Rising tensions

Though skirmishes aren’t new along the frontier, the standoff at Ladakh’s Galwan Valley, where India is building a strategic road connecting the region to an airstrip close to China, has escalated in recent weeks.

India and China fought a border war in 1962 that also spilled into Ladakh. The two countries have been trying to settle their border dispute since the early 1990s without success.

Since then, soldiers from the two sides have frequently faced off along the frontier, which stretches from Ladakh in the north to the Indian state of Sikkim in the northeast.

Lt. Gen. D.S. Hooda, a former head of the Indian military’s Northern Command, under which Kashmir and Ladakh fall, said the incident was the “most serious confrontation” between India and China since 1975, when Chinese troops killed four Indian soldiers in an ambush in the Twang region of northeastern India’s Arunachal Pradesh state.

“It’s a very complicated and serious situation, and it will take real, hard negotiating skills to resolve this,” Hooda said.

Lt. Gen. Vinod Bhatia, a former director-general of Indian military operations, said the incident was “serious but local.”

“Such incidents can happen, particularly when (opposing) soldiers are in such proximity,” he said.

The Indian army statement said the “violent faceoff” occurred “during the de-escalation process underway in the Galwan Valley.”

Indian officials say Chinese soldiers commit more than 500 border transgressions annually. China claims about 35,000 square miles of territory in India’s northeast, while India says China occupies 15,000 square miles of its territory in the Aksai Chin Plateau in the Himalayas, a contiguous part of the Ladakh region.

India unilaterally declared Ladakh a federal territory while separating it from disputed Kashmir in August 2019. China was among the handful of countries to strongly condemn the move, raising it at international forums including the U.N. Security Council.