Current Events :
Responding to the continuing Chinese aggression, India has added Apache attack copters, Sukhoi fighter jets, infantry men and tanks to defences along the Line of Actual Control (LAC).
Ajay Banerjee
Tribune News Service
New Delhi, June 19
Responding to the continuing Chinese aggression, India has added Apache attack copters, Sukhoi fighter jets, infantry men and tanks to defences along the Line of Actual Control (LAC).
Editorial: Taking on China
A division of the Indian Army, kept ready for contingency, has been acclimatised over the past two weeks for war fighting at more than 14,000 feet. Earlier, in the first week of May, the defences in Ladakh were bolstered by moving another division (some 15,000 troops).
Also, the 3rd Division of the Army, tasked for Ladakh under normal circumstances, is already there. Three divisions now form an arc and are ready to respond. This comes in response to the massive buildup by China along the LAC opposite Indian positions in Depsang, Galwan, Hot Springs, north bank of the Pangong Tso, Koyul, Fukche and Demchok.
The Chinese have been relentless in adding to their military capabilities across the LAC, as confirmed by the latest satellite imagery.
The IAF has moved the latest Apache attack 64 helicopters to Ladakh. The bases at Adampur and Pathankot are on alert and are doing patrolling. A navy surveillance plane, Boeing P8I, has been used to capture high-resolution imagery and videos. It can stream videos to war-rooms of the forces in Delhi.
Sandeep Dikshit
Tribune News Service
New Delhi, June 19
The US has said it would like to hear more from China about its land border disputes with India. For the first time in recent years, China’s tensions with India are openly figuring in American calculus for the region.
‘PLA invaded same area in 2015 too’
The PLA invaded this contested area deeper and longer in 2015, with more people, than ever before historically. We don’t have a lot of visibility and we don’t have a lot of open dialogue with our Chinese counterparts — David Stilwell, Senior US Official
Speaking on the India-China border clashes immediately after high-level talks between US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Chinese Communist Party Politburo member Yang Jiechi, a senior US government official wondered whether the Chinese incursions into the Indian territory since 2015 were a negotiating tactic or “just a punch in the nose to demonstrate their superiority”.
However, the US has clubbed China’s friction with India along with its other long-standing regional disputes such as South China Sea and Hong Kong issues to assert that “the actions that we’ve seen out of China have been not really constructive”, according to Assistant Secretary for East Asian and Pacific Affairs in the US State Department David Stilwell.
The US is watching the India-China border dispute “very closely” and finds the current activity at the Galwan valley and Pangong Tso as similar to the activity in the past on border disputes. In this respect, he mentioned Xi Jinping’s India visit in 2015 when the PLA invaded the same contested area “deeper and longer, with more people, than ever before historically. Then we saw the Doklam issue down near Bhutan, where we saw similar concerns”.
“We don’t have a lot of visibility and we don’t have a lot of open dialogue with our Chinese counterparts, and honestly I’d like to see more of that if we can,” he added.
For the most part India was however a footnote as the US-China dialogue in Honolulu revolved around safeguarding American interests, including full transparency to combat the ongoing pandemic, implementing phase one of the Indo-US trade deal, North Korea, Hong Kong, South China Sea and provocative behaviour around Taiwan.
Stilwell described the US-China relationship overall as intense. “This is terra incognita for the Chinese. They never had a US government actually stand up and insist that they follow through on their commitments,” he said.
The Indian Army released the list of the 20 soldiers who were killed in the violent clashes with Chinese troops late Monday night in Ladakh’s Galwan Valley.
The Indian Army initially released a statement Tuesday afternoon, noting that three officers had died in action during the violent face-off. However, later at night, the Army said 17 more soldiers had succumbed to their critical injuries since they had been exposed to sub-zero temperatures in the high altitude terrain.
There has been speculation that some soldiers are missing, since some had fallen into the freezing river in the valley, but the Army neither addressed this in its statement nor mentioned the injuries or deaths sustained by the Chinese side.
The clash occurred after Commanding Officer Col Santosh Babu found out that Chinese soldiers did not entirely follow through on the de-escalation process agreed upon by both side during earlier talks.
ThePrint had reported that the face-off took place on a narrow slope and some soldiers fell into the confluence of the Galwan and Shyok rivers. The face-off included stone pelting and physical clashes with barbed wire and iron rods. The soldiers who fell into the river died of hypothermia.
The bodies of the soldiers were taken by a military aircraft from Leh Wednesday afternoon and will be carried by road to their respective hometowns.
The Indian Army released details of all 20 soldiers declared killed in action. Among them was Ankush, a 21-year-old sepoy born on 4 November 1998. Sepoy Ganesh Hansda was even younger at 20 years. Sepoy Kundan Kumar Ojha died just days before his 27th birthday on 18 June.
Also read: ‘Will be busy for couple of days, be strong’ — wife recalls last chats with Col Santosh Babu
Defence Minister Rajnath Singh will visit Russia and attend the Victory Day Parade at Red Square, Moscow, on June 24.
Tribune News Service
New Delhi, June 19
Defence Minister Rajnath Singh will visit Russia and attend the Victory Day Parade at Red Square, Moscow, on June 24.
The visit comes in the backdrop of the Indian Air Force looking to buy additional MiG-29 and Sukhoi-30 fighter jets. The visit also comes amid a war-like situation when India and China are locked in a tense situation along the Line of Actual Control (LAC).
In addition to attending the parade, Singh will be meeting top officials of the Russian Federation, said sources.
The parade will commemorate the 75th anniversary of the victory in World War-II (1939-45). India is a key ally of Russia and before that the Soviet Union.
From India, a tri-services contingent of the Indian armed forces comprising 75 personnel, led by a Colonel-rank officer, will participate in the parade. The marching contingent will be led by a Major-rank officer of the Sikh Light Infantry Regiment. The Regiment had fought in the World War-II and has the distinction of earning four Battle Honours and two Military Cross amongst other gallantry awards.
Indians took part with the British Indian Armed Forces during World War-II and were one of the largest Allied Forces’ contingents, which took part in the North and East African Campaign, Western Desert Campaign and the European Theatre against the allies. More than 87,000 men lost their lives.
Linked to WW-II
This essay will deal with just one trope – that foreign policymaking in India cannot be an open, public or democratic exercise and that ‘quiet diplomacy’ is the way to go in dealing with China. There are two central problems with such a position – both of which have been on view during the ongoing crisis on the LAC and which have severely constrained the Indian government’s ability to assess the situation as well as to find options to deal with it.
First, the desire to keep decision-making on China within the strict confines of the government has much to do with the run-up to the 1962 Sino-Indian conflict. The lesson learned following India’s defeat seemed to be that discussing matters openly in Parliament or with the general public tended to limit the freedom of manoeuvre for the Indian government to engage in negotiations with the Chinese side that would require compromises by New Delhi in order to have a realistic chance of a resolution that at least broadly met India’s interests.
If this tendency has continued within the Indian government, it has to do with a second reality valid until quite recently, which was that expertise on the border areas or on what went on there was limited to the Army and various paramilitaries – the Indo-Tibetan Border Police and previously, also the Assam Rifles, both under the Ministry of Home Affairs – that had manned the borders and/or with the diplomats and other civilian officials who held administrative charge of these areas.
There are good reasons why neither position is tenable any longer.
Also read: How India and China stack up in terms of military capability
One, as under Mao Zedong, so also under present Communist Party (CPC) General Secretary Xi Jinping, China is a power that not only takes maximalist positions but also makes no effort to couch these in polite language or to even discuss alternatives. It is also a China that seeks to distract from internal strife and the leadership’s inability or incompetence in handling domestic crises with a shrill, victimhood-based nationalism. It is doubtful that Nehru’s India could have avoided eventual conflict with China given the Dalai Lama’s decision to flee Tibet to India or the need for Mao to both counter criticism for and distract attention from the Great Leap Forward, whose disastrous effects – tens of millions dead by starvation – the rest of the world would only come to know many years later.
Today, Xi Jinping faces a similarly fraught internal situation with an economy hammered by the COVID-19 pandemic and the long-aspired for goal of a ‘moderately well-off society’ by the CPC’s 100th anniversary next year, looking ever more distant. Meanwhile, Xi’s policies since his ascension to power in 2012 – his centralization of power and his hard-selling of the ‘Chinese dream’ of nationalism, and of being a natural challenger to the United States –has had the implication of painting other countries as weaker than or less important than China. Thus, when a Vietnam or Indonesia or India decides to challenge China’s bad behaviour, the Chinese tendency has been to view such reactions with surprise as if the smaller country were being both unreasonable and arrogant.
While the incidents – whether in the South China Sea or on the LAC might be localized and the tactics used by military commanders shaped by local factors, they are sanctioned by the larger set of goals and objectives under Xi’s plans for ‘national rejuvenation’. Thus, whatever ‘strategic guidance’ he might have imparted to his military commanders following the Wuhan informal summit with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in April 2018, it certainly was not aimed at maintaining peace and tranquillity on the LAC but ensuring dominance and constraining Indian behaviour.
Given this reality, the Indian government actually gains nothing from keeping its own public in the dark about goings on along the LAC or by infantilizing its citizens by portraying them as being unable to understand India’s international interests. On the other hand, open and accurate dissemination of information by the political leadership on the general state of relations with China as well as at the LAC specifically, would have helped with the current situation. In fact, if instead of being buried deep in various government reports, news about the numbers and nature of transgressions on the LAC had been actively disseminated and explained at least from 2017 when the Doklam standoff took place, if not earlier still, this would have created an iterative learning experience for the Indian public – including possibly its own soldiers – who would then have been both better informed about what is at stake and prepared for the troughs in the relationship.
Instead, what we have is a situation where Doklam has almost completely disappeared from public memory and the larger pattern of increasing Chinese assertiveness that has been underway for years already has been missed. The evidence for this last would have been available from Doklam itself if the government had been so minded to keep the media and the public focused on the area that Bhutan claims for its territory but which the Chinese have today more or less occupied entirely save for the exact spot of the original standoff itself. Instead, New Delhi diverted attention by the so-called ‘informal summits’ in Wuhan (2018) and Mamallapuram (2019) that departed from the norm of even minimal transparency by providing neither a joint statement nor any clearly defined set of commitments that the two sides had agreed on.
Meanwhile, the Chinese have begun to claim that they too, now have to acknowledge ‘public opinion’ on their side, while India which is a democracy enters the negotiating room with one hand tied behind its back simply because it cannot leverage its public opinion.
What is more, the deaths of Indian soldiers on the LAC will probably now also set off great confusion about how such a situation could come to pass when the average Indian thought all this while that the only real existential threat came from Pakistan. In fact, even without the Indian casualties on the LAC, it could be argued that the Modi government had created an unintended consequence in the form greater Indian public attention on China precisely by focusing frequently and loudly on its tough responses to Pakistani provocations and claiming that it had done what previous governments had failed to do. In terms of responding to Chinese provocations, therefore, ‘yeh dil maange more’ (the heart wants more) might now well become the attitude of the average Indian on China, too.
Also read: Railways terminates contract with Chinese company but ‘not due to LAC conflict’
Two, it is no longer the case that expertise on China or on India’s border areas with China are limited to only within the Indian government, even if this expertise has gone up considerably and continues to grow especially among the middle and junior rungs of the military leadership. Despite consistent lack of government support, there is today a whole generation of young Indians who, ironically, have the Chinese government to thank for some extremely generous – by Indian standards – scholarships to study in China and have, as a result, developed significant expertise as well as niche areas of specialisation on that country. Also to be thanked is the Taiwanese government that has for over 15 years run its own set of scholarships and fellowships for Indian students and academics as part of its outreach to India and a desire to diversify its options in global politics and economy – a move that New Delhi itself has failed to reciprocate in substantive measure.
One might also add that China’s Belt and Road Initiative and its attempt in the opening years of the project to gain India’s support also meant invitations to conferences for Indian scholars, including of older generations – opportunities for travel and discussion that they simply had not had in all the years past owing to lack of money for field trips in Indian universities and think-tanks. These occasions served to open Indian eyes and minds to the scale of just what the Chinese were up to in the Xi era. While scholars who were not specialists of China were justifiably impressed with glitz and ambition of a conference even in a mid-size Chinese city, they too, eventually came around to observing and highlighting what Indian students in China as well as China specialists in India soon perceived to be Beijing’s zero-sum approaches in foreign policy and economic globalization.
It has been easy for both serving and former Indian government officials to tar Indian scholars and students who have studied in China as being soft on the country or having their heads turned by Chinese inducements. The chances of this happening are about the same as the chances of Indian diplomats or intelligence officers posted in China selling their country short. But one reason why such statements continue to have currency is a desire by sections within government to protect the government’s imaginary ‘freedom’ of manoeuvre, from criticism that if they acknowledged as valid would require uncomfortable changes of course and loss of turf and privilege. It is time to bury this ostrich mentality within the government and to both move faster to tap expertise outside its four walls as well as to open the purse-strings to more generously fund China studies in the country.
Also read: Modi govt and military leaders have soldiers’ blood on hands. PM’s dilemma now same as Nehru
The deaths of Indian soldiers along the LAC at Galwan is a watershed moment in the India-China relationship. If the relationship is not to spin out of control and if India needs to develop the muscle – military, economic and intellectual – to tackle the long-term China threat on the borders as well as the challenges that Beijing poses in the region and globally, not only will New Delhi have to adopt transparency and openness to questions as a central plank of the reworking of its China policy but also partnership with and support for expertise on China in India’s universities and think-tanks. The first is a policy change that can be achieved practically overnight if the government wills it. The second is currently available from sections of the government episodically but needs to become more widespread and sustained. Together, these changes could well ensure that the tragedy on the LAC is not for nothing.
Jabin T. Jacob is Associate Professor, Department of International Relations and Governance Studies, Shiv Nadar University, Uttar Pradesh. Views are personal.
The Uddhav Thackeray government is having second thoughts on going ahead with the MoUs signed with Chinese companies for investing Rs 5,000 crore in the state’s automobile sector.
Mumbai, June 19
The Uddhav Thackeray government is having second thoughts on going ahead with the MoUs signed with Chinese companies for investing Rs 5,000 crore in the state’s automobile sector. China’s Great Wall Motors is to invest Rs 3,770 crore for taking over General Motors’ facility at Talegaon near Pune.The Congress, an ally, has demanded the MoUs signed hours before 20 Indian soldiers were killed by the Chinese troops be scrapped. — TNS
According to friends, Rajesh, one of the 20 soldiers killed in the Galwan Valley clashes with China this week, was about to get married next month.
The news of his death brought scenes of despair to his house in the forested tribal village of Belgoria in Bengal’s Birbhum district, but there was also pride. Rajesh’s cousin Abhishek, 24, said the two brothers had aspired to serve in the Army together.
“Rajesh was more than a brother, he was my best friend. He motivated me to join the force,” said Abhishek, who is in his second year at an industrial training institute (ITI). “We dreamt of staying in a tent together. He left me, but strengthened my resolve.”
Nagen Orang, Rajesh’s uncle and Abhishek’s father, expressed pride that they had “sacrificed our son for the country”. “We have lost one son, but we have one more. We want him to join the force. This brings us ultimate pride and prestige,” he said. “My nephew was and is a hero.”
Also Read: ‘Will be busy for couple of days, be strong’ — wife recalls last chats with Col Santosh Babu
Belgoria, a village of 80 to 90 families, sends many of its young men to the security forces, including military, paramilitary and police.
Rajesh was in his second year of graduation in 2015 when he joined the Army. He was posted in Ladakh for the last year and a half, said Abhishek. The young sepoy was the sole breadwinner for the family.
The family came to know about Rajesh’s death from a senior Army officer who called them Tuesday evening.
Rajesh, the officer told them, was critically injured in the clashes and succumbed to his injuries at the Army hospital.
A day later, his father Subhash Orang, a terminally-ill marginal farmer, was inconsolable.
“We say that we are proud. People will tell us that we should be proud. But after some days, when all this will be over, we will have an empty life without my only son,” Orang, 50, told ThePrint over the phone. “I do not want war, but I also do not want to see my son’s sacrifice go in vain,” he added.
Rajesh had last visited the family in January and was building a concrete house for them so they could move out of their mud house.
His last call came two weeks ago, to his sister Shakuntala, who studies at a college in neighbouring Jharkhand but is at home currently on account of the lockdown. “The call only lasted for two minutes. He told his sister to stay well and take care of us,” said Subhash. “He said he would be climbing up now and there would be no network, so he would call back later after reaching their base camp,” Subhash added. “We were standing there, but did not get a chance to speak to him.”
Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee Wednesday announced a compensation package of Rs 5 lakh for the family and a job for one of them.
Also Read: 1954 Panchsheel pact to Galwan Valley ‘violence’ — India-China relations in last 7 decades
The Indian Navy has also been asked to raise its alert level in the Indian Ocean Region where Chinese Navy has been making regular forays.
The decision to raise the alert level of the three forces were taken at a high-level meeting Defence Minister Rajnath Singh held with Chief of Defence Staff Gen Bipin Rawat and the three service chiefs, sources said.
The Army has already rushed in additional troops to all its key front-line bases and formations along the Line of Actual Control (LAC) in Arunachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh and Ladakh, they said.
The Indian Air Force has already raised the alert level in all its front-line bases tasked to keep an eye on the LAC, the de-facto border
India has the third highest defence expenditure in the world, but China spends nearly four times more. It also has greater air and naval strength.
New Delhi: Monday’s deadly Galwan Valley clash between the Indian and Chinese armies, the first casualties in a skirmish between the neighbours in 45 years, has left lingering fears of a military confrontation.
Some experts contend that unlike the 1962 war, the Indian military is now in a much stronger position, while others point to China’s defence budget being nearly four times that of India to say otherwise.
Here’s how the two nations’ military capabilities stack up.
Though China’s finance ministry declared its official military budget in 2019 as $177 billion, analysts report the actual figure to be between $261-266 billion.
According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), in 2019, China’s defence budget was $261 billion, while the corresponding figure for India was $71.1 billion. These are the second- and third-highest military spends in the world.
In terms of manpower, China has 21,83,000 active personnel and 510,000 reserve troops, while India has 14,44,000 and 21,00,000, according to Global Firepower.
Also read: The more troubling India-China conflict is economic, not military
In the realm of military resources on land, China possesses 3,500 tanks, 33,000 armoured vehicles, 3,800 self-propelled artillery, 3,600 towed artillery, and 2,650 rocket projectors.
China’s total air fleet stands at 3,444, and includes 1,232 fighter jets, 371 dedicated attack crafts, 224 for transport, 314 trainers, 111 for special missions, 911 helicopters, and 281 attack helicopters.
The Indian air fleet has a strength of 2,141, including 538 fighter jets, 172 dedicated attack crafts, 250 for transport, 359 trainers, 77 for special missions, 722 helicopters, and 23 attack helicopters.
China currently has two aircraft carriers, 36 destroyers, 52 frigates, 50 corvettes, 74 submarines, 220 patrol vessels, and 29 crafts for mine warfare.
The Indian fleet, meanwhile, consists of one aircraft carrier, 10 destroyers, 13 frigates, 19 corvettes, 16 submarines, 139 patrol vessels, and three crafts for mine warfare.
According to SIPRI’s 2020 Yearbook, the Chinese nuclear arsenal currently stands at 320, while India has 150 weapons.
Also read: China’s chairman of everything faces new challenge in Beijing’s Covid outbreak
