Virendra Pandit
New Delhi: Even as India’s National Security Advisor (NSA) Ajit Doval is in Beijing for the 23rd round of bilateral talks on the Sino-Indian border issues, reports stated that China has captured two percent of Bhutan’s territory and established at least 22 villages and settlements there since 2016.
This territory has been traditionally considered part of the landlocked Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan.
Eight of these villages have been developed near the strategically important Dolklam Plateau since 2020, according to media reports on Wednesday, citing satellite imagery. These revelations have coincided with India’s Special Representative (SR) Ajit Doval attending the bilateral meeting.
Doklam, which Beijing claimed as Donglang,, is situated in Chumbi Valley, between China’s Yadong County to the north, Bhutan’s Ha district to the east, and India’s Sikkim state to the west. Since the 1960s, when China invaded India, it has been warming up this dispute with Bhutan as well.
Bhutan’s Doklam, which was the site of a 73-day standoff between Indian and Chinese troops in 2017, saw New Delhi intervene to block the construction of a road and other infrastructure that would have allowed China access to the southernmost part of the plateau.
While frontline forces from both sides withdrew after the standoff, satellite imagery cited by a number of reports in recent years has revealed increased Chinese construction activity around Doklam.
On June 18, 2017, as part of Operation Juniper, about 270 armed Indian troops with two bulldozers crossed the Sikkim border into Doklam, to stop the Chinese troops from illegally constructing the road. After a faceoff between the two armies, short of a war, both India and China announced that they had withdrawn all their troops from Doklam.
But China resumed its salami-slicing tactics of using a series of many small actions to produce a much larger action or result that would be difficult or unlawful to perform all at once.
The eight villages China claims are situated in Bhutan’s western sector near Doklam, strategically positioned either within or on ridges overlooking a valley claimed by China, with several located close to Chinese military outposts or bases.
Among the 22 villages identified as sensitive, the largest is Jiwu, reportedly constructed on a traditional Bhutanese pastureland known as Tshethangkha, also within the western sector.
The strategic location of these villages has raised concerns because a strengthened Chinese presence in this key area could heighten the vulnerability of the Siliguri Corridor—commonly referred to as the “chicken’s neck”—a narrow strip of land linking mainland India to its northeastern states.
The media reported that, in 2023, former Bhutan Prime Minister Lotay Tshering sparked controversy when he told a Belgian newspaper that the Chinese facilities “are not in Bhutan.”
Since 2016, when China established its first village in a traditionally Bhutanese territory, it has constructed 22 villages and settlements with nearly 2,284 residential units and settled 7,000 people in previously uninhabited areas within Bhutan.
According to the reports, China has seized about 825 square kilometers of land that was previously within Bhutan’s borders, accounting for more than 2 percent of the Himalayan kingdom’s territory. Besides, Beijing has moved several officials, construction workers, border police, and military personnel into these settlements, all connected by roads to the nearest Chinese towns.
Since 2023, seven new settlements have been constructed, marking a significant acceleration in the scale and pace of development within the annexed areas, and three of these villages are being upgraded to towns.
China’s efforts in Bhutan’s western sector have primarily aimed at acquiring and securing the Doklam plateau and its surrounding regions. The eight villages in the western sector form a 36-kilometer line running north to south, with an average distance of 5.3 kilometers between each settlement. These villages were built in a region that Tibet ceded to Bhutan in 1913.
According to Ashok Kantha, India’s former Ambassador to China (2014-2016), China’s construction of villages within Bhutanese territory breaches the 1998 agreement between the two countries on maintaining peace and tranquillity in border areas.
He described these developments as part of China’s strategy of “incrementally and systematically changing facts on the ground”, the same way as Chinese incremental aggression in the South China Sea, where artificial features were created and militarized.
“Bhutan is unable to challenge these actions due to the significant power imbalance. This reflects China’s typical behavior of asserting its claims, disregarding prior commitments and the perspectives of other countries, and facing no real consequences,” Kantha added.
Amid these reports, NSA Ajit Doval met his Chinese counterpart, Wang Yi, who is a Member of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and the Minister of Foreign Affairs of China.
Bilateral relations between India and China deteriorated significantly over the past four years, reaching their lowest point since the 1962 border conflict. This decline was triggered by a military standoff in the Ladakh sector of the Line of Actual Control (LAC) that began in April-May 2020. However, on October 21, 2024, both nations reached an agreement that enabled the disengagement of frontline forces at Demchok and Depsang, the two remaining “friction points” along the LAC.
Following this, on October 23, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping met on the sidelines of a BRICS Summit in Russia, wherein they agreed to revive mechanisms to address the border dispute and work towards normalizing bilateral ties. Of course, Beijing, now wary of the Trump 2.0 regime’s uncertainties, would not like to fight two powerful democracies simultaneously. Hence the fresh talks, for the sake of talks, whose outcome is uncertain.
Chinese Ambassador to India, Xu Feihong on Wednesday said in a post on X, “China is ready to work with India to implement the important common understandings between the leaders of China and India, respect each other’s core interests and major concerns, strengthen mutual trust through dialogue and communication, properly settle differences with sincerity and good faith, and bring bilateral relations back to the track of stable and healthy development as soon as possible.”
The Special Representative (SR)-level talks in Beijing are expected to focus on the China-India border issue. These would be the first high-level talks since December 2019. Doval and Wang will discuss the management of peace and tranquillity in the border areas and explore a fair, reasonable, and mutually acceptable solution to the boundary question, the Ministry of External Affairs stated.
External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar informed Parliament that the disengagement between India and China has been fully achieved in Eastern Ladakh through a step-by-step process, culminating in Depsang and Demchok.
He also stressed that the maintenance of peace and tranquillity in border areas is a prerequisite for the development of India-China ties.
In October, India and China reached an agreement regarding patrolling arrangements along the LAC in the India-China border areas.