OUT OF CONTROL

How China outmanoeuvred the Modi government and seized control of territory along the LAC

- SUSHANT SINGH

FOR THE FIRST TIME in forty-five years, on 15 June 2020, India and China recorded the death of Indian soldiers on the Line of Actual Control-the contested border between the two countries, which stretches from the Karakoram Pass in the west to Myanmar in the east. The deaths occurred in the Galwan Valley, in Ladakh, and these were the first military casualties in the territory since the 1962 Sino-India War. The full details of the incident are shrouded in ambiguity, but it involved Chinese soldiers pitching tents around the Galwan Valley and their forceful eviction by the Indian Army-there is little clarity on whether China's People's Liberation Army had agreed to abandon these positions.

This led to a clash which claimed the lives of 20 Indian soldiers and at least four PLA soldiers.

More than seventy Indian soldiers were injured while nearly a hundred more, including some officers, were taken captive by the Chinese. No Chinese soldier was in Indian captivity. "We were taken by surprise by how well prepared they were for the clash," a top officer at the army headquarters in Delhi, who was part of the decision-making in the Ladakh crisis, told me.

The LAC has neither been delineated on the map nor demarcated on the ground by either side.

The last attempt to do so failed nearly two decades ago. The difference in the two sides' understanding of it is so vast that New Delhi claims the border between the two countries is 3,488 kilometres long while China says it is only around two thousand. It is the world's longest disputed border.