- Tuesday, April 30, 2024
By: Shubham Ghosh
THE two giant neighbours have found themselves at constant odds in the recent past punctuated by talks to defuse the tension. But if reports are to be believed, the nuclear powers have resumed military build-up on their respective sides of the mountainous border, raising the spectre of further conflicts. India and China had a border clash in 1962 that resulted in India’s humiliation while in 2017, they came very close to yet another one at a trijunction border area between India, China and Bhutan, sandwiched between them.
The Telegraph on Tuesday, June 8, reported that satellites have traced the rapid military build-up on both sides of the India-China border. India deployed 60,000 troops and heavy artillery to reinforce the border in the wake of the clashes with Chinese soldiers in Ladakh’s Galwan Valley last year that saw 24 dying. China, on the other hand, has been carrying out live fire exercises with self-propelling mortars even though a 1996 agreement between the two nations says no guns or explosives should be used near the border.
India has to heavily secure two borders
According to analysts in Delhi, the situation doesn’t look too assuring for India as it has to maintain troops on two fronts at the same time as its day-to-day relation with Pakistan to the west also stands on shaky grounds.
“The Chinese threat has increased substantially and it is growing because of the capabilities that the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) is inducting in the theatre… Right now there is no war but when you increase the threat, a war can never be ruled out,” Pravin Sawhney, analyst and editor of national security magazine Force, was quoted as saying by The Telegraph.
A year before, bloody physical clashes broke out between Chinese and Indian soldiers after the northern neighbour was accused of breaching the Line of Actual Control. Twenty Indian troops were battered to death and their bodies were thrown into steep ravines. China later acknowledged that four of its soldiers were killed too.
‘Galwan changed whole face of LAC’
“The Galwan incident changed the whole face of the LAC. The mobilization of troops by China needed counter mobilization for which we needed infrastructure and roads,” a senior defense official told the news outlet. “We pressed in combat engineers to complete the construction work planned for five years in just over five months,” he said.
But could the serious mobilisation at the border lead to a war? Asian security analyst Arzan Tarapore doesn’t think so. However, he conceded to The Telegraph that the risk is “significantly higher now” than what it was before the crisis started in may last year.
“The disengagement has stalled and talks have not restored the status quo,” he said, adding that while both sides are now much better prepared to fight, India also faced a challenge in securing the Kashmir border as a result of its heavy deployment to the north and north-east.
