Blood On The Barbed Wire

Named after Ladakhi explorer Ghulam Rasool Galwan, the Galwan river flows west from Aksai Chin to converge with the Shyok in Ladakh. It slices through high-altitude mountains and the peaks overlook the valleys and pass—especially a stretch of India’s 255-km Darbuk-Shyok-Daulat Beg Oldi road running close to Galwan valley.

- Bhavna Vij-Aurora

Although a fierce battle was fought in 1962 in Galwan valley, the area has been peaceful since. Chinese transgressions have been mostly concentrated in Pangong Tso, Demchok, and Daulat Beg Oldi. But China perceives the new road as a threat to Aksai Chin and the Tibet-Xinjiang highway. It wants to control the heights in Galwan valley.

This summer, Chinese soldiers entered Galwan valley and billeted in camps, leading to an Indian pushback. They exchanged blows, threw stones...(an informal agreement forbids troops from carrying guns in the buffer area). On June 15/16, the Chinese attacked Indian troops with nail-studded clubs, killing 20 and capturing ten.

Can war and pestilence come together? A pandemic is already upon us, akin to hemorrhage for the body of systems and resources that make up a nation. War is no less severe: the blood loss it entails is of another (if equally real) sort; the debility it causes gradually leaches into the economy too. Can the body even take two extreme stressors, two co-morbidities, at once? India came close to testing that proposition this week, with the violent India-China face-off at Galway in eastern Ladakh making world headlines. No bullets were fired, but so blood-soaked was the episode that it was described as the biggest military confrontation between the two countries in over five decades. Even as New Delhi claimed military and diplomatic engagement had de-escalated a testy situation, Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) soldiers, armed with iron rods and batons wrapped in barbed wire, attacked Indian troops in unprecedented and brutal combat, killing 20 of them.