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The US has assured India of its overt support following its recent military clash with China along their mutually disputed Himalayan border, and accused Beijing of being “provocative” towards Washington’s allies in the Indo-Pacific region.
“We continue to remain steadfast in our commitment to ensuring the security of our partners,” Pentagon Spokesman Pat Ryder told reporters in Washington.
He said the US had observed that China continues to assert itself by amassing its forces along the 3,488km de facto border known as the Line of Actual Control (LOAC) between the neighbours and by building military infrastructure along it.
Ryder said Washington supported India’s efforts to “de-escalate” the situation which erupted last Friday at Yangtse in north-eastern Arunachal Pradesh state along the LOAC, in which scores of Indian and Chinese soldiers engaged in fierce hand-to-hand combat.
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Security sources in New Delhi said more than 200 People’s Liberation Army (PLA) troops armed with nail-studded wooden clubs, staves and iron rods clashed with Indian army personnel as they attempted to seize a strategically located Indian outpost in the region.
Indian Defence Minister Rajnath Singh told parliament earlier this week that the scuffle had led to several army personnel sustaining injuries, but that there had been no fatalities or serious casualties.
Singh declined to provide details, but various media accounts citing official sources put the number of Indian soldiers injured at 34, and those of the PLA at 40. The PLA was prevented from capturing the post, which is located at an altitude of 4,500 metres.
Last week’s clash followed a similar, but far more serious encounter in June 2020 in the Galwan Valley region, some 3,000km to the west in the Himalayan Ladakh region, days after PLA troops had transgressed the LOAC and occupied large tracts of territory India claimed as its own.
Twenty Indian soldiers died in this brawl which also featured iron rods, clubs and rocks. Eight months later, in February 2021, China claimed that four PLA personnel had died in the encounter.
India and China went to war in 1962 over their border dispute, in which the former came off worse. For decades they have maintained an uneasy peace along the LOAC in one of the world’s longest-running frontier disputes.
Between 1993 and 2013 the nuclear-armed neighbours signed five confidence-building measures and rules of engagement to maintain tranquillity along the LOAC.
These resulted in troops from both sides enacting elaborate and farcical pantomimes with flags, fog horns, video cameras and cloth posters, among other props, to warn each other against crossing the LOAC.
With their weapons sheathed, but on full display, Indian army and PLA patrols would almost daily exaggerate their respective charades, either by shouting, mouthing or even miming warnings to each other against straying on to the wrong side of the un-demarcated border.
Physical contact between rival patrolling parties was prohibited, as was their “tailing” of one another. Like children playing hide and seek, both armies would frequently resort to cheekily transgressing areas claimed by the other side by leaving behind empty cigarette packs, biscuit wrappers and soft drink bottles to mark their presence.
But all this ceased in May 2020, after the PLA occupied territory in eastern Ladakh, which India had long claimed as its own. The two sides mobilised more than 50,000 troops each as well as deploying tanks, howitzers, helicopters and infantry combat vehicles to the region.
They also built encampments in the vertiginous terrain to combat the harsh Himalayan environment, where temperatures average minus 30 degrees in winter with a windchill factor of twice that.
The ensuing standoff, which continues, has been interspersed with 16 rounds of talks between the respective army commanders, resulting in limited Chinese withdrawals, but some 1,000 sq km of Indian territory still continues to remain under PLA occupation.
Meanwhile, senior Indian Army officers and analysts claimed that China is not interested in restoring the status quo along the LOAC and is bent upon pursuing its “hegemonistic” agenda by altering the LoAC through occupation.
“The PLA endgame seems to be to extend the points of confrontation and keep the border issue active at a time when the world is engaged in overcoming multiple crises emanating from the Ukraine War,” said former brigadier Rahul Bhonsle of the Security Risks consultancy Group in New Delhi.
Sreeram Chaulia, dean of the Jindal School of International Affairs adjoining Delhi was even more dire in his assessment. “In the short-to-medium term, another limited India-China war cannot be ruled out,” he said. Considering Chinese President Xi Jinping’s “megalomaniacal and hard-line mindset”, worse maybe yet to come, he warned.