China’s territorial revisionism has been unrelenting. Under Mao Zedong, China more than doubled its size by annexing Tibet and Xinjiang, making it the world’s fourth- largest country in area. Under Xi Jinping, China’s expansionism increasingly threatens its neighbours, big and small. Xi’s regime has just opened a new territorial front against one of the world’s smallest countries, Bhutan, by disputing its eastern borders.

In this light, the outcome of China’s aggression against India will have an important bearing on Asian security. If the current India-China military disengagement ends up like the 2017 Doklam disengagement in making China the clear winner, an emboldened Xi regime will likely become a greater threat to neighbours.

China’s strategy after its disastrous 1979 invasion of Vietnam has been to win without fighting. Deception, concealment and surprise have driven China’s repeated use of force — from seizing the Johnson Reef in 1988 and the Mischief Reef in 1995 to occupying the Scarborough Shoal in 2012 and now vantage locations in Ladakh. It has changed the South China Sea’s geopolitical map without firing a shot or incurring any international costs.

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China has displayed its art of deception even in its disengagement process with India. The first accord of June 6 to disengage collapsed after the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) erected structures on Indian territory and then ambushed and killed Indian Army men on verification patrol. The disengagement process restarted after Prime Minister (PM) Narendra Modi seemed to let China off the hook with his June 19 speech at the all-party meeting. But the fresh process became a ruse for PLA to encroach on two new Indian areas — the Depsang Y-Junction; and the Galwan Valley site of the ambush killings.

India and China are now in their third disengagement series. But while the previous two abortive rounds followed military-level talks, the latest cycle is being driven politically. We now know that Modi’s July 3 Ladakh visit, and his tough words there, were essentially designed to create domestic political space for his government to seek de-escalation with China. Barely 48 hours after his visit, India and China hammered out a disengagement deal.

Will the latest deal stick? Having encroached on key areas that overlook India’s defences, PLA is sitting pretty. A full return to status quo ante as sought by India seems remote, thanks to India’s own mixed signals. Moreover, by encroaching on additional areas behind the previous disengagement facade, China has armed itself with greater leverage to impose a revised status quo, including by applying the precept that “possession is nine-tenths of the law”.

Disengagement (pullback of rival forces from close proximity), if not de-escalation (ending hostilities through demobilisation of forces), meshes well with China’s interest in presenting India a fait accompli. Removing the threat of an Indian counteroffensive or Indian tit-for-tat land grab will help China win without fighting.

This explains why China has accepted disengagement — but on its terms. This is illustrated in the Galwan Valley, where India has pulled back from its own territory and created a “buffer zone” on its side of the Line of Actual Control (LAC). These steps, though temporary, create a new, China-advantageous status quo that PLA could seek to enforce because it keeps India out of China’s newly-claimed zone — the Galwan Valley.

The risk that, like at Doklam, the current disengagement may not end well for India is high. Instead of demonstrating strength and resolve, India has displayed zeal to end the stand-off, despite its armed forces being mobilised for possible war.

At a time when the international environment is beginning to turn against China, India could have prolonged the stand-off until winter to compel restoration of status quo ante. But, instead, it has kicked status quo ante down the road and settled merely for disengagement. This allows China to hold on its core territorial gains and trade the marginal occupied territories for Indian concessions, as part of its well-known “advance 10 miles and retreat six miles” strategy.

Far from imposing military costs, India has shied away even from trade actions against the aggressor, as if to preserve the option of another Modi-Xi summit. India’s steps so far (banning Chinese mobile apps and announcing an intent to restrict Chinese investment in some areas) have been designed to assuage public anger at home, but without imposing substantive costs on Beijing or damaging bilateral relations.

In 1967, a weak India, while recovering from the 1962 and 1965 wars, gave China a bloody nose. But in 2017 and again now, after its soldiers displayed extraordinary bravery in tackling China’s aggression, a nuclear-armed India hastily sought disengagement. Its decision-makers remain loath to fundamentally change the China policy even when faced with aggression.

Bite by bite, China has been nibbling away at India’s borderlands, even as successive Indian PMs have sought to appease it. When political calculations trump military factors and a nation lives by empty rhetoric, it can win neither war nor peace.

The present path risks locking India in a “no war, no peace” situation with China and imposing mounting security costs. This path aids China’s time-tested strategy of attrition, friction and containment to harass, encumber, encircle, deceive and weigh India down.

If India wants Himalayan peace, it must make China pay for its aggression to help create a deterrent effect. The present aggression — the most serious since the 1960s — resulted from India letting China off the hook too easily in 2017, allowing it to capture Doklam. And if China emerges the winner from the current crisis, its next aggression could be worse. Only a chastened China saddled with high costs and loss of face will rein in its aggressive expansionism.

After the successful outcome of the July 6 meeting between National Security Adviser and Special Representative for boundary talks, Ajit Doval, and his counterpart and Chinese foreign minister, Wang Yi, there has been a palpable lowering of tensions between the Indian and Chinese armies along the 3,488 km Line of Actual Control (LAC). The aggressive Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has thinned its presence at Finger Four in Pangong Tso, has withdrawn from forward positions to base camps in the Galwan sector, and is on the way back to its April positions in the Gogra and Hot Springs area. Disengagement has begun with de-escalation to follow in next three weeks — three divisions (30,000 troops) each of the Indian and Chinese armies are still facing each other from Ladakh to Arunachal Pradesh.

There is a certain amount of satisfaction among national security planners that the Indian military stood up to PLA, but the massive bilateral erosion of trust after the June 15 flare-up has convinced the Narendra Modi government that Beijing will be back on LAC, perhaps at Depsang Plains in Ladakh, next summer. For a country which believes that it is a global superpower, 2017 Doklam and 2020 Galwan are mere tactical mistakes in power projection and ambition.

That Prime Minister (PM) Modi will think a hundred times before he does a Wuhan or Chennai connect again with paramount leader Xi Jinping is akin to a traffic ticket for the Middle Kingdom. For a rampaging China, it is only the big picture that matters.

The Chinese expansionist posture in Ladakh is intertwined with the country’s plans in the South China Sea — something that is evident by looking at the world map. Beijing wants the Shyok river alignment to be the border with India in Ladakh so that the multi-billion dollar China-Pakistan Economic Corridor is further away from the Indian military positions, and also to ensure it gets a better all-weather route linking the Tibet Highway in Aksai Chin to the Karakoram highway south of the Khunjerab pass.

With Pakistan now reduced to a client State of China, it is through the port of Balochistan that the PLA Navy will dominate the oil trade in the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Sea. The Chinese base in Djibouti and Beijing’s huge influence on Africa’s eastern seaboard will allow it to dominate the sea route from Suez Canal. The strategic location of both the Gwadar and Djibouti bases makes this amply evident to any military planner.

The Chinese military’s ambition in the South China Sea is not only limited to dominating more than half of world trade passing through the Malacca, Lombard and Sunda Straits, but to also capture Taiwan as part of One China Policy to, then, break out from its backyard and contest the dominance of the Pacific Ocean with the United States (US) Japan and Australia. The military key to this posture is the presence of ballistic missile firing Chinese nuclear submarines at Yulin Naval Base at Hainan Islands, just north of Vietnam.

As a military plan, all this looked good and achievable, till such time India, under PM Modi, called the Ladakh bluff and the mighty US Navy simultaneously pincered Beijing by challenging the PLA Navy in the South China Sea. Currently, supercarriers USS Ronald Reagan and USS Nimitz are not only orchestrating a full spectrum war game in the South China Sea but also daring Beijing’s mouthpieces who threaten to use DF-21 D and DF-26 “ship killer” nuclear missiles on carriers. The US task forces now dominate all the exit routes from the East and South China sea in Miyako, Bashi Channel and Luzon Strait through which the global internet cables pass undersea.

Asean countries are also unhappy with China, and Japan is finally standing up to Beijing in the Senkaku Island dispute. Australia and Canada have called out China, and Europe has finally woken up to the reality of a Communist State. If one were to look at the big picture, then the global pushback against China was inspired by the Galwan fightback and followed by US President Donald Trump translating America’s often stated but never implemented Asian Pivot objectives on the sea. The plight of the Buddhist people of Tibet and Muslim Uighurs in Xinjiang under the traditionally xenophobic Han Chinese is back on the global agenda, and suddenly things don’t look so good for the general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party.

Rather than distracting countries from the global fight against the marauding coronavirus, which originated from Wuhan, by indulging in a war dance in Ladakh and the South China Sea, China should be at the forefront of the battle against the pandemic. It needs to de-escalate from both the areas and not wait for another opportunistic strike when the world is focused on US Presidential elections in November 2020 as it did against India in 1962 taking advantage of Cuban Missile Crisis.

Taking a leaf out of past paramount rulers, China needs to settle the borders on basis of the 2005 agreement on the Political Parameters and Guiding Principles of the India-China Boundary Question. President Xi surely understands the popularity of Modi, whom much of India followed faithfully through the painful demonetisation and total lockdown. But the global bully that China has become, it understands only the language of power, and the economic, military might and technological superiority of the US. Had the India-US nuclear deal been nixed by opponents in India, the 2005 border agreement would have never come through. Beijing will not forget 2020, the year of the metal rat in the Chinese calendar, in a hurry. The world, particularly India and the happy tiny kingdom of Bhutan, will hear the echoes of this in the future.

India scrambling to buy weapons, from fighters to ammunition, on an emergency basis during a military crisis has become a familiar sight. India is fast-tracking the purchase of equipment worth ₹400 billion from foreign and domestic suppliers. This is largely about signalling determination in light of the military confrontation with China, but also the partial mobilisation by the Pakistani army. Many of these projects have simply been fast-tracked. Some purchases are designed to provide a financial fillip to domestic Indian defence manufacturers severely stressed by the recession. Unfortunately, that these sort of emergency buys also took place during the Pulwama crisis and the earlier Doklam stand-off points to gaps in the country’s defence equipment and the planning.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s defence policy has been inward-looking. The defence budget has been squeezed, in part to rid the military structure of the considerable flab it has accumulated. There has been an overwhelming emphasis on indigenous defence manufacturing, especially through the private sector. There has been a much-needed cleansing and streamlining of the arms procurement process. The past six years have seen a dizzying array of committees and reports on military reform. All of this is laudable, necessary and will pay dividends in the future. But this has also meant fewer weapons and more inferior ones being bought. The backdrop to all of this has been an assumption that India’s strategic environment is relatively stable. Pakistan is around, but less a threat than an irritant. The big gamble was that India and China had reached a state of competitive equilibrium. Under present circumstances, this assumption no longer holds true.

India’s defence reforms should continue. It remains an absurdity that a great power in the making has to import assault rifles. The lack of battlefield networking simply because of a desire to keep different foreign vendors happy is not working either. In the Balakot strike, India lost a fighter because it lacked a secure data link. It was China that used drones with lethal effect in the Galwan Valley. The deep-seated resistance to the massive expansion of smart weapons, unmanned aerial vehicles and greater investment in cyber-offensive capabilities needs to be overcome, and quickly. The world is becoming an increasingly unsafe place and that means security must reassume priority over shaking things up.

Prime Minister (PM) Narendra Modi’s speech in Ladakh on July 3, where he addressed Indian Army personnel and commended them for their professionalism and valour, even while asserting that the “era of expansionism is over”, marks the beginning of a definitive reset in the troubled but the, up to now, violence-free India-China relationship.

The cordial tenor changed with the Galwan Valley incident in May/June where the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) troops moved into previously uncontested locations in eastern Ladakh, taking advantage of the thin Indian tactical presence. This resulted in the loss of 20 Indian lives (PLA is yet to confirm the casualties it has sustained) and led to the surprise Modi visit to Nimu in Ladakh. The signal to Beijing is that Delhi will not blink and that the Galwan knot, triggered by PLA’s pre-meditated belligerence, will have to be untied by China.

On current evidence, it appears that PLA has hunkered down for an extended stay in the areas it has occupied and the two armies will be monitoring each other for compliance as per the agreed disengagement and return to status quo protocols. The received wisdom is that this going to be a long haul into the winter months, even as the freshly-minted Chinese claim to Galwan is on the territorial expansion anvil.

While Modi’s reference to this expansionist characteristic refers to the unresolved territorial dispute on land across 3,800 kilometres which has morphed into a Line of Actual Control (LAC) and shifting claim lines, Beijing has already set a precedent in the maritime domain in an audacious and innovative manner.

The South China Sea (SCS) dispute that pitted Chinese Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZs) and fishing rights claims against those of the Association of South East Asian Nations (Asean) began with the adoption of the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Seas (UNCLOS).

China then invoked a historical, but dubious, nine-dash line formulation and adopted the might-is-right approach, much to the chagrin of the smaller nations. Consequently, the SCS dispute festered in an inconclusive manner for decades. The PLA began its creeping assertiveness by occupying certain atolls and enlarging the topography through artificial means and then staking a maximalist EEZ claim.

What does a smaller nation do when a bigger more powerful neighbour refuses to engage in sincere dialogue to resolve a territorial jurisdiction matter? Seek third party arbitration or go to the International Court of Justice (ICJ). The Philippines took this path despite veiled warnings from China. Much to the consternation of Beijing, the international tribunal ruled in favour of Manila.

Predictably, China rejected this ruling and asserted that its historical claim was the only truth that mattered. This unabashed assertion of expansionism by Beijing caused dismay in many capitals. But little was done in tangible terms to push back, since none of the major powers wanted to get into this tangle, except to defend the principle of free navigation in international waters.

However, in an unusual development, the 36th Asean Summit held at the end of June under Vietnam as chair, made specific reference to the centrality of the UNCLOS and the need to uphold international law. This is a familiar politico-diplomatic position in relation to the SCS dispute. But what is instructive is that over the last six months, many Asean states have been visibly vocal about China’s expansionism and related belligerence.

Thus, the template which has evolved is that China stakes a maximalist territorial claim, using history among other determinants, and then engages in salami-slicing through military intimidation, even while proclaiming its commitment to peace and tranquillity. Modi has belled the cat in Ladakh. India will now have to stay the course in managing the tensions that are bound to increase in the bilateral relationship.

Whether other nations will support Delhi or not remains opaque at this point. But India could look at other leverages to temper the Chinese response and the maritime domain is the logical choice. Beijing has long harboured a deep anxiety about its vulnerability at sea — or what is referred to as the Malacca dilemma.

India has the potential to either stoke this anxiety along with like-minded nations, or assuage it as part of the common good order at sea. The four-nation Quad (United States, Japan, Australia and India) is a work in progress and India could sherpa a cluster of Indo-Pacific nations into a “sagar panchayat” and uphold the rule of law at sea. Some Asean nations may be willing to join such a grouping. Enhancing interoperability at sea, intelligence- sharing and capacity-building would be the early building blocks.

However, to be effective, India will have to invest in specific transborder military capabilities. The recent announcement by Canberra where it has committed $70 billion to acquire new inventory is illustrative. Delhi will have to undertake a radical review of its defence budget despite the Covid-19 constraints to increase its naval/maritime allocations for over a decade-plus. This could enable creating credible military capability in the Andaman & Nicobar islands, a proposal that has been on Delhi’s pending list since 1963. With a suitably-fortified Andaman & Nicobar, the Malacca dilemma can become very real for Beijing.

India can create more negotiating space along the land border by turning to the seas. If this tenet is appropriately understood by Delhi, this policy transmutation could be the silver lining in the Galwan cloud.

C Uday Bhaskar is director, Society for Policy Studies, New Delhi

The views expressed are personal