THE BORDER STANDOFF
China’s latest transgressions across its disputed border with India have raised alarm
TThere is a macabre reassurance when soldiers of two nuclear-armed countries choose to clash with clubs and stones. It darkly echoes a quote often misattributed to Albert Einstein about how the fourth world war would be fought. Disagreements on where the 3,448-km-long Line of Actual Control (LAC) lies between India and China have led to fisticuffs and bar brawl-like scuffles, but with soldiers’ rifles strapped on their backs and always reversed—the last shots on the world’s longest contested border were fired nearly 45 years ago. Even so, the clashes between Indian and Chinese troops in eastern Ladakh in the first week of May sparked concern. The brawl on the banks of the Pangong Tso, a boomerang-shaped brackish water lake on the LAC, was the worst in recent memory, with several Indian soldiers hospitalised. Within days, Indian and Chinese troops scuffled in Naku La area of North Sikkim.
The incident in Ladakh’s Galwan Valley is the biggest since the 73-day standoff between Indian and Chinese troops in Doklam in 2017
Carefully agreed upon drills on what to do when patrols from both sides run into each other—unfurling of banners in English that tell the other side it has transgressed the LAC and must go back—were given the boot in these incidents. “The banners have become like regimental flags—rarely displayed,” says an Indian army officer wryly.
In the cold deserts of Ladakh, the clashes have now culminated in a stand-off between the two sides, with several hundred Chinese troops pitching tents in the Galwan Valley, nearly 100 km northwest of the Pangong Tso. The tents have been pitched ahead of the boundary claimed by the Chinese. An equal number of Indian soldiers have pitched their tents roughly 500 metres away.
The Galwan Valley is a painful reminder of the Indian government’s doomed ‘Forward Policy’ in the run-up to its border war with China in 1962. In July 1962, China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) surrounded a newly established Indian army post in the valley and threatened to overrun it. When they did not carry out their threat, it was interpreted as a victory in New Delhi. The post was wiped out by the advancing Chinese later that year. There is, of course, no danger of a shooting war this time—the pattern suggests Galwan is a stalemate similar to recent ones.
It is nevertheless the biggest one since the 73-day Doklam stand-off in 2017 when the Indian army crossed over into a meadow in Bhutan to prevent the PLA from building a road. The latest incursions are serious because, as an army official explains, the PLA is camped near a new road to a remote Indian border outpost. Cutting this axis could threaten the vital supply route to the army’s northern defences. New Delhi is in no mood to back down even as it has established multiple levels of communication with Beijing to de-escalate the situation.
WHY NOW?
That is the question being asked by pretty much everyone in the army and the government. The IndiaChina LAC seemed to be on an even keel since Doklam. That stand-off was followed by two informal summits between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chinese president Xi Jinping—in Wuhan (April 2018) and Mamallapuram (October 2019). Both leaders sought to delink the bilateral relationship from border disagreements and ensure peace and tranquility on the boundary. A first-of-a-kind hotline between the Indian army’s Director General Military Operations (DGMO) and China’s Western Theatre Command based in Lanzhou will be operationalised soon. The three-year hiatus in stand-offs had even led a senior army officer to hint that a permanent border settlement was on the cards.
The LAC has yet to be demarcated on the ground and delineated on military maps. It is segmented into the western sector, comprising eastern Ladakh; the central sector, covering the border along Himachal and Uttarakhand; and the eastern sector, with Sikkim and Arunachal Pradesh. Without delineation, the LAC remains a cause of tension. Indian and Chinese patrols walk up to the LAC, as they perceive it, to reiterate their claims. Chinese patrols have often camped on territory claimed by India to protest against infrastructure building (see Ladakh on the Edge). Indian officialese for these disagreements accommodates the Chinese view—they arise out of ‘difference of perception’. “But in Galwan,” as one army officer says, “there was never any difference of perception.”
The latest incursions grimly echoed a 2017 forecast by Lieutenant General Vinod Bhatia, a former DGMO. In a paper written for the Centre for Joint Warfare Studies (CENJOWS), a defence ministry think-tank he heads, Lt Gen. Bhatia predicted: ‘On account of differing perceptions of the LAC, an assertive and aggressive China, and a growing new India, peace and tranquility along the LAC will be constantly and continuously under stress, with increase in frequency, intensity and depth of transgressions, leading to more stand-offs.’
On May 19, an editorial in the Communist Party of China-owned Global Times painted India as the