Xi Jinping’s game of politico-military coercion within the Himalayas is currently at a stalemate.
Flying visit PM Modi with Northern Army Commander Lt Gen. Y.K. Joshi
As the Himalayan stand-off between India and China in eastern Ladakh entered its fourth month, the Indian soldiers remained on high alert. On July 28, a Chinese foreign ministry spokesman in Beijing appeared to signal that the crisis was over when he said that Indian and Chinese troops had “completed disengagement in most parts of the border”, implying that they had pulled back from most of the areas where they had been engaged in an eyeball to eyeball confrontation. However, Indian defense ministry officials say there has been no change within the ground situation.
Meanwhile, New Delhi has been pulling all the levers, diplomatic, economic, and political, to urge the Chinese to withdraw and restore the bottom position to what it had been before May 5. it’s invoked the support of like-minded countries like us, Australia and Japan, conducting a naval drill with the USS Nimitz carrier strike group on July 21, deploying the Indian Navy within the Indian Ocean, through which China’s energy lines flow—and imposed economic sanctions, like banning Chinese smartphone apps from the Indian market. no matter the immediate outcome, India, and China are watching the most important reset in their relationship in over three decades since Rajiv Gandhi’s 1988 visit to Beijing, where the 2 countries found out a joint working party to hunt an answer to the boundary question.
Regardless of the stream of mealy-mouthed diplomatese being issued by Beijing, the very fact remains that Chinese belligerence began with a huge military mobilization in late April; ironically, the 70th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic ties between the 2 countries. This military mobilization along the 840-km stretch of the road of Actual Control (LAC) in eastern Ladakh couldn’t are possible without the specific approval of the chairman of the Central Commission, the primary Chinese president to seem publicly in uniform, Xi Jinping. Indian intelligence sources point to a surge within the number of VVIP flights to China’s joint battle command center, the PLA’s nerve center 20 km northwest of Beijing, in early June. This, they say, happening around the time of the stand-offs strongly suggests that Xi intended the border incidents to start out after the third session of the National People’s Congress, China’s Parliament, led to late May.
HOW THE PLA GAME PLAN UNFOLDED
In late April, as India’s national lockdown approached its second month, the PLA was engaged in mock wargames on the Tibetan plateau. For several years, China had been exposing its troops to the tough realities of warfare on the high-altitude Tibetan plateau, at over 15,000 feet. Thinner air means fighter cannot fly with full fuel and weapon loads, and artillery shells follow trajectories different from those within the plains.
Since 2016, the tempo of the exercises had accelerated as China combined the Xinjiang and Tibet military districts to line up its giant Western Theatre Command (WTC), as a part of Xi Jinping’s sweeping reform of the PLA, the most important in China’s history. With 230,000 troops and 157 warplanes, the WTC became China’s largest military command, the key to the PLA’s transformation into a mobile, mechanized force capable of rapid deployment. Post Xi’s arrival as President in 2013, China also stepped up its incursions across the LAC, with foot and vehicle-borne patrols asserting territorial claims. These had begun in 2006, after the Chinese had built up over 36,000 miles of black-topped roads on the Tibetan plateau, completed a Qinghai-Tibet railway, and, more importantly, built feeder roads to permit their troops to maneuver right up to the LAC. Under Xi, border incursions became bigger stand-offs, the most important at Depsang in 2013 and Chumar in 2014.
On Epiphany, 2020, China’s state-run English daily, the worldwide Times, had reported that ‘the exercises deployed helicopters, armored vehicles, heavy artillery, and anti-aircraft missiles across the region, from Lhasa to frame defense front lines with elevations of quite 4,000 meters’. the thing of those exercises was clear, to organize for war with the sole adversary China faced over the plateau. India. Every PLA exercise simulated combat with adversaries who had ‘captured mountain passes’ and featured a variety of weaponry, from light tanks to self-propelled howitzers, optimized for combat in super high-altitude regions. this is often also why the Indian security establishment tracks these exercises per annum. But military maneuvers are an efficient way of masking a true mobilization, the vast movement of armored vehicles and fighter that, within the normal course of events, would trigger alarm across the border. The PLA’s plan, reconstructed by INDIA TODAY with military and intelligence officials, was as follows.
In late April, elements of two motorized infantry divisions, soldiers riding in trucks and armored personnel carriers, that had been conducting exercises in Hotan left their exercise area and commenced moving down the G219, also referred to as the Western Tibet Highway, onto the LAC. They included the South Xinjiang Military District’s 6 Mechanised Infantry Division and therefore the 4 Highland Motorised Infantry Division infantry with tanks and howitzers. The LAC is 115-155 km from the Aksai Chin highway, a 12-hour drive through two mountain passes.
Prelude to a skirmish: Indian and Chinese soldiers the interacting enemy; the June 15 scuffle in Galwan Valley.
The soldiers were soon in position. In late April and early May, the subsequent phase began. Smaller groups of PLA troops moved forward across the LAC and established temporary camps at multiple locations in eastern Ladakh. These sprang up, near-simultaneously, at places like Gogra, Hot Springs, Depsang, the Galwan Valley, and on the Pangong Lake, asserting Chinese territorial claims. it had been a variant of the ‘Forward Policy’ employed by India before the 1962 war. it had also been a military subterfuge at its best and combined diverse elements, maneuvers, and incursions, into a hybrid mobilization plan. The deployment of troops was a blocking move, to stay the incursions from being militarily evicted by the Indian Army.
India’s response, after an initial lull, was to strengthen its strength in eastern Ladakh. By the top of May, it had begun pushing two divisions, or around 30,000 soldiers and two armored brigades with 180 tanks, into eastern Ladakh while the Air Force deployed helicopter gunships and fighter jets and used its heavy lifters to airlift tanks into the theatre.
The Chinese move had shredded every provision of the 1996 peace and tranquility agreement. It left the Indian political, diplomatic and security establishment second-guessing Chinese intentions and just what had been the trigger for the sudden belligerence, the August 9 bifurcation of Jammu and Kashmir, the spurt in India’s border construction, or maybe perceived slights like India staying out of Xi’s Belt and Road Initiative. the top state of the deployment, however, was very clear. Quite just being a blatant attempt at altering the LAC, it had been an enormous game of politico-military coercion along with the three,448 km stretch.
“This operation would have taken several months of designing,” says Jayadeva Ranade, former additional secretary, Cabinet Secretariat, and president of the China Centre for Analysis and Strategy. “It was a part of Xi Jinping’s decision to ‘teach India a lesson’. Perhaps in their assessment, that they had factored within the incontrovertible fact that we might not react.” the 2 divisions were insufficient for a trans-LAC invasion; for that, the PLA would wish a minimum of six. The forces are only enough for what Lt General P Shankar, former DG Artillery, calls “belligerent war avoidance”. The vehicles, tanks, and artillery pieces were left within the open and not emplaced, full view of satellites, Indian analysts take this to mean that the Chinese intent was messaging, not an invasion.
WAS THERE AN INTELLIGENCE FAILURE?
Army officials deny there was an intelligence failure and say that they had been constantly tracking Chinese troops, which is why there have been face-offs. “We stopped them and sent them back. The premise (that we didn’t know they were deployed) is wrong,” they assert. “We knew he (Chinese soldiers, the PLA) was within the exercise area every year, he would return as per CBMs. it’s a breach of trust and faith. We also roll in the hay (conduct exercises), but we don’t go and sit [on the LAC]. He has publicly broken these agreements,” a senior military officer says.
“Troop movement was noticed by unmanned aerial vehicles,” an official tells INDIA TODAY. “[Chinese] tanks and howitzers are in their depth areas (several kilometers from the frontlines) but a lot of PLA troops advanced rapidly towards the LAC. The Indian Army quickly mobilized to counter the Chinese troop build-up. The Chinese were trying to form inroads into the Galwan valley, where they do not have a road. On May 5, as Chinese troops advanced towards the confluence of Shyok and Galwan rivers, Indian troops clashed with them in an attempt to stall them.”
The first confrontation between Indian and Chinese troops occurred on the evening of May 5, and then, at Naku La in North Sikkim on May 9. A much bigger clash followed on May 15th, at Finger 4 on the north bank of Pangong Tso, when the Chinese army arrived with multiple armored personnel carriers and trucks and deployed troops between Finger 4 & 8. (‘Fingers’ are mountain spurs jutting into a lake.) “The Chinese had built a road between Finger 4 & 8 in 1999. Indian troops may have administered patrolling till Finger 8, but hold ground only up to Finger 4. The Chinese had built a road up to Finger 4 and have easier access to logistics from their base, [which is] barely 10 km away at Sirijap,’’ a source says. Groups of Indian soldiers who were prevented from reaching their patrol points by Chinese soldiers got into scuffles with them. These were more than within the past where the scuffles had been confined to single locations. Even by mid-May, the military didn’t think this anything out of the standard or didn’t disclose publicly that it did.
“It is reiterated that both these incidents are neither co-related nor do they need any reference to other global or local activities,” the military chief, General M.M. Naravane, told the media on May 14. “All incidents are managed by established mechanisms… as per established protocols and strategic guidelines given by the PM after the Wuhan and Mamallapuram summits.” Exactly a month later, on June 15, a deadly crash happened at Galwan. The commandant of the 16 Bihar Regiment, Colonel B. Santosh Babu, and 19 Indian soldiers was killed, alongside an unknown number of Chinese soldiers.
The Army’s Udhampur-based Northern Command is liable for guarding a 2,000-km-long horseshoe-like stretch of territory, from the plains of Jammu to the rugged high-altitude deserts near the border of Uttarakhand. This Army command features a Leh-based 14 Corps, which has one division facing Pakistan and another facing China. On the bottom, the army’s own intelligence capabilities are restricted to a brief 50-km rush the LAC, which it can monitor using ground-based sensors, tactical drones, spies across the border, and foot patrols. “If they’re doing something in their depth area, how are we to know?” A former northern army commander says this might be because the LAC lacks a fanatical satellite with a ‘24-hour revisit capability’ (continuous monitoring). But while technical intelligence would reveal movements, the task of monitoring an adversary’s intent and hence, the forewarning of military misadventures, maybe a more complicated job.
In this case, performed by a labyrinth of agencies in New Delhi. the precise task of collating external intelligence is that the task of India’s external agency, the Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW). It collects inputs from spy planes and overseas agents. The NTRO (National Technical Research Organisation) has reconnaissance satellites and drones and scoops intelligence from computers. The Defence intelligence, under the Union ministry of defense, features a Defence Image Processing and Analysis Centre, which is tasked with analyzing satellite and spy plane imagery. and every one of these intelligence flows into the National Security Council Secretariat (NSCS), which is under National Security Advisor Ajit Doval. The NSCS want to have a Joint Intelligence Committee, which collated intelligence and sent out weekly assessments to 29 addresses within the security establishment. The JIC was disbanded in 2014 and therefore the NSCS reorganized under four verticals (see Need for a Shake-Up) to perform the JIC’s tasks. it’s not known whether the NSCS warned the military about the larger deployments (a request for comment to the NSA’s office went unanswered). A former member of the NSCS acknowledges the organization’s Achilles heel, a shortage of analysts. “We didn’t have the potential to ascertain a punch coming, we are weak at analyzing the intelligence that flows in to form dispassionate assessments.”
By June, it had been clear that the Wuhan and Mamallapuram spirit had evaporated. The Chinese side had violated multiple peace and tranquility agreements whilst its diplomats mouthed platitudes. On July 3, while inspecting troops at Nimu in Ladakh, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, without naming either China or President Xi, said that the “age of expansionism was over”. A touch over 48 hours later, NSA Doval spoke with the Chinese secretary of state Wang Yi before each side agreed to commence the method of disengagement. The Indian side hyped it as a breakthrough, but nearly a month later, it seems anything but. The PLA remains where it’s, dug certainly at the end of the day.
