INDIA’S protracted, unsuccessful dialogue with China on the boundary dispute brings home a fundamental that talks are doomed to failure unless both parties are in a negotiating frame of mind. This they have not been in the last nearly six decades.

On April 20, India’s national security adviser, Ajit Doval, who is also special representative for boundary talks, met China’s state councillor Yang Jiechi in Beijing for the second such talks since the Narendra Modi government came to power in May 2014.

Differences over a proposed draft for a ‘framework for the resolution of the boundary question’ proved insurmountable. It is envisaged by Article 10 of the political parameters agreement of April 11, 2005.

The parties settled on confidence-building measures instead. Earlier that week, India’s Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar met Defence Minister Gen Chang Wanquan while the Minister for External Affairs Sushma Swaraj met China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi in Moscow on April 18. The lines of communication remain intact. Manohar Parrikar revealed that the two countries had agreed to establish a hotline connection between their armies and open more points on their disputed frontiers for meetings of border guards.

India and Pakistan must not play a zero-sum game in their ties with China.

In its earlier tenure in government 1998-2004 the BJP government hit upon an idea. Since we cannot settle the boundary dispute, why not agree on the alignment of the present Line of Actual Control (LAC) and then demarcate it on the ground in order to avoid ‘incursions’.

Both Ajit Doval and Manohar Parrikar pressed for this in the talks and drew a blank. China has been asking, instead, for a settlement of the boundary dispute itself. Its position is that the LAC is “well known to both sides”; we know where you are and you know where we are. It fears it might become a boundary proper once it is defined in an agreement; more so, when it is demarcated on the ground. This was made clear over 20 years ago.

In 2000, Jaswant Singh, the then external affairs minister in the Atal Behari Vajpayee government wrote to foreign minister Tang Jiaxuan, stressing the need for an early accord on the LAC. He laid down the timetable for maps to be exchanged. Those for the middle sector had already been exchanged. Maps for the west would be exchanged in June, ending the process in 2002. Maps for the east would be exchanged early in 2003.

Shortly after the maps for the mere 545-kilometre long middle sector were exchanged on Nov 14 2000, the COAS Gen S. Padmanabhan said on Jan 14, 2001, that perceptions on the LAC were “poles apart”.

When the experts group met on June 19, 2002, the Indian side was in for a surprise. India’s map for the western sector included Pakistan’s the then Northern Areas as well as the 5,180 square kilometres that India says Pakistan gave to China. China refused to accept it.

As far back as on June 27, 1960, in the official level talks, the director, First Asian Department in China’s foreign office, Chang Wen-chin, presented a map and a written statement excluding the area west of the Karakoram Pass from discussion with India. He objected to India’s map which included that area.

China will not accept any challenge to the boundary agreement with Pakistan of March 1963. It rests squarely on the British note to China on March 18, 1899. Since China had not accepted that proposal, Lord Curzon modified it in India’s favour in August 1905 to include lands across the watershed. Yet in September 2014, Prime Minister Narendra Modi proposed delineation of the LAC.

China has revised its stand on Kashmir, a fact which receives little notice. The year 1990 marked a watershed. In February that year prime minister Li Peng told prime minister Benazir Bhutto’s national security adviser, Iqbal Akhund, that Pakistan and India should act in accordance with relevant UN resolutions and accords reached by both countries and “resolve the dispute on the basis of friendly consultations”.

In New Delhi, Qian Qichen thereafter simply said that Kashmir has been discussed by the United Nations. From April 1990 to this day China’s standard formulation is “seek a peaceful solution through negotiations”. China’s entente with Pakistan remains while it maintains friendly relations with India.

India will be able to settle the boundary dispute with China only when a political rapport has been established realistically. Pakistan is no hurdle in its way. The US should not be one either.

India and Pakistan must stop playing a zero-sum game in their relationship with China. Pakistan will recognise that China is determined to forge good relations with India.

On its part, India must accept the reality of China’s growing entente with Pakistan. Neither reality will vanish anytime soon. Both are a part of China’s overall Asian policy.

The writer is an author and a lawyer based in Mumbai.

Published in Dawn, May 7th, 2016