As American media continue to obsess over dubious allegations of Russian collusion by President Donald Trump, global media have instead turned their focus to China and India, two nuclear-armed world powers that have been feuding over a piece of land in Bhutan since mid-June.
The dispute concerns the Doklam Plateau, which overlooks the Siliguri Corridor, a pivotal strip of land in the landlocked nation of Bhutan through which “(a)ll land-based military and commercial traffic between India’s northeastern provinces and the rest of the country travels through,” according to Bloomberg.
Builders from the People’s Liberation Army of China reportedly entered the plateau during the summer and began constructing roads. In response, India ordered its own troops to put a halt to the construction, which its defense strategists argue would make the Siliguri Corridor vulnerable to attack were a military conflict ever to erupt between the two nations.
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What followed was a brief altercation in which Chinese and Indian soldiers were seen in a leaked video shoving one another:
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As of late July, there were “about 3,000 troops on each side on the plateau” with no resolution in sight, according to Bloomberg.
Moreover, China recently threatened India, claiming it’s willing to defend territory “at all costs” and that its southern neighbor should discard any “unrealistic illusions” it may have over how the conflict might play out, as reported by the Associated Press.
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While it’s expected that both nations will eventually arrive at a diplomatically achieved agreement, concerns continue to grow that the feud could eventually boil over into a military conflict.
“Most certainly, yes!” retired Australian-British journalist Neville Maxwell, an expert on Indian-Chinese relations, replied when questioned by the The Financial Express over whether a war might break out.
“But it must be assumed that at the highest levels of control in both countries there is a will to avoid such a catastrophe, reining in the martial itches at lower levels, military and civilian,” he added.
But unless something changes anytime soon, the current feud may very well wind up mirroring the 1987 Sino-Indian skirmish, during which Chinese and Indian troops faced off in a year-long skirmish over yet another land dispute.
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