As China salami-slices at LAC, India must not decouple border from bilateral ties

Reports of these recent face-offs come just ahead of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s expected visit to India for the 18th BRICS summit on September 12-13. This will be his first trip to India since 2019, and his first since the bloody Galwan Valley skirmishes in eastern Ladakh in June 2020, which saw the two countries suffer casualties for the first time in a border clash in 45 years.

Border friction, high-level visits

Border military friction, curiously enough, has often coincided with high-level Chinese visits. The Chumar-Demchok stand-off in eastern Ladakh occurred during Xi’s visit to Gujarat for summit talks with Prime Minister Narendra Modi in September 2014, much like the Depsang incursion before Premier Li Keqiang’s visit to New Delhi in May 2013.

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The Galwan clashes, of course, were a direct fallout of the multiple pre-planned incursions by the People’s Liberation Army into eastern Ladakh in April-May 2020. India then held firm for four years that a full normalisation of bilateral ties – economic, political and cultural – was contingent on restoring peace and the status quo along the LAC.

Ties improve, but borders still tense

However, in late 2024, India was forced into a pragmatic recalibration, driven by economic pressures, manufacturing supply chain disruptions, trade tensions and global geopolitical instability.

Troop disengagement from the two remaining immediate face-off sites at Depsang and Demchok in eastern Ladakh in October 2024 catalysed this reset.

It must, however, not be forgotten that the entire 3,488-km LAC, stretching from eastern Ladakh to Arunachal Pradesh, is still extremely tense and fragile, with the rival armies remaining forward deployed with missile, artillery and other heavy weapon systems.

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China has so far refused to undertake the next steps of de-escalation and de-induction along the LAC, which would require the return of all additional troops to their permanent peacetime locations in the rear.

China fortifies military positions, infra at LAC

There has also been no movement towards restoration of patrolling rights in areas where no-patrol ‘buffer’ zones were created in eastern Ladakh, much to India’s disadvantage, after previous rounds of disengagement till September 2022. Initially touted as only “a temporary moratorium” in patrolling, these roughly 3-km to 10-km zones at Galwan, north bank of Pangong Tso, the Kailash Range and the larger Gogra-Hot Springs area exist largely on territory India considers its own.

While restoration of the pre-April 2020 status quo in eastern Ladakh is still nowhere on the horizon, China has systemically fortified its military positions and built extensive border infrastructure, from new tunnels, bridges and helipads to artillery batteries, surface-to-air missile sites and ammunition storage dumps in the forbidding high-altitude terrain.

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This enables China to rush additional troops and weapons to forward areas many times faster than India in all the three sectors of the LAC – western (Ladakh), middle (Uttarakhand, Himachal) and eastern (Sikkim, Arunachal). Effectively, the LAC now mirrors the Line of Control with Pakistan, necessitating permanent deployments even through the harsh winters.

Airbases, dual-use villages

Additionally, China has upgraded its key airbases facing India – including Hotan, Shigatse, Gargunsa, Kashgar, Nyingchi, Lhunze and Bangda – with new expanded runways, hardened shelters to house aircraft, and fuel and ammunition storage facilities. This allows Beijing to base additional fighters, bombers, reconnaissance planes and drones there, which offsets terrain constraints of high-altitude and rarefied air that limit the weapon and fuel-carrying capacity of aircraft.

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Concurrently, China continues to go full steam ahead with building 628 dual-use ‘Xiaokang’ villages, many of them in disputed areas, to fortify the borders of the Tibetan Autonomous Region with India and Bhutan and lay claim to territory.

After Ladakh, China has been progressively upping the ante in the eastern sector as well. China covets Arunachal Pradesh, especially the Tawang sector that it claims as “South Tibet”, much like it does Taiwan and territories in the South and East China Seas.

What should be India’s strategy?

There has been some diplomatic pushback from India in recent days. First, it formally identified 27 locations in Arunachal Pradesh by their standard names in the Survey of India maps to counter Beijing’s persistent campaign to assign new names to places in the state.

Then, the External Affairs Ministry reiterated that Arunachal Pradesh is indisputably an integral and inalienable part of India. Significantly, it warned that the “state of border affairs will reflect on the state of larger bilateral ties”.

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India must not allow China to decouple the border dispute from the rest of the bilateral relationship. Faced with China’s continuing ‘grey zone’ tactics designed to incrementally alter the status quo in different stretches of the LAC, India can also consider negotiating a new border framework and set of protocols with China after reviewing pacts like the Border Defence Cooperation Agreement (BDCA) of 2013. Overall, any rush for wider diplomatic détente must not lose sight of the stark military reality on the ground.

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