By
Sanja De Silva Jayatilleka
“As the stand-off between the Indian and Chinese militaries enters its third month at Doklam…The entire neighbourhood is watching”
-Suhashini Haider, The Hindu, 11.8.2017
There is a situation brewing about 4 kilometers away from the “crest of the mountain range separating the waters flowing into the Sikkim Teesta and its affluents from the waters flowing into the Thibetan Machu and northwards”. These lyrical words in the 1890 Tibet-Sikkim Convention between the British and Qing Empires, define the boundaries between China and Bhutan, which China cites in its claim for territory at the border in Doklam in its on-going dispute with India since June this year.[i]
Sudheendra Kulkarni, head of Observer Research Foundation, writing on the 22nd of August 2017 warned that “…the current deepening mistrust between India and China…even carries the seeds of an armed conflict over the prolonged military standoff at Doklam.”
India’s other neighbours are watching the situation closely, but is Sri Lanka? Nepal’s Deputy Prime Minister Krishna Bahadur Mahara has already said it “will not get dragged into this or that side in the border dispute”.
While border disputes are common on the India-China border, and the foreign editor of the Hindustan Times, Pramit Paul Chaudri writes that it is almost a weekly event along the disputed Himalayan border, there is something different about this particular dispute. Indian commentators point out that it is the first time that “it is not taking place in Indian soil or Indian claimed territory”.[ii]
Today, as both countries expand their interests regionally and globally, Chaudri points out that India and China are “more likely to run into each other in third countries”. In the context of the rapidly changing dynamics between these two emerging powers in our region and indeed globally, Chaudri argues that “a new set of understandings will need to be worked out in the coming decades. Unfortunately, as has happened in the past, it will take a number of crises at a number of flashpoints to occur before New Delhi and Beijing accept the goalposts have shifted and the playbook needs to be updated.”
Of great concern to Sri Lanka is his conclusion that “it is in this transition period during which miscalculations are most likely to happen.”
Continue reading ‘Between Dragons and Elephants: Sri Lanka’s Dangerous Quest for Cash from China and India’ »
