Brahma Chellaney, professor of strategic studies at the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi, said India-China border tensions, largely unknown to the rest of the world, were ominous.
"Things are getting really intense and from the Indian perspective outrageous. Any doubts that the Indian foreign policy establishment might have had about the threat posed by China have evaporated in recent months," he told media.

That China does not consider Arunachal Pradesh a part of India became clear again in March when it
objected to a US$60 million (Dh220m) Asian Development Bank loan to India because part of the money was meant for Arunachal Pradesh.

A report this month in China’s official newspaper Global Times said that if the border dispute was not addressed by Beijing properly “the result will only be blamed by generations to come."

"China won’t sacrifice its sovereignty in exchange for friendship. Therefore, India should not have any illusions with regards to this issue,” the report said.

Ahead of every bilateral meeting during the past six years, expectations were raised that the dispute would be resolved soon. But the 13th round of the meetings held in New Delhi this month failed to reach a breakthrough.

Just before these talks, the Hong Kong-based Chinese newspaper Ming Pao reported that China was prepared to give up its claims over Arunachal Pradesh if India dropped its claim to a 33,000 sq km area of Aksai Chin, which is on the border of northern Jammu and Kashmir state and is currently under China’s control.

Beijing also wanted New Delhi to concede 2,000 sq km of territory that it currently holds in the middle part of the disputed western stretch, the paper said.

But the Chinese foreign ministry called the report groundless.

Jiang Yu, a Chinese government spokesman, said China was "willing to work with India to seek a fair and mutually acceptable resolution” to the border dispute and hoped the discussions would further strengthen the "strategic partnership" between the two countries.

At the end of this month’s talks, however, experts did not see any sign of progress in the border issue.

In a Mail Today article headlined "Talks with China are not heading anywhere," a former Indian foreign secretary, Kanwal Sibal, wrote that years of efforts to resolve the border dispute had "produced no visible result."

"Despite high-level visits on both sides, some military contacts, burgeoning trade and convergence of thinking on global issues like climate change and WTO negotiations, the underlying mutual distrust [between the two countries] has increased, rather than decreased, in recent years,” Mr Sibal wrote.

A day after the talks ended, on the site of the International Institute of Strategic Studies, an organisation reportedly close to the Chinese military, an article appeared calling for India to be split into 30 independent nation states.

"To split India, China can bring into its fold countries like Pakistan, Nepal and Bhutan ... back aspirations of Indian nationalities like Tamil and Nagas, encourage Bangladesh to give a push to the independence of West Bengal and lastly recover the 90,000 sq km territory in southern Tibet [Arunachal Pradesh],” the report said.

India’s foreign ministry took the article so seriously it issued a statement saying the two countries had agreed to “resolve outstanding issues, including the boundary question, through peaceful dialogue andconsultations, and with mutual sensitivity to each other’s concerns … and [the controversial article] appears to be an
expression of individual opinion and does not accord with the officially stated position of China”.

But D S Rajan, an Indian expert on Chinese issues, said the article could not have been published without permission from Chinese authorities.

"However, Beijing will wash its hands out of this if the matter [of the article] is taken up by New Delhi," Mr Rajan, the director of the Chennai Centre for China Studies, told Indian media, adding that ignoring the article could "prove to be costly" for India.

Shaikh Azizur Rahman, Foreign Correspondent
The National (UAE)