Tortuous journey of India-China talks

TWENTY-FIVE rounds, 23 years, one agreement, and even that has been subject to constant revision through reinterpretation. India counts the rounds held; China counts the ridgelines held.

Conceived in 2003 under then Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee to bypass diplomatic hair-splitting and forge a high-level political settlement, the Special Representatives framework has slowly degenerated into a procedural exercise in crisis management.

Its sole structural milestone, the April 11, 2005, Agreement on Political Parameters and Guiding Principles, also essentially lies hollowed out. Article VII of this agreement was intended to protect “settled populations” — safeguarding territories like Tawang. New Delhi read the compact as “Tawang secured”. Beijing has spent two decades unreading it.

Finally, in March 2017, then Chinese Special Representative Dai Bingguo declared that Indian concessions in the east were key to Chinese “accommodation” elsewhere.

When the two current Special Representatives met in Beijing on August 25 for the 25th round of the dialogue, the mechanism turned 23 with not even a kilometre of the boundary settled.

Since the April-June 2020 Chinese intrusions across the Line of Actual Control (LAC), the mandate has inverted: India finds itself negotiating a tactical disengagement and friction-point buffer zones rather than strategic boundary demarcation, effectively trading established patrolling rights to preserve a fragile peace.

The eight points of consensus and outcomes arrived at on August 25 read more like a crisis management mechanism than a boundary dispute settlement process. Even the terms of reference of the Expert Group on Boundary Delimitation and the Working Group on Border Management under the Working Mechanism for Consultation and Coordination (WMCC) on India-China Border Affairs are yet to be mutually settled.

Conversely, the promised “Early Harvest” in sector-wise delimitation, hyped after the 24th round on August 19, 2025, has been given a quiet burial in the latest pronouncements, leaving behind in concrete terms only a scheduled 26th round in India next year.

A device created to deliver a settlement now exists to administer its absence. Is the mechanism working, or is it merely meeting?

The western sector is the oldest wound. The Treaty of Chushul (1842) between the Dogra Durbar, Lhasa, and the Qing dynasty pledged old, established frontiers without defining one. WH Johnson’s 1865 survey placed Aksai Chin within Kashmir. Claude MacDonald’s note of March 14, 1899, to the Tsungli Yamen offered China most of the Aksai Chin plains. Peking never replied. The silence was weaponised. China drove its Xinjiang-Tibet highway through Aksai Chin, announcing it in 1957. Ten Indian policemen were killed in a firefight at Kongka Pass on October 21, 1959, while roughly 38,000 square km of Ladakh came under unlawful Chinese occupation. Another 5,180 square km of the Shaksgam valley, illegitimately occupied by Pakistan, was signed away on March 2, 1963, to China. All of this territory rightfully belongs to India.

The eastern sector is the newest claim. The McMahon Line was delineated in notes exchanged by Henry McMahon and Lonchen Shatra at Simla on March 24-25, 1914. China’s plenipotentiary initialled the draft Convention on April 27, but Peking repudiated it. Britain and Tibet signed a revised version of the Convention on July 3, proceeding without China.

On that repudiation rests Beijing’s claim to roughly 90,000 square km of Arunachal Pradesh. Why Tawang, above all? Because the sixth Dalai Lama was born at Urgelling near Tawang in 1683, and whoever holds Tawang holds a veto over the politics of reincarnation, the only legitimising currency of Chinese rule in Tibet. The claim is theological, but the gains sought are territorial.

The middle sector, some 2,000 square km from Barahoti to Shipki La, is the only one whose maps were exchanged, in 2000-01, under Article X of the Confidence Building Measures Agreement of November 29, 1996, binding both sides to “speed up the process of clarification and confirmation” of the LAC. When western sector maps were shown in June 2002 during the 14th Joint Working Group meeting, the Chinese side withdrew them within minutes, and the exercise has been dead since then. It was never attempted in the case of the eastern sector.

Why does Beijing refuse to clarify the LAC? Because cartographic ambiguity is a standing licence for coercion, and every unclarified kilometre is a future salami slice.

Then Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai carried the original bargain to Delhi in April 1960: China would recognise the McMahon Line in the east if India surrendered its claim over Aksai Chin in the west. India declined. The Officials’ Report of February 1961 recorded two irreconcilable cases, and the Lok Sabha resolution of November 14, 1962, vowed to recover every inch of “the sacred soil of India,” a parliamentary lock no government has dared to pick since then. By 1985, during the sixth round of the border talks, Beijing upended its own offer, demanding the east, meaning Tawang, as its price.

Vajpayee’s China policy bookended the irony. On May 11, 1998, he justified Pokhran-II to US President Bill Clinton by citing “an overt nuclear weapon state on our borders” that had committed armed aggression in 1962. This was leaked to The New York Times in two days, and repairing that damage took five years and came at a price. In the 2003 Beijing Declaration, Vajpayee recognised Tibet as part of China and gained implicit Chinese recognition of Sikkim in turn.

Article VII of the April 2005 agreement was supposed to protect settled populations. Beijing has systematically neutralised this clause on the ground by populating contested frontiers with over 600 dual-use Xiaokang border villages, converting uninhabited buffer zones into State-backed civilian strongholds. Beijing has tenanted the dispute before negotiating it.

India’s answer, the Vibrant Villages Programme, approved by the Union Cabinet only on February 15, 2023, committed

Rs 4,800 crore to developing hamlets already emptying out. Can a demographic offensive be answered with a pilot scheme?

Broad theatre-level transgressions by China happened between April and June 2020. If nobody intruded, what then did 21 rounds of corps commander-level talks disengage? Whose land became the buffer zones Indian patrols cannot enter? What of the 26 of 65 patrolling points reported beyond reach at the January 2023 DGPs’ conference?

The understanding reached on October 21, 2024, restored coordinated patrolling at Depsang and Demchok, not the status quo ante of April 2020 in all areas. When did status quo ante quietly exit our lexicon?

Beyond the choreography, the Special Representatives process has been repurposed from settlement to a sedative. Instead of actually resolving the border dispute, it is now used just to keep things calm before major summits — such as the upcoming BRICS event in Delhi.

Thirty-four WMCC meetings have produced only repetitive statements. The resumption of flights and pilgrimages masks a critical reality: the need to clarify the border and restore the pre-April 2020 status quo on the LAC.

Manish Tewari is Lok Sabha MP and former I&B Minister