THE BIG STORY INDIA-CHINA FACE-OFF
began their slow climb up the rolling
hills south of Pangong lake. Chosen
for their mountaineering skills, their
backpacks stuffed with water and
dry rations, carrying assault rifles
and ammunition, radio sets, night
vision devices and hand-held thermal
imagers, they were up for the long
haul. The climb took them between
two and three hours, their objective
being to occupy a series of rolling
hills along a 40-kilometre-long massif south of the lake. The features—
Thakung, Helmet Top, Black Top,
Gurung Hill, Magar Hill, Mukhpari,
Rezang La and Rechin La—are all at
altitudes of 17,000 and 18,000 feet
above sea level and within India’s
perception of the LAC. Two of the
features, Gurung and Magar, named
after Gurkha clans, were a reminder
of the last soldiers to have held these
heights during the 1962 war. Groups
of commandos also climbed the
heights north of Pangong lake. The
only casualty in their stealthy nocturnal ascent was an SFF company
leader, Nyima Tenzin, killed in an
anti-personnel mine blast south of
Pangong lake. Indian troops had laid
the mine in 1962 to deter the Chinese. The special units bivouacked at
the top, just as their comrades had
done nearly half a century ago—by
fashioning improvised rock shelters
or sangars out of loose rocks.
As the special units flashed their
coded mission accomplished signals
back to base on August 30, a wave of
relief spread through the 14 Corps
headquarters in Leh headed by Lt
Gen. Harinder Singh. The corps
guards the entire 840-km LAC in Ladakh. For over four months since the
PLA moved two divisions of troops
and tanks along the LAC and carried
out intrusions, the army had no cards
to play.
It had tried, unsuccessfully, to
convince the PLA to honour the June
6 de-escalation agreement in over a
dozen rounds of talks at the military
level. The PLA refused to budge from
Gogra Post and Finger 4 on Pangong
Lake. Now, virtually overnight, the
tables had turned. The operation using a brigade of special forces—over
3,000 commandos—was the largest
deployment of special forces by the
Indian Army.
This is the biggest pushback
against the PLA since 1986, when
Gen. K. Sundarji heli-lifted a brigade to confront intruding Chinese soldiers at Sumdorong Chu in
Arunachal Pradesh, giving the government some heft on the negotiating
table. An army statement on August
31 said it had ‘thwarted Chinese
intentions to alter the ground situation by occupying strategic heights
within the LAC in the Chushul subsector’. The stealth move attracted a
flurry of statements from the Chinese
embassy in New Delhi, the Chengdubased Western Theatre Command
and the foreign ministry in Beijing.
A Chinese spokesperson in Beijing
called it a ‘flagrant provocation’, and
accused India of ‘severely undermining China’s territorial sovereignty,
breaching bilateral agreements and
important consensus and damaging
peace and tranquility at the border
areas’. In short, exactly what the text
of India’s statements had been in the
past four months.
To describe the situation in
“CHINA HAS
TAKEN US FOR A
RIDE SINCE 1962;
THEY NEVER
DEFINED THE LAC,
USING IT EACH
TIME TO THEIR
ADVANTAGE... WE
WOULDN’T PLAY
THE SAME GAME
WITH THEM, SO AT
EACH STAGE THEY
GAINED A BIT”
G. Parthasarathy
Former high commissioner
to Pakistan
southern Ladakh as tense would be an
understatement. The situation is on a
knife edge, far more than it was after
the June 15 incident at Galwan Valley
where a deadly clash between the two
forces left 20 Indian soldiers and an
unspecified number of PLA men dead.
A senior army official explains why the
situation is precarious. Many units
are deployed in isolated places where
the army does not exercise centralised
command and control. The Rules of
Engagement (which decided how both
sides respond to each other) changed
after the Galwan Valley clash on June
15. “Earlier, we rarely carried weapons
on patrols and it was a peaceful situation, but now both sides are heavily
armed. If a threatening situation is
created, our soldiers on the ground will
use their wisdom…”, he says.
What the army left
unsaid was its official
term for this operation, a ‘quid pro quo’ or
simply a ‘QPQ’ move, a riposte aimed
at getting the other side to withdraw
by capturing territory. In Chushul, this
move could be used to get China to
withdraw behind Finger 4 in Pangong
Tso where it has intruded nearly eight
kilometres, and from Gogra Post near
the Galwan Valley where it has moved
forward by two kilometres.
Yet, India’s gambit teeters on the
edge of armed conflict because both
sides have deployed close to 50,000
armed soldiers, backed by artillery
and tanks, within shooting distance
of each other. Photographs released by
the Indian Army showing PLA troops
armed with medieval Chinese polearms called guandaos—a staff with a
machete-like blade attached—suggests
what they are up against.
On September 7, the first bullets
were fired along the LAC between
India and China in 45 years. The
Indian Army accused the PLA of firing
in the air to intimidate its soldiers at
Mukhpari.
The last time shots were
fired was on October 20, 1975, when
the PLA ambushed an Assam Rifles
patrol in Tulung La in Arunachal
Pradesh, killing four soldiers. Both
sides have since observed the military
confidence building measures (CBMs)
they signed in November 1996 which
include several articles governing the
conduct of troops and forbidding the
discharge of firearms.
Military analysts feel China could
exercise a range of retaliatory options to hit back —from launching a
military offensive to retake the heights
to expanding the conflict by applying pressure in other areas along the
4,400-km-long LAC, including in
Arunachal Pradesh (see box). All these
options have the potential of sparking
off a military skirmish. Lt Gen. H.S.
Panag, former Northern Army Commander, though, believes the focus
of the Chinese offensive is likely to be
Chushul. “The Chinese are most likely
to counter-attack at Black Top , Rechin
La and
Mukhpari. Our defences are
still coming up at these places and they
would want to get in at the earliest.”
Lt Gen. D.B. Shekatkar (retired),
former Director General Military
Operations, disagrees. “I don’t think the
Chinese are in a position to launch even
a local offensive in Ladakh. Except in
Daulat Beg Oldie (the army’s northernmost post in Ladakh) and Galwan, we
are on the heights. In mountain warfare, if you are in a dominating position,
you have won the first round.”
The next two months will be critical for the Indian side. October and
November are seen as the ‘campaign
season’ in the Himalayas, the best
months to launch offensives before the
onset of winter blocks the mountain
passes. This is the reason the PLA
chose to launch their 1962 border
offensive in Arunachal Pradesh and
Ladakh during these months.
A fresh round of talks is now expected at the military and diplomatic
levels to resolve the deadlock. Foreign
minister S. Jaishankar’s meeting with
his Chinese counterpart Wang Yi in
Moscow on September 10 was one such
summit. A joint statement issued by
the MEA noted that “the current situation in the border areas is not in the
interest of either side” and that “border
troops of both sides should continue
their dialogue, quickly disengage,
maintain proper distance and ease
tensions”.
The corps commanders from
both sides are set to meet shortly.
G. Parthasarathy, the former high
commissioner to Pakistan, cautions
against expecting any breakthroughs
in the talks. “China has taken us for
ON SEPT. 7, THE FIRST BULLETS WERE FIRED
AT THE LAC . THE INDIAN ARMY
ACCUSED THE PLA OF FIRING IN MUKHPARI. THE LAST INCIDENT WAS ON OCT. 20,
1975, WHEN AN ASSAM RIFLES PATROL WAS
AMBUSHED IN TULUNG LA, ARUNACHAL
PRADESH. FOUR SOLDIERS WERE KILLED
ride since 1962; they said they will
respect the LAC but have never defined
or drawn it, using it each time to their
advantage, as a pressure point. We
wouldn’t play the same game with
them, so they gained a bit at each stage.”
HOLDING THE HEIGHTS
One of the key tenets of mountain warfare is the control of strategic heights
and passes. The US Army’s manual
of mountain warfare defines heights
as ‘key terrain’—terrain that is higher
than that held by the enemy. Seizing
the heights often depends on long
and difficult envelopments or turning
movements. No one knows this better
than the Indian Army which fought
the last century’s only high-altitude
war in Kargil in 1999—sending up
waves of infantry to dislodge the Pakistan Army from mountain tops.
From what it calls ‘LP/ OP posts’
(listening posts, observation posts)
now manned by small groups of
soldiers in sangars—the army can not
only keep the enemy under constant
watch but, in times of war, can accurately guide artillery shells on enemy
positions.
“The Chinese might have
been preparing for a level 3 or 4 game,
but we have taken
the game to level 9,”
says one senior army official. “We have
handed them a fait accompli. If they
stay, they are below us. If they launch
an offensive, they are still below us.”
The view from the heights—as
Brigadier N.C. Joshi (retired), who
served two tenures in the Chushul, says,
is ‘breathtaking’. “You see nothing but
plains all the way into Tibet.” From
their perch atop the heights, Indian soldiers can see the G219 Xinjiang-Tibet
road and even the PLA’s Moldo garrison in the Spanggur gap—a two-kilometre-wide valley in the mountains.
An army official says the occupation
of the passes bottlenecks the Chinese:
“We have increased the cost for them
to take back the area.”
The plans to dominate these
heights, according to two sources,
always existed with the army, just that
the political will to implement them
was never there. The army began looking for a military option over the past
month when it was clear that talks with
the Chinese were not making any headway and they had refused to restore the
status quo ante as it existed along the
border on April 2020.
The choice of Chushul was not
accidental. History, geography and
geopolitics intersect at Chushul—a
military gateway between Ladakh and
Tibet. Exactly to whose advantage is
decided by the side that can apply the
quantum of military force needed to
move through its mountain passes. In
1841, it was Zorawar Singh, a general
of the Dogra ruler of Jammu, Gulab
Singh, and conqueror of Ladakh and
Baltistan, who chose the Chushul
doorway to ascend the Tibetan plateau where he died in battle with the
Chinese and Tibetan armies.
In 1842,
the Dogras and the Tibetans signed
the treaty of Chushul, demarcating the
border between Ladakh and Tibet.
In October 1962, the PLA burst
through the Spanggur Gap overwhelming a lightly-held Indian garrison. The
PLA advance saw the Indian Army
airlifting six AMX-13 light tanks—the
world’s highest tank deployment—to
defend the access to Leh. A company of
120 entrenched Indian soldiers fought a
ferocious rearguard action falling to the
last man to protect an airfield against
the advancing PLA. The saddle where
they made their last stand against the
advancing Chinese—Rezang La—is
synonymous with near-suicidal courage. The Chinese declared a ceasefire
just two days later and withdrew. The
Indian Army too pulled back from the
area, never to return except for occasional patrols. “Both us and the Chinese
claimed it but never occupied it—it was
for all practical purposes a no man’s
land,” says Brigadier Joshi (retired).
While the danger of the Chinese
returning to reclaim the heights and
plunging the region into a military
conflict remains, the Indian Army
is focused on reinforcing its positions—guarded with barbed wire—
and protecting its soldiers from the
elements with high-altitude clothing
and temporary shelters. A logistics line,
all of it relying on porters and soldiers
transporting material on foot, will
ensure the posts are stocked with food,
water, fuel oil for cooking and heating
and batteries to power their electronics.
At these super-high altitudes, the
enemy could not just be a sneak attack
from Chinese soldiers but frostbite,
sunburn, high altitude sickness and
pulmonary oedema. Winter brings
with it snow blizzards—where fine
powder-like snow can kill humans by
rapidly filling up nostrils and freezing winds can plunge the mercury to
as low as 40 below zero. The army,
fortunately, has the valuable experience
from Siachen and manning the winter
posts in the Kargil sector to fall back
on. “Wars are fought on capabilities
and not wishlists, and these capabilities are what the army has invested in
for decades at the cost of lives and
comfort,” says Lt Gen. P. Ravi Shankar,
former Director General Artillery. In
Chushul lies the key to the escalation of
a four-month-long military stand-off or
its eventual resolution
