How India and China Have Come to the Brink Over a Remote Mountain Pass<br />“I hope the Indian side knows what it’s doing, because the moment you put your hand in the hornet’s nest, you have to be prepared for whatever consequence there is going to be,” said Shiv Kunal Verma, the author of “1962: The War<br />That Wasn’t,” about the bloody border conflict the two countries fought that year.<br />Bhutan and India say that China, by extending its road, is trying to extend its control<br />over an area known as the Dolam Plateau, part of a larger contested area.<br />One gives Bhutan control of the area — the position that India supports — and the other China.<br />“The messaging is eerily similar,” Mr. Smith said, to the countries’ 1962 slide into a war that was also over border disputes.<br />China has sought to woo Bhutan with its own offers of aid, investments and land swaps to settle border disputes.<br />The dispute dates to contradictory phrases in an 1890 border agreement between two now-defunct empires, British India<br />and China’s Qing dynasty, that put the border in different places.
