Opinion | Kashmir, a highway, more troops: three reasons for China-India tensions flare-up

In late October last year, Chinese President Xi Jinping and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi met – to considerable fanfare – in the resort town of Mamallapuram in India’s southern state of Tamil Nadu. Their summit did not produce any tangible accomplishments, but reports in the Indian news media suggested that it was accompanied by much mutual bonhomie.

Less than a year later, in early May, Indian and Chinese forces clashed along a poorly demarcated border in the region of Ladakh in northwestern India, near China’s Xinjiang. Following this skirmish, a tense lull followed for the next several weeks, until another clash ensued in mid-June resulting in the deaths of at least 20 Indian soldiers and an unspecified number of their Chinese counterparts. In an effort to de-escalate the crisis India’s foreign minister, Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, has held talks with his opposite number in China, Wang Yi, over the phone, with both sides agreeing to “cool down” passions.

These were the first clashes since 1975 to have resulted in the loss of life by military personnel of either side. A series of skirmishes have taken place in recent years including, an extended stand-off in the summer of 2017 on the Doklam plateau near where the borders of Bhutan, India and China meet. None of these involved violence, however, despite eyeball-to-eyeball confrontations. Only the most recent encounter has proved to be deadly, even though no shots were fired.

What explains this dramatic deterioration in Sino-Indian relations along the troubled border given that a series of confidence-building measures are in place and the political leaders of the two states have had a number of affable summit meetings? Even the most casual observers of bilateral ties will be aware that the border dispute has historical origins and resulted in a brief, harsh and costly – especially for India – border war in October 1962. After a hiatus of more than a decade, the two sides sought to repair relations, and in 1988 Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi of India undertook a historic visit to China.