The India-China relationship has always been too complex to classify under a single theme. Competition-cooperation discord is an often-evoked term typology that reflects the contradictory nature of this relationship. Last year witnessed all these facets play out: India’s trenchant critique of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), India’s entry into the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, the dramatic crisis in Doklam on the northern frontiers, the acceleration of multilateral cooperation in the BRICS format, and attempts to foster economic engagement. Yet, nothing exemplified the state of ties more than the Himalayan standoff, which was the closest both countries came to drawing blood in over three decades. 
What led to this tailspin in India-China relations ? We will not find the clues in some valley or a narrow stretch of road in the upper Himalayas. Rather, the main reason has been a systematic build-up of negative images of how each side viewed the other’s foreign policies, along with a collapse in geopolitical trust. For India, China’s attempt to raise its economic and political profile in the subcontinent was seen as an encroachment on, and an affront to, Indian authority in the neighbourhood. For China, India’s pursuit of deeper military engagement with the former’s main strategic rivals – the U.S. and Japan – was viewed as a serious challenge to its future security. Convinced that only an assertive policy would work, both Delhi and Beijing over the past two years began exploiting leverages and pressure points to keep the 
other other side off balance. India tilted closer to the U.S., China towards Pakistan, and on a scale not witnessed even during the Cold War years. 
Yet, neither side has been able to extract any concessions or improve the terms of their bilateral interactions. On a range of issues – the Nuclear Suppliers Group membership, Pakistan-sponsored terror and hydrological cooperation being the most prominent – India failed to receive any give from China. With India’s boycott of the BRI, China too found itself confronting not only the only major holdout against its flagship international initiative but also its most suspicious and non-cooperative neighbour in Asia. Beijing also noticed that New Delhi was beginning to openly involve external powers to collaborate with it in an anti-China strategy in South Asia and the Indian Ocean. Worse still must have been the spectacle of India brandishing its Tibet card. Such unbridled competition and rising costs to Indian and Chinese interests – and Doklam was the tipping point – appears to have persuaded both Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chinese President  Xi Jinping that their policies were producing zero-sum outcomes and required some kind of a course correction.