BUILD-UP ON THE BORDER

A BURST OF ROAD AND BRIDGE-BUILDING SEES INDIA PLAY CATCH-UP WITH CHINA’S BORDER INFRASTRUCTURE. DE-ESCALATION WILL NOT MEAN A REDUCTION IN THE ROADWORKS

- SANDEEP UNNITHAN

Sometime in late April, two Chinese motorized divisions— over 20,000 soldiers in trucks, equipped with light tanks and self-propelled howitzers—left their exercise area at the edge of the Gobi desert in Hotan, Xinjiang, and hit the ‘Sky Road’. The Xinjiang-Tibet highway is thus called because it is one of the world’s highest motorable roads, with an average altitude of 4,500 meters. From here, these divisions branched off towards a series of feeder roads that took them right up to the Line of Actual Control (LAC) with India. Once these formations were in position along the 480-km stretch in eastern Ladakh, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) of China began Phase 2 of their military plan—triggering incursions across the LAC in four locations using small batches of troops.

The PLA force was insufficient for a full-fledged invasion (for which they would need between four and six divisions) of Ladakh but just enough to block any attempt at militarily evicting them. The Indian Army rushed two infantry divisions to beef up the Leh-based 3 Division even as the IAF flew in fighter jets and helicopter gunships as deterrents. The counter deployment rode on freshly topped strategic roads and bridges built in the biggest post-Independence burst of infrastructure-building—over 4,700 kilometers—along the disputed frontier.

The largest military standoff between the Asian giants since the 1962 war culminated in a violent clash on June 15 which claimed the lives of 20 Indian soldiers and an unspecified number of their PLA counterparts. A two-hour phone call between National Security Advisor Ajit Doval and Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi on July 5 saw both armies begin the process of stepping back or ‘de-escalating’.