On June 16, the world woke up to news of a dramatic clash in the Galwan Valley in the Himalayas that led to the death of 20 Indian soldiers and an undisclosed number of Chinese troops. India and China have had numerous confrontations along their disputed 2,100-mile border since 1962, when the two countries fought a deadly war, but this was the first fatal India-China border clash since 1975 and the most serious since 1967, marking a dangerous new chapter in Sino-Indian ties.

Though both sides stepped back after the clash, tensions remain at a boiling point after two months of border confrontations along the de facto border. Despite a number of high-level military and diplomatic talks in recent weeks, both countries have amassed a large number of troops and armaments along the border. How did India and China cross this deadly precipice in the midst of a global pandemic? After decades of border confrontations without fatalities, why was blood spilled this time? What are the pathways to de-escalation and conflict management in the days and weeks ahead? And how will this border incident impact long-term term relations between Asia’s two major powers and the strategic dynamics in the Indo-Pacific?

This Asia Society Policy Institute and Asia Society India Centre webinar will shed light on these questions and analyze the impact on India, China, the region, and the United States moving forward. Suhasini Haidar, the Diplomatic Editor of The Hindu, will moderate a conversation between Ambassador Nirupama Rao, former Foreign Secretary of India, Tanvi Madan, Senior Fellow and the Director of the India Project at the Brookings Institution, and M. Taylor Fravel, Professor of Political Science and Director of the MIT Security Studies Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

SPEAKERS

M. Taylor Fravel is the Arthur and Ruth Sloan Professor of Political Science and Director of the Security Studies Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He studies international relations, with a focus on international security, China, and East Asia. His books include Strong Borders, Secure Nation: Cooperation and Conflict in China's Territorial Disputes (Princeton University Press, 2008) and Active Defense: China's Military Strategy Since 1949 (Princeton University Press, 2019). Fravel is a graduate of Middlebury College and Stanford University, where he received his PhD. He also has graduate degrees from the London School of Economics and Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar. In 2016, he was named an Andrew Carnegie Fellow by the Carnegie Corporation. Fravel serves on the board of directors of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations and as the Principal Investigator for the Maritime Awareness Project.

Suhasini Haidar (Moderator) is the Diplomatic Editor of The Hindu. Prior to this, she was Foreign Affairs Editor and prime time anchor for CNN-IBN, and Correspondent for CNN International’s New Delhi bureau before that. In 2015, she was the recipient of the prestigious Indian print journalism ‘Prem Bhatia’ award. Haidar worked with CNN International from 1995-2005, regularly reporting from India, Pakistan, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. She was part of the CNN team that won the Columbia-Dupont Broadcast Journalism Award in 2005 for coverage of the tsunami in India. Haidar earned a Bachelor's degree at Lady Shriram College in Delhi and her Masters in Broadcast Journalism at Boston University.

Tanvi Madan is a Senior Fellow and Director of The India Project at the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC. Madan’s work explores India’s foreign policy, focusing in particular on India's relations with China and the United States. She is the author of the book "Fateful Triangle: How China Shaped US-India Relations during the Cold War." Previously, Madan was a Harrington doctoral fellow and teaching assistant at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas. She has a Ph.D. in public policy from the University of Texas at Austin, a master's degree in international relations from Yale University, and a bachelor's degree with honors in history from Lady Shri Ram College in Delhi.

Amb. Nirupama Rao is a retired Indian diplomat who held several important assignments during a four-decade-long diplomatic career. She was India’s first woman Spokesperson in the Ministry of External Affairs, the first woman Indian High Commissioner from her country to Sri Lanka, and the first Indian woman Ambassador to the People’s Republic of China. She served as India’s Foreign Secretary from 2009-2011. At the end of that term, she was appointed India’s Ambassador to the United States. Amb. Rao has taught courses at Brown University and Columbia University and has held fellowships and visiting scholar positions at the India China Institute at The New School, The Wilson Center, and Bellagio Center. She is on the board of numerous institutions.