India, China Push for Closer Defense Ties - Wall Street Journal (blog)

By Margherita Stancati

Prakash Singh/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

Indian Defense Minister A.K. Antony with General Liang Guanglie in New Delhi.

China and India unveiled plans to resume joint military exercises, a gesture aimed at strengthening defense ties but that experts say will do little to resolve long-standing territorial disputes.

In a statement Tuesday, India’s Ministry of Defense said joint military exercises would resume “at the earliest.” The announcement was made after Indian Defense Minister A.K. Antony met his Chinese counterpart, General Liang Guanglie, in New Delhi. This is the first time the two countries have agreed to hold joint military exercises since 2008.

Mr. Antony earlier said resuming joint military exercises was a way of “fostering mutual confidence and goodwill.” And that’s all the announcement will likely to boil down to, some say. “I really don’t think there is great military value to this,” says Bharat Karnad, a security expert at New Delhi’s Center for Policy Research. “The fact of the matter is that most of the exercises we do with the Chinese are of a very, very basic kind, they don’t reveal any secrets,” he adds.

While the announcement shows that both sides â€"on the surface, at least â€" want closer defense ties, bilateral relations remain frosty.

For one, India is irked by China’s infrastructure development in Pakistan-controlled Kashmir. In a letter to Parliament Monday, Mr. Antony said the “government has conveyed its concerns to China about their activities in Pakistan Occupied Kashmir and asked them to cease such activities.”

These projects, which include road building, are ostensibly civilian, but India is worried they could be put to military use, facilitating the movement of troops to the border with India.

China, for its part, says it does not have a military presence in the area. In a written interview published Tuesday in the Hindu, Gen. Liang said the Chinese army “has never deployed a single soldier in the Pakistan-controlled Kashmir.”

He reiterated China’s position that it “firmly supports India and Pakistan to properly solve their disputes through dialogue and cooperation.”

But China has a long history of involvement in the Kashmir dispute. India has challenged China’s control of tens of thousands of square kilometers of land bordering its state of Jammu and Kashmir since 1962, when the two countries fought a border war, which Beijing won.

On top of this, India says China is illegally administering around 5,200 kilometers of land that Islamabad ceded to Beijing as part of a 1963 border agreement. New Delhi, which claims sovereignty over the whole of Kashmir, has refused to recognize that agreement.

Technically, the border agreement is not final, as it allows room for renegotiating the border “after the settlement of the Kashmir dispute between Pakistan and India.” This is unlikely to happen any time soon.

Other sensitive areas include the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh, which China claims as its own, referring to it as south Tibet.

Over the past two decades, talks to settle disagreements over the 4,000-kilometer contested India-China border have made little progress. And this looks unlikely to change with the announcement both sides are committed to closer defense cooperation.

“I don’t think we’re anywhere near close to a solution” on these disputed areas, says Mr. Karnad of the Center for Policy Research, arguing that both sides appear happy to keep border differences on the backburner. This is partly because their priority is to deepen economic ties “without things flaring up on the border,” argues Mr. Karnad.

The ministry’s statement included a passing reference to the contested boundaries, saying Mr. Antony and Gen. Liang agreed to strengthen cooperation between border troops, “so as to enhance and maintain peace and tranquility in the India-China border areas.”

Several mechanisms are already in place to prevent tensions in these areas from escalating into a military confrontation.

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