The Great Wall Of India-China Agreements

First came decades of talks and pacts starting in 1993. Then came a 54-month standoff. Now that a new beginning is being signaled, what happens to the earlier covenants?

- MANISH TEWARI

AT conference on geopolitics, a Chinese participant made a rather interesting—if not intriguing—pitch in the context of the 54-month-long standoff on the Line of Actual Control (LAC). He said that both India and China needed to make a new beginning, while referring to the process of disengagement that has been playing out intermittently over the past four years. It provoked a thought where it would leave the rather carefully constructed architecture of agreements that had been put into place to manage the LAC between 1993 and 2013 across different Indian and Chinese administrations.

To provide a bit of perspective, the Sino-Indian relationship went into a deep freeze after the border war of 1962. It was marked by periodic clashes and prolonged standoffs like the ones at Nathu La in 1967 and Somdurong Chu in 1986-87. In 1988, Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi broke the ice when he visited Beijing in December and met with the Chinese leadership, including Deng Xiaoping. However, it was only in 1993 that the first pact with China, titled Border Peace and Tranquility Agreement, came to be signed. It was followed in 1996 with the Agreement on Confidence Building Measures. In June 2003, during Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee's visit to China, the Declaration on Principles for Relations and Comprehensive Cooperation between the Republic of India and the People's Republic of China was arrived at along with a memorandum between the governments on expanding border trade. It was during this visit that the Special Representatives Mechanism on the India-China boundary issue was also set up.