by Eric Margolis

11 Aug 1997 - Inside Track On World News

China and India, which between them have 33% of the world's population, met last week in New Delhi to discuss their long-simmering Himalayan border disputes. Yet hardly anyone in the west noticed.

As usual, our eyes were fixed on the bloody, endless dispute between Palestinians and Israelis - two peoples whose combined number barely equals the population of Shanghai.

China and India, the world's two most populous nations, share a 4,500 km (2,800 mile)mountainous border. Amazingly, this frontier has never been formally delimited; India and China have argued bitterly, and occasionally fought, over their contested borders since the 1960's.

India claims China illegally occupies 33,000 sq km (13,000 sq miles) of its territory in the Aksai Chin region bordering disputed Kashmir. China claims India has seized 90,000 sq kms of its territory on their northeast frontier. These are no mere academic squabble: in 1962 China and India went to war over their border. The Chinese whipped the Indian Army in the eastern Himalayas and were poised to take Calcutta when Chairman Mao decided to withdraw after `teaching India a lesson.' .

Today, China and India possess nuclear weapons and huge armies. India has long accused China of threatening nuclear attack.. This lead China's late Foreign Minister, Chou En- lai, to respond that if China really wanted to destroy India, he would mass 100 million Chinese in Tibet, and order them to urinate downhill, washing India into the ocean.

Chou's remark underlines the Himalayas' enormous strategic importance. All India's great rivers rise in the Himalayas. Control of the Himalayan crests is essential to the defense of north India. Late last century, the British Raj began pushing the old `traditional,' undemarcated border between India, China and Tibet northward to higher ground - the MacMahon Line, which India today insists is the border. China rejects this product of British imperialism, claiming the old border is the correct one.

While the world denounced China for annexing Tibet, there was almost no criticism of India when it annexed the independent Himalayan kingdom of Sikkim in 1975, made Bhutan a virtual colony, and tried to turn Nepal into a protectorate. All three strategic Himalayan states are future flash-points between China and India, particularly Tibet. India shelters the exiled Dalai Lama and allows Tibetans a discreet amount of anti-Chinese activities.

China, in turn, occasionally stirs the pot on India's troubled northern frontier, where unrest simmers among Gurkhas, in tea-growing Assam, and further east, in the rebellious tribal regions of Mizoram, Manipur and Nagaland. . The two Asian superpowers also face potentially explosive confrontation at both ends of their Himalayan borders: Kashmir and Burma. China strongly supports Pakistan in its extremely dangerous dispute with India over the divided mountain state of Kashmir, Pakistan and India - both nuclear armed - have gone to war three times over Kashmir and remain at dagger's drawn in spite of recent peace talks between Pakistani officials and India's new prime minister, Inder Kumar Gujral. War between India and Pakistan over Kashmir, or the nearby Siachen Glacier, where I joined Pakistani commandos battling Indian mountain troops at 18,000 ft., could quickly involve China.

Burma is another potential flash-point, as this column reported last fall. China and India are vying for geopolitical influence over southwest and southeast Asia. They will soon contend for the region's energy resources. Resource-rich Burma, rent by ethnical rebellions, will become a focus of Indo-Chinese rivalry. with high possibility of a military clash there before 2010.

Meanwhile, India's rapid development of a large nuclear arsenal, powerful navy, tactical and medium-ranged missiles, has heightened tensions between Delhi and Beijing. Intelligence sources say India's new intermediate-range missile, the `Agni,' has been designed to deliver nuclear warheads onto Chinese targets as far away as the major industrial centers of Chengdu, Lanzhou, Xi'an and Wuhan. A longer ranged 5,000 km version, capable of hitting Beijing, is under development. Indian security sources say `Agni' is a counter-force weapon against Chinese missiles pointed at north India from the Tibetan plateau.

Given this broad spectrum of tensions and dangers, the talks in Delhi are most welcome - as were recent exchanges there between India and Pakistan aimed at improving their toxic relations. India and China are focused on rapid internal economic development; neither has any current interest in pressing border disputes with the other- for the present.

But India's powerful opposition party, the Hindu chauvinist BJP, virulently anti-Muslim and anti-Chinese, keeps beating the war drums over Kashmir and the Himalayan border. Russia, which is supplying large quantities of modern arms to India, sees Delhi as a major ally in its long historical rivalry with China, and is in no mood to encourage Sino- Indian amity.

China's military watches India with deep mistrust and fears Delhi aims to challenge Chinese control of Tibet. Kashmir could explode at any time, igniting full-scale war - including a nuclear exchange - between Pakistan and India A disintegrating Pakistan would almost certainly draw India and China into direct confrontation. Delhi and Beijing are currently vying for influence in Iran and Central Asia.

While the diplomats in Delhi talk peace, high up in the misty, barren Sumdorong Valley in the eastern Himalayas, heavily armed Chinese and Indian army patrols still eye each other warily. Asia's hostile giants may yet fight again.