India-China border clash deadliest in decades
NEW DELHI — The worst border clash between India and China in more than 40 years left 20 Indian soldiers dead and dozens believed captured, Indian officials said Tuesday, raising tensions between nuclear-armed rivals who have increasingly been flexing their diplomatic and military muscle.
For the past several weeks, after a series of brawls along their disputed border, China and India have been building up their forces in the remote Galwan Valley, high up in the Himalayas.
As they dug into opposing positions, adding tinder to a long-smoldering conflict, China took an especially muscular posture, sending in artillery, armored personnel carriers, dump trucks and excavators.
On Monday night, a huge fight broke out between Chinese and Indian troops in roughly the same barren area that these two nations, the world’s most populous, fought a war in 1962.
Military and political analysts say neither country wants a further escalation — particularly India, whose military forces are nowhere near as powerful as China’s — but they may struggle to find a way out of the conflict.
Both countries and their nationalist leaders, President Xi Jinping of China and Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India, have taken increasingly assertive postures that pose real risks of conflict spinning out of control.
“Neither PM Modi or President Xi want a war, but neither can relinquish their territorial claims either,” said Ashley Tellis, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington.
What’s happening along the Himalayan border is an unusual kind of warfare.
As in the brawls last month, Chinese and Indian soldiers fought fiercely without firing a shot — at least that’s what officials on both sides contend.
They say the soldiers followed their de facto border code not to use firearms and went at each other with fists, rocks and wooden clubs, some possibly studded with nails or wrapped in barbed wire.
At first, India’s military said only three Indian troops had been killed in the clash, where the Ladakh region of India abuts Aksai Chin, an area controlled by China but claimed by both countries. But late Tuesday night, a military spokesman said that 17 other Indian soldiers had succumbed to injuries suffered in the clash, bringing the total dead to 20.
An Indian commander said dozens of soldiers were missing, apparently captured by the Chinese. Indian television channels reported that several Chinese soldiers had been killed as well, citing high-level Indian government sources. Chinese officials didn’t comment on that.
It’s not clear what India can do now. Modi and his Hindu nationalist party have pursued a forceful foreign policy that emphasizes India’s growing role in the world, and last year, after a devastating suicide attack that India blamed on a Pakistani terror group, Modi ordered airstrikes on Pakistan, bringing the two countries to the brink of war.
But India is in no shape to risk a war against China — especially now, as it slips deeper into the economic and health crisis caused by the coronavirus, which has cost the country more than 100 million jobs.
“Whatever India might want to do it’s not in a position to do,” said Bharat Karnad, a professor of security studies at the Center for Policy Research at New Delhi.
“The Modi government is in a difficult position,” he said. “This is bound to escalate.”
And, he added, “we are not prepared for this kind of escalation.”
Xi has been doubling down on China’s territorial claims across Asia, backing up arguments with the threat of force or sometimes even the use of force.
In recent weeks, the Chinese have tightened their grip on the semiautonomous region of Hong Kong; menaced Taiwan; and sunk a Vietnamese fishing boat in the South China Sea.
The upshot, scholars say, is a dangerous break from the past. China and India, with their growing ambitions and growing militaries are increasingly bumping up against each other along their 2,100-mile border.
“Over the past several decades there’s been incessant confrontation between China and India, but proudly there have been no shots fired or deaths,” said Long Xingchun, a professor at China West Normal University in southwest China who studies relations with India.
But now, he added, neither side is as willing to compromise, raising the risks of more fighting, even if the countries don’t actually want to go to war.
“There was no reason for this to happen,” he said. “Unless it was a military standoff that got out of control.”