The present timing of the visit of the Chinese Premier to India — expected before the end of May — had been requested by the Chinese leadership, and India obliged right away although the time to prepare for Mr Li Keqiang’s first trip out as Prime Minister was short.
This is all the more reason why New Delhi is intrigued by the Chinese Army’s move to transgress the normal protocols of boundary management and penetrate 19 kilometres inside Indian territory in the Daulat Beg Oldi area near the tri-junction of India, China and Pakistan, right on the eve of Prime Minister Li’s maiden trip abroad.
Well-placed sources say that during the recent BRICS summit in Durban, Chinese leader Xi Jinping had urged Prime Minister Manmohan Singh that he receive the Chinese Premier before embarking on his trip to Japan, slated for May 30.
This meant Mr Li’s India visit had to be compressed into a tight time-frame.
Since the Chinese forces did something extraordinary by pitching tents on the Indian side of the Line of Actual Control and seemed not amenable to serious negotiations to end the “face-to-face” deadlock, but suddenly one day signalled their desire to return to their original position, the meaning can be read that they did not want to imperil the Chinese Prime Minister’s visit to India.
As the impasse on the LAC seemed to be locked into a long-term jam, external affairs minister Salman Khurshid — who was to visit Beijing to prepare for the Chinese Prime Minister’s trip to New Delhi — strongly hinted to the media on his way back from Tehran that his trip to China may not materialise, after all.
In the Congress party, especially, there was sense that India should cancel the Chinese PM’s trip if the Chinese troops did not roll back to their earlier position. On seeing this, the official stance in Beijing changed, as if on cue.
The urge to salvage its PM’s trip appeared desperate to a country keen on being seen as a major world player.
That the Chinese leader was scheduled to go on to Pakistan from India only complicated the situation. If India cancelled his trip at the last minute, his stature in Islamabad risked being undercut.
Among China-watchers here, the sense obtains that the recent border imbroglio in Ladakh may not be a one-off, and that sufficient grounds remain for little and big flare-ups in the future, even if the two sides are agreed that it is the sum of their ties that should be the guiding factor. All the more this means that when Mr Li is here, the boundary dispute may get more than its fair share of airing.
The Chinese cannot be allowed to gloss over the 20-day-old tension-ridden episode in Ladakh. Otherwise, surprise will not cease that a major player in the international system could potentially risk so much by behaving in such an awkward, irresponsible and unpredictable manner.