Examine the Geo-strategic points of contention in the bilateral relationship between India and China. (2021, 15 Marks)
India and China are rising post-colonial civilisational states whose interests overlap from the Himalaya to the Indian Ocean, Central Asia and Africa. John W. Garver (Protracted Contest, 2001) traced a rivalry in which each sees itself as Asia’s natural leading power. The contention is geographic before it is ideological.
The Himalayan frontier
- An undefined boundary: about 3,488 km with no agreed line. China holds Aksai Chin (about 38,000 sq km), vital to its Xinjiang–Tibet highway, and claims some 90,000 sq km in Arunachal Pradesh, with Tawang at the core, rejecting the McMahon Line (1914). Pakistan’s 1963 cession of the Shaksgam Valley compounds it.
- An unclarified LAC: map exchange stalled in 2002; standoffs followed at Depsang (2013), Doklam (73 days, 2017, near the narrow Siliguri Corridor) and Galwan (June 2020, 20 Indian dead). Disengagement was completed in October 2024; de-escalation has not followed. Beijing “renamed” 27 more Arunachal places in 2025.
- Tibet: the Dalai Lama’s statement of 2 July 2025, reserving recognition of his successor to his own trust, sets up a likely clash of two claimants, one probably on Indian soil.
- Water: the ~60 GW Medog project on the Yarlung Tsangpo began construction on 19 July 2025. With the hydrological-data MoUs lapsed and only emergency sharing promised (August 2025), the real risks are dry-season timing and information denial, not a choked river.
Pakistan and the two-front problem
CPEC runs through Gilgit-Baltistan, which India treats as a breach of its sovereignty. China supplied 80% of Pakistan’s arms imports in 2021–25 (SIPRI). During Operation Sindoor (May 2025), Lieutenant General Rahul R. Singh said China gave Pakistan live inputs and treated the conflict as a “live lab”.
The Indian Ocean and the neighbourhood
- Access at Gwadar, Hambantota (leased 2017) and Djibouti (base, 2017), with the Yuan Wang 5‘s Hambantota call (August 2022), gives the “string of pearls” a real basis. C. Raja Mohan (Samudra Manthan, 2012) shows the rivalry moving from the mountains to the sea.
- India’s counter-leverage is China’s Malacca dilemma (Hu Jintao, 2003): most Chinese oil passes waters India can watch.
- Chinese lending in Nepal, Bangladesh, the Maldives and Sri Lanka contests India’s primacy in South Asia.
The Indo-Pacific and global arenas
India upholds UNCLOS against the nine-dash line and keeps ONGC Videsh in a Vietnamese block China claims; China reads the Quad as encirclement. Beijing blocks India’s NSG entry and alone among the permanent five has not endorsed India’s bid for a permanent UNSC seat.
Testing the “rivalry” reading
Shivshankar Menon (India and Asian Geopolitics, 2021) locates the driver in China’s pursuit of primacy and a security dilemma in which each side thinks itself defensive. Yet the contention is bounded: the Special Representatives’ 25th round (August 2026), Xi Jinping’s visit for the September 2026 BRICS summit, and $151.1 billion of trade in FY2025–26.
Conclusion
Sharing a geography without a settled map makes the friction structural. Communication can manage the security dilemma, as the CBM architecture did for 27 years; only a boundary settlement and a narrower power gap can resolve it.