A Frontline Step That Will Only Strengthen China

After the 1962 Sino-India War ended, the Indian Army faced the problem of bodies of about 190 Indian soldiers lying in an area of ​​about 8 km to 16 km inside the Chinese 1960 claim line in Ladakh. Collecting the bodies of fallen soldiers by mutual consent is an established military exercise, and the Indian Red Cross wrote to its Chinese counterpart in April 1963. The Chinese turned down the request, saying the bodies were properly buried, and there was no need for any Indian side to send them to the disputed areas. Since most of the Indian soldiers were to be cremated, not buried, the issue was again raised with the Chinese. In August, the Chinese agreed to perform the last rites and hand over the ashes to the Indian Red Cross.

When the Indian Red Cross requested that Indian representatives be present during the ceremony, the Chinese canceled the arrangement altogether. In its memorandum on September 16, 1963, the Chinese Foreign Ministry accused the Indian government of attempting to claim these territories through this instrument.

Rejecting these arrangements, the Chinese foreign ministry insisted that the Indians who died in their positions in Ladakh were ‘aggressors’ and not defending their ‘homeland’. Earlier, after overcoming stiff Indian resistance at Rejang La, remembered in the Hindi film, Haqeeqat, and at Gurung Hill, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) had buried the bodies of five Indian soldiers – wooden posts with inscriptions in Chinese and English, ‘corpses of Indian invaders’. The purpose of the elaborate exercise was to deny any legitimate Indian presence and claim these territories in future negotiations. If Indian soldiers were killed defending their homeland, it was an area under Indian occupation and control – which would defy Chinese claim to the territories of Ladakh. Its efforts to build facts on the ground to bolster its ‘historic’ claim underscore the extent of Chinese enterprise in asserting its territorial claims.

delinking dipsang

It is thus surprising that in a recent television interview, the Indian Army Chief, General MM Naravane, argued that “out of five or six friction points (in Ladakh), five have been resolved”. ‘Point of friction’ is an Indian euphemism for the points of Chinese entry into hitherto India-controlled territory in Ladakh, where this control is carried out through regular patrolling in claimed areas by the Army and the Indo-Tibetan Border Police (ITBP). Is. These ‘friction points’ are Depsang, Galwan, Hot Springs, Gogra, the northern bank of Pangong Tso, Kailash Range and Demchok. Stating that there is only one friction point to be resolved – he was referring to hot springs or PP15, which was discussed in the last round of talks with China – he clearly stated the areas to be resolved. As Depsang rejected. This attempt to isolate the strategically important Depsang region from the current Ladakh border crisis is worrying. This may suit the Narendra Modi government’s domestic political agenda of declaring an early end to the crisis, but it has long-term strategic consequences for India.

Depsang is an enclave of flat terrain located in an area that the Army classifies as Sub-Region North (SSN), which provides land access to Central Asia through the Karakoram Pass. A few kilometers southeast of the crucial Daulat Beg Oldie (DBO) airstrip, the Chinese military has blocked Indian patrols at a location called the Y-junction or bottleneck since early 2020, calling it five PPs: PP10, PP11, PP11A. has been denied access to. , PP12 and PP13. A joint patrol team of ITBP and Army will patrol these five PPs about once in a month. The Y-junction is approximately 18 km on the Indian side of the Line of Actual Control, even though the Chinese claim line is located five kilometers to the east of the city of Burtse in the west. Satellite imagery from November 2021 confirms Chinese deployment at the Y-junction: two PLA ground force camps with six infantry fighting vehicles split between two positions while a smaller Indian Army forward camp from the Y-junction Positioned 1.2 km west.

Standoff and patrol in 2013

The Indian Forward Camp is the new patrol base, with a permanent patrol force stationed there, which was created in April 2013 after a 22-day long stand-off at the Y-junction. Since then, it has stopped and stopped Chinese patrols from moving forward. to the Indian side, but a PLA patrol still managed to reach about 1.5 km less than Burtse in September 2015. Essentially, until the current blockade, the Indian side was able to reach five patrol points, claiming Indian control, while the PLA had been denied access to its claim line since the late 2000s. The status quo has been disturbed since the beginning of 2020.

A section of the security establishment has tried to suppress any conversation about Depsang since the Ladakh border crisis broke out in May 2020. Media reports have dubbed it a ‘legacy issue’ due to ‘sources’, suggesting that the crisis has been ongoing since April 2013. The 2013 standoff was diplomatically resolved after talks, leading to an Indian entry on the Chinese side and reversing bunker construction. In Chumar, while the PLA stepped away from the Y-junction. The then Northern Army Commander, Lt Gen KT Parnaik (Retd), confirmed that “the resort(ing) is a quid pro quo, as we did during the Depsang incursion in 2013. Early response pays off.”

Former Ladakh Corps Commander Lt Gen Rakesh Sharma (Retd) had categorically stated that “the patrolling was going on since the time it was planned. [the] April/May 2013 stand-off” and “so far as we know we haven’t reached our LOP since 2013” [the] PLA was stopping our movement, is pure hypocrisy. The fact that specific major general-level talks for Depsang took place with the Chinese on August 8, 2020, proves that this is part of the ongoing crisis. The 22-day standoff in 2013 caused much public and media outrage, but the 22-month-long blockade in the same area has now been greeted with silence.

Importance of Depsang

The army, which has always identified the plains of Depsang, where it finds itself most vulnerable, in Ladakh, devises a plan to deal with the major Chinese challenge. The SSN’s Depsang, Trig Heights and the flat terrain of DBO – which provides direct access to Aksai Chin – are suitable for mechanized warfare, but are located only at the end of a very long and weak communication axis for India. In turn, China has many roads that provide easy access to the region. This leaves the SSN highly vulnerable to capture by the PLA, with some thousands of square kilometers likely to be lost from the Karakoram Pass to Burtse. Elsewhere in Ladakh, the PLA is unlikely to gain so much territory in one fell swoop.

The SSN is located east of Siachen, between the Saltoro Ridge on the Pakistani border and the Cesar Ridge close to the Chinese border. On paper, this is the only place where a physical military collusion between Pakistan and China could take place – and the challenge of a two-front war could be real in a worst-case scenario. If India loses this territory, it will be almost impossible to launch a military operation to take back Gilgit-Baltistan from Pakistan.

Theoretically, if the military is to fulfill Union Home Minister Amit Shah’s parliamentary resolution to recapture Aksai Chin from China, Depsang should be given a call for a mechanized force-based military offensive launched by India inside Aksai Chin. Also seen as a viable launchpad.

danger of delinking

However, the biggest danger of alienating Depsang from the current border crisis in Ladakh is to confirm the Chinese argument, which invalidates the rightful Indian claim over a large area. In sparsely populated areas like Ladakh, with limited advance deployment of troops, the only claim to territorial claims is regular patrolling. By arguing that the blockade on the Y-junction predates the current standoff – a ‘legacy issue’ that goes back years – the Chinese side could confirm that Indian patrols never had access to the area. and thus India has no valid claim on this territory. , already living with the disadvantages of having less power face to face China, this argument further weakens India’s hand during talks in Ladakh.

This would be similar to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s statement during the all-party meeting in June 2020 that no one had entered Indian territory, which strengthened the Chinese position during the talks. India cannot afford to repeat that mistake and lose its ground. As demonstrated by China after the 1962 war, it should not shy away from asserting its claims when it comes to the security of the region. Denying the truth in this matter for domestic political gains would certainly be detrimental to India’s strategic interests.

Sushant Singh is a Senior Fellow at the Center for Policy Research