China still challenges India in the Himalayas as BRICS summit approaches

With the Oct. 22 BRICS summit meeting approaching, China and India have stepped up discussions about defusing their tense military standoff along the long Himalayan frontier. But although the 10-nation summit in the Russian city of Kazan is catalyzing efforts to resolve the confrontation — which has sparked rival force buildups and intermittent clashes — it is far from certain that any deal will be reached.

The standoff between the two Asian giants is not grabbing international headlines, thanks in part to the wars raging in Ukraine and the Middle East. But the threat of the confrontation escalating to a border war of the kind fought in 1962 cannot be discounted. Both sides have significantly ramped up border deployments of troops and weapons, with India acknowledging the situation is “very tense and dangerous.”

The Sino-Indian faceoff, as well as the Russian invasion of Ukraine, are detracting from the international appeal of BRICS, the world’s first major non-Western initiative. Founded 15 years ago by Brazil, Russia, India and China as BRIC, the group, with the addition of South Africa in 2011, became BRICS. And with this year’s entry of five additional countries, it has become BRICS-plus, accounting for nearly half the world’s population and 40 percent of global trade.

As many as 40 more countries have lined up to join BRICS, which seeks to shape a multipolar global order in place of the fading era of Western dominance. An easing of military tensions between nuclear-armed titans China and India could help build consensus to further enlarge BRICS.

The Sino-Indian border faceoff was triggered by China’s stealth encroachments on some Indian borderlands in April 2020. India failed to foresee the Chinese aggression largely because Prime Minister Narendra Modi had focused on appeasing Beijing in a bid to chip away at the China-Pakistan strategic axis. Between 2014 and 2019, Modi met with Chinese President Xi Jinping 18 times, building a close personal rapport. The Xi-ordered encroachments were thus widely seen in India as a stab in the back.

Xi seriously miscalculated that China would be able to present the land grabs to India as a fait accompli, like the Chinese “salami-slicing” expansionism elsewhere in Asia. In contrast to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, China prefers incremental expansionism, enabled by stealth and deception.

India’s robust military response to China’s encroachments, including more than matching Chinese force deployments, took Beijing by surprise, helping to spotlight not just the Sino-Indian territorial disputes but also India’s challenge to Chinese power and capability. No other nation, not even the U.S., has locked horns with the Chinese military in this century the way India has since 2020.

Xi, by transforming the Sino-Indian frontier into a “hot” border patrolled by tens of thousands of rival troops, has crimped the further pursuit of his own “salami-slicing” strategy on the Himalayan massif. China will find it more challenging from now on to nibble away at Indian territories.

With the U.S.-China rivalry deepening, the last thing Xi should be doing is turning India into an enduring enemy. Yet as the world’s fastest-growing major economy, India is moving closer to America, with Modi’s foreign policy showing a distinct pro-Western tilt.

With an eye on China, India has ramped up its military buildup and modernization. A stronger India aligned with Western powers and Japan is likely to stymie China’s plan to gain strategic preeminence in Asia.

A war with India could expose China’s weaknesses. Whereas the Chinese military relies largely on conscripts, India, with an all-volunteer force, has the world’s most-experienced troops in mountain warfare. The Chinese military, though, has a technological edge over Indian forces.

Against this backdrop, China’s recent charm offensive in India, including initiating renewed efforts to defuse the military standoff, suggests that Xi wants to salvage Beijing’s relationship with New Delhi — but without losing face at home.

For four-and-a-half years, tens of thousands of Chinese troops have remained deployed along the inhospitable Himalayan frontier, which has some of the harshest terrain on Earth. Oxygen levels are so low that soldiers take weeks to acclimatize before being deployed on the front lines. If Xi were to reach a deal with India centered on a pullback of rival forces, it would raise questions in China about why he ever launched this provocation in the first place.

This may well explain why, in the bilateral negotiations up to now, the Chinese side has sought a deal largely on its own terms, dimming the prospect of reaching an agreement by the time Xi and Modi could meet on the sidelines of the BRICS summit.

But even if Xi climbed down to some extent, leading to a deal to implement a sequential process of disengagement, de-escalation and removal of rival forces, the new warfare-related infrastructure China has built along the India frontier will remain in place. India thus would not be able to lower its guard.

China has bored tunnels and shafts into mountainsides to set up an elaborate underground military infrastructure, as if preparing for war. In addition, it has planted settlers in new militarized border villages, the equivalent of the artificial islands it created in the South China Sea to serve as forward military bases.

China and India, which represent more than one-third of the global population, became neighbors only after the Chinese Communist Party annexed Tibet in 1951. Today, China and India need to find ways to peacefully coexist. Yet, despite the latest efforts to mend fences, their strategic rivalry seems likely to endure.

Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist and the author of nine books, including the award-winning “Water: Asia’s New Battleground.”