As Jaishankar notes, Beijing has spearheaded conflict “in Hong Kong, in the South China Sea, in the East China Sea with Taiwan, with India and Bhutan….At the same time, there’s also great diplomatic sparring with the United States, with Europe and many other places like Australia and Canada.”īut Jaishankar disputes that China is just flexing its strength: “My personal inclination is that it is driven a little bit more by vulnerability than a lot of outside observers think.
This comes after two years or so of what would seem to be somewhat better relations between its two leaderships.”Ĭonflict in the Himalayas is building in the context of Beijing’s increasingly aggressive foreign policy.
One major question circling the violence between India and China is: why now? After all, as Jaishankar explains, “this is a massive territorial dispute that goes back to the 1950’s in fact between the two countries, and part of it has a sort of colonial-era legacy.” But after decades of violence, the two countries agreed in 1993 to settle any border disputes diplomatically, and “It’s still unclear what China hopes to gain out of this and why at this time. His commentary appears regularly in Indian and international publications including The Hindu, The Atlantic, and Foreign Policy, and he has collaborated on multiple books and journals. He is also a non-resident fellow at the Lowy Institute in Australia and previously worked at Brookings India and the German Marshall Fund. Initiative at the New Delhi-based Observer Research Foundation, joined Altamar Podcast and explains what the fallout means for the region and the rest of the world. Meanwhile, Indian citizens are protesting and boycotting Chinese-made goods.ĭhruva Jaishankar, Director of the U.S. And as New Delhi and Beijing butt heads 14,000 feet above sea level, China is building up its presence in Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and other contentious points along the Indian Ocean. Both sides have rushed in tens of thousands of reinforcements backed by artillery, tanks, and fighter jets. Now, in a marked escalation of tensions, the two nuclear-armed states are accusing each other of firing warning shots at the frontier. In June, a deadly clash left 20 Indian soldiers and an unknown number of Chinese soldiers killed in the worst cross-border violence in decades. In the barren reaches of the Himalayas, Chinese and Indian patrols keep coming to blows. The violence in the Himalayas between India and China points to a rapidly deteriorating relationship – could it lead the nuclear powers to seek new geopolitical alignments? Initiative at the New Delhi-based Observer Research Foundation Guest: Dhruva Jaishankar, Director of the U.S.