If you walk past the border police academy in Mussoorie, a hill station in the northern state of Uttarakhand, don't be surprised if you hear conversations that don't sound anything like Hindi or other languages spoken in India.
Instead you will hear border guards practising their Chinese language skills as part of a government programme to ease tensions on the border that India shares -- and frequently disputes -- with China.
The Mandarin words and phrases are pretty rudimentary but a good start nonetheless -- zao shang (good morning), wan'an (good night), ni laizi nali (where are you from?), wo men shi pengyou (we are friends), wo men yinggai shuo (we should talk), ei, zen me yang (hey, what's up?), ni hao ma (how are you?) and xiexie (thank you).
Concerned over frequent faceoffs and misunderstandings with the People's Liberation Army (PLA), the government has made it mandatory for all 90,000 members of the Indo-Tibetan Border Police (ITBP) deployed along the 3,488-kilometre frontier to learn Mandarin and its Tibetan variant.
It has recruited a dozen Mandarin teachers to provide lessons at the ITBP academy in Mussoorie. In the first year, 5,000 personnel will learn the basics, and the entire force is to be covered over the next six years.
"The idea behind the process is to make the border more harmonious and peaceful and allow the ITBP men to build some kind of personal rapport with their PLA or other Chinese border counterparts," an Indian Home Ministry official told Asia Focus, asking not to be named.
Currently, only about 200 ITBP members have a working knowledge of Mandarin or the Tibetan variant of the Chinese language. Consequently, those patrolling border areas resort to sign language or banners in case of an intrusion by the PLA, whose soldiers know neither English nor any other language spoken in India. This often leads to ugly situations.
That is what happened on Aug 15 near Pangong Tso, a remote lake 4,350 metres above sea level in Ladakh, where PLA and ITBP men pushed, shoved and pelted each other with stones. The incident, immortalised on YouTube, took place at a time when Sino-Indian tensions were already high 2,700 kilometres away on the Doklam plateau near Sikkim.
The Doklam standoff eased in August, a few days before the start of the BRICS Summit in Beijing, where both Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping ere eager to show a friendlier face to the world.
Like their border police counterparts, only about 200 men in the 1.2 million-strong Indian Army have a working knowledge of Mandarin. But the army only enters the picture during a war or a standoff beyond the international border. Doklam was one such instance, as the Indian army and the PLA gathered in territory claimed by both China and Bhutan, which borders the Indian state of Sikkim and had requested help from India.
The Home Ministry official told Asia Focus that breaking the language barrier was strongly advised to bring about peace and tranquillity on the border. Indian authorities also hope the decision to teach Mandarin to all ITBP guards will be well received in Beijing.
PLA soldiers face a major handicap when conversing with their counterparts from India. Even for flag meetings, the PLA officers bring English-to-Chinese interpreters with them.
The Doklam standoff began on June 16 when Indian army soldiers stopped their PLA counterparts from laying a road on a stretch claimed both by China and Bhutan. It continued for 72 days and only ended after New Delhi agreed to disengage and the Chinese army consented to remove roadbuilding equipment from the site.
During the 10-week standoff, Chinese authorities and media made a lot of threatening and bellicose noises but the Indian government resorted to gandhigiri (no public threats but a firm stand), a term associated with the tenets of the father of the nation, Mahatma Gandhi.
The approach calls to mind a situation that arose when Gandhi allowed a scheduled caste couple to stay at his Sabarmati ashram in Gujarat state. A caste Hindu who owned the ashram land repeatedly ordered Gandhi to throw out the lower-caste couple but the Mahatma neither responded to the threats nor agreed to the order. Eventually, the landlord stopped pushing the issue.
Besides Doklam and Pangong, there have been various standoffs between the Indian army and the PLA in recent years. In September 2014, on the eve of Mr Xi's visit to Ahmedabad, 35 PLA soldiers intruded into Chumar in Ladakh and refused to return to their territory.
Subhash Goswami, then director-general of the ITBP, recalled the incident in a memoir he wrote on the 54th anniversary of the force in 2015: "On receiving information that the PLA was preparing to build a road in our territory, the ITBP along with the Indian Army rushed to the spot and physically prevented the Chinese army from carrying out their evil design. This stout defence led to serious altercations and jostling between the opposing troops."
In 2013, a three-week standoff took place between Indian and Chinese soldiers near Daulat Beg Oldi in Ladakh.
The Line of Actual Control (LAC) in the western sector, the McMahon Line in the eastern sector, and a small undisputed section in between form the border between India and China. Doklam is near the undisputed section. The entire border stretches from Jammu & Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand to Arunachal Pradesh and Sikkim states. India and China fought one bitter war over territory in 1962. To this day, differing interpretations of the LAC lead to frequent incursions and standoffs.
The two armies generally seek to resolve these standoffs through flag meetings of their commanders, a hotline and other mechanisms. And while tensions sometimes flare, not a single bullet has been fired on the border in the last 40 years.
