000 members of the People's Liberation Army. Twenty years ago, the PLA backed off in Arunachal after then army chief the legendary General K Sundarji's Operation Checkerboard military exercise reveal a 10: 1 kill ratio in the Indian Army's favour.
Beijing's priority, notes the afore-quoted China watcher, is in any case Taiwan, not Tawang. The Chinese are worried that Taiwanese President Chen Shui-bian, who lost the parliamentary elections in his country this week, may manipulate the coming referendum in his country to stay in power and keep Taiwan separate from the mainland. So concerned are the Chinese over developments in Taiwan that that distant island found mention in the vision agenda, while Tibet, which was discussed in passing, was ignored.
Some news outlets have speculated that 60 per cent of the border dispute has been resolved, but this is unlikely. Maps of the Middle sector -- about 524 km in Himachal Pradesh and Uttrakhand -- which share a border with Tibet have been exchanged by India and China. But both sides are said to refuse to part with geographical information on the Western sector (Aksai Chin) and Eastern sector (Arunachal Pradesh). Despite that stalemate, both India and China have not allowed the dispute to become, as the prime minister described it recently, 'uni-dimensional', meaning it will 'not hold up things the way Pakistan does with Kashmir.'
Image: Beijing Deputy Mayor Liu Jingmin escorts Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to the Olympic Centre. Left: Commerce Minister Kamal Nath; Foreign Secretary Shiv Shankar Menon, second from right; right, National Security Adviser M K Narayanan. Photograph: Jay Mandal/On Assignment
Also read: Remembering A War
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