China wants to keep LAC border issue alive, says Army chief

In keeping with its India border strategy of holding out the threat of a LoC-LAC triangulation, China is not doing its best to resolve the LAC logjam of settling the borders once and for all, reports Sanjib Kr Baruah

New Delhi: Doing some straight talking on the ongoing military standoff with China across eastern Ladakh on the Line of Actual Control (LAC), India’s newly-appointed Army chief General Manoj Pande said the Chinese side was low on intent to resolve the logjam.

“The basic issue remains the resolution of the border. What we see is that China’s intent has been to keep the boundary issue alive. What we need is a ‘whole of nation’ approach and in the military domain, this is to prevent and counter any attempt to alter the status quo at the LAC,” Gen Pande said Monday during an interaction with journalists.

The 29th Indian Army chief, Gen Pande took over from outgoing chief General Manoj Mukund Naravane on April 30 and is the first-ever chief to be commissioned in the Corps of Engineers. Pointing out that his foremost challenge lay in restoration of trust and tranquility on the northern borders to pre-2020 status, the army chief added that the effort to do so “cannot be a one-way affair” referring to the apparent Chinese lack of intent to pave the way for a final resolution.

Till now, the two Asian giants have held 15 rounds of talks at the senior military commander level besides a slew of diplomatic parleys at different levels but the final resolution of the issue still remains to be achieved with the two militaries continuing to face each other at the hotspots of PP 15, Demchok and Depsang in eastern Ladakh. But what the talks have achieved till now is some disengagement on the northern and southern banks of the Pangong Tso, Gogra and PP 14 in the Galwan valley.

LoC-LAC ‘Triangulation’

The Chinese posture is in line with its policy of holding out the spectre of a LoC-LAC ‘triangulation’, whereby India is restrained and tied down by the ‘hanging’ two-front war scenario with Pakistan and China as possible adversaries. LoC is the Line of Control, the de-facto border with Pakistan, which is notorious for infiltration by Pakistan-hosted terrorists who cross over into India to carry out their violent anti-India activities.

The LoC-LAC ‘triangulation’ has added another dangerous dimension with the possibility of foreign militants who have operated in Afghanistan. Already India has deployed more than 50,000 troops and military equipment on the northern border with China after a string of violent incidents that began in April-May 2020.

“In the last couple of years, we have rebalanced and re-oriented our forces to deal with the eastern Ladakh situation… we have taken certain actions… we have robust position along the LAC to deal with all types of contingencies,” the chief pointed out. On the lessons learnt from the ongoing Ukraine conflict, Gen Pande said that the relevance of conventional warfare still remains with artillery, tanks and infantry employed in one form or the other besides falsifying the belief that all future wars would be short and swift.

“Increasing self-reliance (in military requirements) is one important lesson (drawn from the Ukraine conflict),” he said adding that there is a need to focus on non-kinetic and non-contact warfare like cyber and information warfare.