The area in question, the Dolam plateau in the Doklam area, is the subject of a legal dispute between China and Bhutan, is under the effective jurisdiction of China, and holds an important security interest to India.

The restoration of the status quo in the Doklam area will be a protracted affair.

China, the aggrieved party, bears little interest in unwinding the standoff on terms other than its own. Worse, there is no agreed definition among the parties of the object of discord at stake and China does not even view India as the appropriate interlocutor to engage with to unwind the standoff.

China’s position on and solution to the standoff is blunt.

The alignment of the China–India boundary in the Sikkim Himalayas sector is mutually defined as per Article 1 of the Anglo-Chinese Convention of 1890 relating to Sikkim and Tibet (‘the line commences at Mount Gipmochi on the Bhutan frontier, and follows the … water-parting’). Indian representatives since prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru have formally accepted this. By interfering in a Chinese road construction project roughly three kilometres to the north of the plain letter of Article 1, India has violated China’s territorial sovereignty. As a precondition for any dialogue, India must vacate its trespass unconditionally.

To the extent that the area in question is the subject of a dispute due to Bhutan’s belated claim to the area in the 14th round of Sino-Bhutanese boundary talks, this is wholly a matter to be resolved between Beijing and Thimphu. Until such time, Bhutan — let alone India that has no locus standi to intervene — must respect China’s effective jurisdiction over the Doklam area.

For its part, India does not deny the validity of Article 1 of the Anglo-Chinese Convention of 1890. Its alignment on the ground, in its view, is not an established fact however. As per the same article, the ‘boundary of Sikkim and Tibet [was to] be the crest of the mountain-range separating the waters flowing’ southwards and northwards. The ‘line [that] commences at Mount Gipmochi on the Bhutan frontier’ does not correspond with this principle and should in fact be marked on the ground six kilometres to the north — making the area of trespass wholly Bhutanese soil.

By way of its bilateral Friendship Treaty of 2007 with Bhutan, which calls upon both sides to ‘cooperate closely … on issues relating to their national interests’, India enjoys a basis to intervene in the dispute on Thimphu’s behalf.

China’s road construction activity in this area constitutes a ‘significant change of the status quo’. Its disturbs India’s security interests as well as violates an ‘understanding’ arrived at by Indian and Chinese boundary negotiators in 2012 that the final alignment of the boundary in the tri-junction area would be settled in consultations that involved India. China must therefore desist from further road-building in this area and India stands ready to mutually ease the standoff on this basis.

India’s troop intervention in Doklam is not without grave political risk. Its diplomatic communications throughout this episode have been couched in the imprecise political language of status quos and understandings. By contrast, China’s communications have been grounded in the black-and-white language of legal sovereignty.

India’s intervention also risks setting dangerous precedents.

For the first time, India is militarily engaging a state actor — and one no less than China — from the soil of a third country. Second, it is militarily intervening on behalf of a friendly partner country to uphold the latter’s claims of sovereignty to a patch of territory that it does not effectively control. Not even the mighty US military extends defence obligations to disputed territories that its allies do not exercise effective control over — let alone intervene on their behalf. Third, the China–India–Bhutan boundary is not the only unresolved tri-junction along the length of India’s extended northern frontier. Payback in the same coin would be highly unpalatable.

The trespass also calls into question the political lessons learnt by India from its 1962 debacle. The proximate trigger that autumn was the placement by New Delhi of a lightly armed military post in advance of its map-based claim line. Then, as now, New Delhi assumed that its troops were unilaterally entitled to plug the breach that had opened up as a result of a discrepancy between the map-based — and in this instance Convention-based — line and the (watershed) principle that was to guide the line’s demarcation on the ground.

Having engaged in a high-risk venture, the onus resides on India’s shoulders to devise the conditions of its exit. To this end, it must confront the tangled legalities of the situation.

New Delhi does not possess legal standing to directly engage China to ease the standoff. That standing is held by Bhutan. New Delhi must push Thimphu to take the lead in engaging Beijing and devise a mutually acceptable boundary protocol that acknowledges China’s effective jurisdiction of the area, pending final settlement, in exchange for the restoration of the status quo as of 16 June 2017. In parallel, New Delhi must commit to unilaterally vacating its trespass in the Doklam area while privately holding out for Beijing’s reiteration of the 2012 understanding that the tri-junction boundary points will be finalised in consultation with all (three) parties concerned.

Time is of the essence. New Delhi has made its point. The longer the standoff persists now, the stronger will be the impression that it is New Delhi that is engineering a lasting change in the status quo — in turn, inviting political reprisals by Beijing.

Sourabh Gupta is a senior fellow at the Institute for China–America Studies, Washington DC.

A version of this article was first published here in the South China Morning Post.