The Bhutanese foreign minister, Tandi Dorji, visited Beijing during Oct-end, which marked the first occasion when a top official of the tiny Himalayan kingdom was setting foot on the Dragon land. The highlight of his visit was talks with his Chinese counterpart, Wang Yi, to discuss the vexatious issue of boundary demarcation between the two neighbours.

As a sovereign nation, Bhutan has every right to discuss whatever it wishes with China or any other country but the matter acquires a different complexion because this boundary question involves three cheek-by-jowl countries—India, Bhutan and China.

More importantly, India and China have long standing differences on defining their borders with each other and have often clashed, starting with the 1962 full-scale Chinese invasion on the Himalayas.

Dorji’s Beijing sojourn comes close on the heels of Mohamed Muizzu making no bones about his antipathy towards India and his love for China.

The first task that the newly elected president of the Maldives has promised to perform when he formally takes over the reins from Mohammed Solih on Nov 17, will be to order the Indian ‘troops’ out of the archipelago.

India has not posted combatants ready for action in the Indian Ocean Island nation and, in any case, the number of Indian military personnel in the Maldives is believed to be less than 100 and they are engaged non-military activities.  

To what extent President Muizzu goes in pursuance of his ‘anti-India’ policies is to be watched but in Bhutan the danger to Indian security will be greater if China outplaces India as the major influencer.

The Indian borders in the Himalayas will be under greater Chinese threat. India’s effort to shore up the infrastructure in the Himalaya border areas will not be able to match the Chinese for quite a while.

Muizzu makes no bones about his antipathy towards India and his love for China. In any case, politics in the Maldives has been alternating between ‘pro’-and ‘anti’ – India presidents. Muizzu’s election could not have surprised India unduly. 

But Bhutan is a different ball game altogether.

India has been its key partner in development and apparently there is no anti-India feeling among the people of the Himalayan Kingdom, who are perhaps wary of the neglect, if not disrespect, of Buddhism in the Middle Kingdom. Also because of the emergence of ‘Xi Jinping thought’ as the only accepted religion in the land of Bamboo capitalism.

China is waiting to loosen its purse strings for Bhutan but it will have to wait till after the boundary issue gets out of the way to win hearts and minds of the ordinary Bhutanese.

Sensitive to Indian concerns, Bhutan has been carefully avoiding overtures from Beijing. The kingdom of happiness has allowed none of the five permanent members of the UN to open diplomatic missions in its capital, Thimpu.

If China is permitted to have a mission in the Bhutanese capital, the other P-5 members are bound to follow. Bhutan may well be sucked into the intrigues of geo-politics which may dent some of its gross happiness quotient.         

It was as recently as 2017 that there was a 76-day stand-off between Indian and Chinese armies at Doklam situated at the tri-junction of India, Bhutan and China. The Chinese have not given up their claim in the area but have buttressed their position by constructing villages and infrastructure in the region aimed at securing strategic advantage over India.

This is not just an act of defiance but one of provocation and defiance and a signal from Beijing that it believes in arbitrarily grabbing by force land in the neighbouring countries.

China has been putting pressure on Bhutan to resolve the boundary dispute–including the dispute over Doklam. On its part, Bhutan appears to have quietly accepted the fait accompli of the Chinese presence in Doklam but is nervous at the thought of uneasy India-China relations because of the likely fallout from trouble in the neighbourhood.

Thimphu has a friendship treaty with New Delhi which places India in a better position than China but Prime Minister Lotay Tshering government is wary of doing anything that perturbs the Dragon that will affect its high ranking in the Gross National Happiness Index.  

Bhutan has reportedly assured India that as and when it negotiates Doklam with China it will keep Indian security interests in mind.

Bhutan is clear that India will be a party in triangular negotiations on Doklam, going by Prime Minister Tshering interview to Belgian newspaper La Libre published during his visit to Brussels in March this year.

In the same interview, the Bhutanese Prime Minister had stoked a controversy with the remark that he hoped to see completion of demarcation of territories with China within one or two more meetings.  

Well, he did some damage control subsequently.  He told The Bhutanese newspaper that he had said nothing new in his statements to the Belgian paper on Doklam and on the Bhutan-China boundary talks. “I have said nothing new and there is no change in position,” he clarified.

Bhutan may be sincere but its words, promises and assurances mean nothing in the face of the expansionist policy being relentlessly pursued by Xi Jinping, who has anointed himself as the helmsman cut in the mode of Mao Zedong and his successor Deng Xiaoping.  And he has been riding rough shod at home, and over more than a dozen neighbours.     

Bhutan has been engaged with China on boundary negotiations for a few years; the two countries have already held 25 rounds of talks without arriving at any definite conclusion.

The Beijing visit of Dorji may pave the way for settling the issue given the fact that both sides have now signed (on Tuesday, Oct 24, 2023) a “Cooperation Agreement” outlining the responsibilities and functions of the Joint Technical Team (JTT) on the delimitation and demarcation of the boundary.

The boundary dispute relates to the northern (Jakarlun Pasamlung) and western (Doklam) regions of Bhutan.

The Chinese are in the habit of basing their land territorial claims on ancient maps which have little relevance in today’s world.

If maps of several century antiquity are to be cited as establishing authentic claims in the contemporary world, then almost most of the world, particularly Europe, would be deeply unsettled.       

If China has its way, and gets the piece of landmass it claims as its own in the Doklam tri-junction, it will mark formal extension of Chinese territory into the Doklam region.

And it would bring the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) dangerously close to the Siliguri Corridor that connects India with its eight North-eastern provinces which share border with China, Myanmar or both.

Such a situation will not be to the liking of either India or Bhutan itself. More so because, three years ago, in 2020, China made a surprising claim on Bhutan’s Sakteng Wildlife Sanctuary at the Global Environment Facility (GEF) Council meeting.  Thimphu wasted no time to lodge a demarche to the Chinese Embassy in India over the claim.

It is likely that Bhutan King Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck may intervene to either stop or slow the stride as he did seven months ago when Prime Minister Tshering’s remarks on the border issue raised concerns in India.

—By Rama Rao Malladi & Poreg Team