US-INDIA GLOBAL REVIEW JUL-SEP 2020

10 US-INDIA GLOBAL REVIEW JULY-SEPTEMBER 2020 however, a nuclear dimension to the dispute. "It's important, first of all, because these are two nuclear- armed powers," that have not definitively demarcated the border despite twenty rounds of border talks," Ayres said in an interview on PBS June 16. While it's not known what pre- cisely led to the latest violent clash, Ayres said, the worry is about it escalating further. "When you have a standoff of this nature, when you have, again, two nuclear powers that have a border standoff, you always worry about what the possible path of escala- tion could be." She hoped the process of de- escalation would continue, "But I don't think we should make any mistake about the fact that, when you see, suddenly, all of a sud- den, after more than four-and-a- half decades, troop fatalities in this way, it does raise concerns." While neither India and China are looking at an interlocutor, and in fact, would shun any idea of Washington's mediation because they had bilateral mechanisms for dealing with such situations, Ayres said, "... I do think the United States should signal that territorial assertiveness — we are seeing territorial assertiveness on China's part around the whole region — is not acceptable." Ashley Tellis, senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, wrote about rising tensions days before the June 16 hand-to-hand combat. According to his rationale, China not only had little respect for India's long-standing efforts to freeze the status quo, but was using India's internal actions in Jammu and Kashmir as a provo- cation to expand its control over new parts of the Himalayan bor- derlands taking brazen actions to do so. Even on the agreements the two sides have agreed to in the past, "Beijing has thus far consis- tently declined to follow through on its obligations," Tellis said, tak- ing bits and pieces of land in the Ladakh region to eventually con- trol the entire Aksai Chin plateau. Not only is the India-China bor- der issue remained a thorn on New Delhi's side for many decades, Beijing's "anxieties" may have risen when the status of Jammu & Kashmir was changed in August 2019, and Ladakh became a Union Territory directly under the central government. Carafano speculated that the Chinese were using the confronta- tion on the Himalayan border as a diversion from the internal effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and the economic decline. "Maybe China is worried about looking weak. Or maybe Beijing is facing more internal pressure than we suspected. After all, China's econ- omy has suffered a massive 6 percent drop in output, the first negative economic statistic in over 15 years," he opined. Tellis however, nixed this idea in his June 4 piece "Hustling in Himalayas: Sino-Indian Border Confrontation" where he believes the foray on the border with India was in line with general pattern of Chinese behavior elsewhere. "According to this reading, signs of new Chinese aggressive- ness along the Sino-Indian border is all of a piece with the new security law Beijing has enacted to control Hong Kong, the enunci- ation of new administrative struc- tures in the South China Sea, and the new language on Taiwanese reunification used during the May 2020 National People’s Congress plenary session in Beijing," Tellis said. The recommendations from experts to censure China or at least lean on it, come in the midst of a firestorm between Washington and Beijing and major differences within the U.S. admin- istration and with the U.S. Congress. Among the many factors con- tributing to turmoil : A new book by President Trump's former National Security Advisor John Bolton, where Bolton alleges Trump pleaded with President Xi Jinping to import more agricultural products and help him win the 2020 election, and endorsed the camps where millions of Uighur Muslims have been isolated; The potential sanctions order Trump signed June 18 against China over the incarceration of Uyghur's; and the U.S. Congress passing a bill condemning the Uighur camps. These and the flare-up over China's handling of the COVID-19 pandemic in the early stages, could all condition whether the experts' recommen- dations could sway Washington to be proactive on the India-China situation. However, the almost unanimous vote for New Delhi's membership in the United Nations Security Council, albeit as a non-voting member for two years, could pro- vide another forum in which to negotiate or raise the issue of China's posturing. Ela Dutt | Editor, Parikh Worldwide Media