China-India Boundary Dispute: How It All Began

Inference: Whenever two neighbouring countries, when negotiating the delineation (on maps) and demarcation (on ground) of the mutually-applicable international boundaries (IB), resort to previous international treaties and historical paperwork relating to customary laws and traditions, this is not the case with Mainland China and India because, while the latter has documentation of the McMahon and Johnson-Ardagh Lines, the former has no such corresponding historical treaties or maps in its possession, since all such documentation was transferred from the Kuomintang (Nationalist) government in 1949 from Nanking (Nanjing) to Taiwan, where they today are preserved in a hardened underground tunnel complex located underneath the National Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall at Taipei’s Zhongzheng District. And without such documentation, China finds it impossible to agree on any legal parameter that is required for delineating and demarcating any IB and hence always insists that such documentation be superceded by a “political settlement”. It is for this reason that Mainland China will NEVER agree to negotiate the delineation and demarcation of not just the LAC, but even a legally-binding IB.

How Tibetan Ineptitude Reduced Pandit Nehru's Policy Options On Tibet

Inference: While popular perception dictates that India’s first Prime Minister Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru needs to be repeatedly excoriated for his government’s nonchalance in the face of stealthy military incursions by Mainland China into eastern Ladakh throughout the 1950s and 1960s, and for the disastrous and misguided “forward policy”, which constituted the actual casus belli for the Sino-Indian border-conflict of 1962, little-known historical factoids instead prove that it was the sheer ineptitude of the Tibetan government between 1949 and 1950 that forced Pandit Nehru to compromise with Mainland China throughout the 1950s.

Tibetan Uprising Origins

The CIA Starts Helping

Raising Of Special Frontier Force

CIA Wants Out, KGB Wants In

CIA Stirs Unrest Inside TAR, While R & AW Manipulates Dharamsala

Galwan River-Valley Clash Explained

34 45 40.71 N, 78 13 6.79 E

The first signs of discomfort in India started when the China a few days ago began pressing hard for another round of Corps Commander-level meeting to kickstart talks on the Panggong Tso Lake standoff. The PLA even moved a request for a Corps Commander-level meeting on June 16. India, however, declined and had conveyed to China’s interlocutors that a higher-level meeting would only be possible after complete disengagement from the Galwan Valley. This decision was taken at the highest levels. The issue on the table from an Indian standpoint were two semi-permanent structures with tents on PP-14 (Patrolling Point) in Galwan. The PLA-BDR troops had moved back some distance following local commander-level talks, but had refused to remove these structures. At PP-17 in Gogra/Hot Springs, China had apparently raised objection to some Indian Army hutments. In the recent past, PLA-BDR troops have acted in a pattern where they move up, build tented structures and then move back after talks without demolishing what they had made. This was flagged off by the Indian Army as a way to make re-occupation easier at these heights. However, pending resolution of these issues on Galwan, China was keen to start conversation on the Finger Areas of Panggong Tso. At that stage, a high-level meeting took place in Delhi on June 12 where it was decided that India will insist on complete resolution of the dispute in Galwan before moving on to Panggong Tso. South Block was, in fact, gearing up for a more protracted conversation on getting the PLA-BDR troops to move back from Finger-4 in Panggong Tso. It was felt that the PLA would be more belligerent there as it had moved into advantageous ground.

It was the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) insistence of constructing an observation post (OP) at Indian patrolling point (PP) that resulted in the violent scrap between the two sides on the evening of June 15. The post would have helped the PLA to not only observe Indian troop movements towards the Karakoram mountain range, but also would have had the capacity to interdict army vehicles plying on the Darbuk-Shyok-Daulet Beg Oldi (DS-DBO) road. Most importantly, the OP was on India’s side of the Line of Actual Control, or LAC. While India’s External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar red-flagged this issue in his conversation with his Chinese counterpart Wang Yi, it is quite evident that the PLA had a pre-meditated plan in the garb of de-escalation to change the agreed alignment of the LAC and push out Indian Army from PP-14. This would have been hugely detrimental to Indian interests. Set-up in 1978 by the Indian Army, PP-14 is on a ridge that overlooks both the Galwan River Valley and the Galwan Nullah, which joins the Shyok River on whose bank the DSBO road is being build by Indian Army and BRO engineers. The June 6 meeting between the military commanders of China and India had even defined the number of troops to be present at each point leading to PP-14. But even as the de-escalation was on, the PLA wanted to put up an OP near PP-14 on grounds that it wanted to observe the dis-engagement of troops. This was strongly objected to by 16 Bihar Battalion’s Commanding Officer Col Santosh Babu, who rightly saw this as the breach of laid-down rules of disengagement. Around dusk on Monday, June 15, Col Santosh and his Company Commander went up to PP-14 and told his PLA counterpart to pull down the OP. A heated exchange ensued, more troops rushed in from both sides, and punches were thrown. The PLA, which has a base camp down from the ridge near the Galwan River, rushed in more troops in armoured personal carriers to the nearest road-head to PP-14. Initially, the Indian Army troops were present in significant strength, but the PLA soon outnumbered them. While China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi has asked India to punish its troops for breach of discipline, the fact is that the PLA wanted to set up the OP as part of its efforts to redefine the LAC. PLA officers had told Indian Army officers before the scrap that the alignment of the LAC was behind PP-14. The illegal OP would not only have made the Indian position at PP-14 untenable, but also given a huge tactical advantage to the PLA with the option of interdicting Indian Army movement on the soon-to-be-constructed bridge with field artillery or direct-fire. If the OP had been allowed to be set-up the Indian Army supplies to DBO camp ahead would have been at the mercy of the PLA. With more than 600 troops involved in fisticuffs and hand-to-hand combat, the mountain ledge on which the fighting was taking place gave away to a landslide. This led to casualties on both sides as the troops fell into the Galwan Nullah and River, with a section of Indian Army troops being isolated on the other bank of the tributary. Drenched in the ice-cold water of Galwan River and with temperatures running way below zero, the Indian Army troops had nowhere to hide against the elements at an altitude of 16,000 feet ASL. A large number of Indian casualties are on count on standing out in the open in wet clothes to prevent the PLA from taking control of PP-14. The PLA engaged in a show of strength on the morning of June 16 by bringing in more armoured personnel carriers to the nearest road head to intimidate their Indian counterparts. The PLA had also linked the dis-engagement on PP-15 (in Gogra/Hot Springs) to the Indian Army allowing the OP being built near PP-14 on the Indian side. It was the courage of Col Santosh and his men that prevented that.

The clash between Indian Army and PLA troops in which both sides suffered casualties on June 16 began at around 7pm in the Galwan Valley when an Indian Army squad of about 50 soldiers, led by Colonel Santosh Babu, reached a contested site near PP- 14. The soldiers were unarmed, as part of a protocol between the two sides. Forward troops patrolling the disputed border either do not carry guns, or, if they do, keep them slung on their backs with the magazines in pouches and not clipped on. The PLA soldiers were supposed to have withdrawn from the location under a de-escalation plan discussed by senior commanders from both sides on June 6. But the Indian squad found the PLA troops, in violation of that understanding, did not pull back and their tents and an OP was still around. It was when Col Babu and his team confronted the PLA soldiers about their continued presence at the site that the clash broke out and the situation swiftly escalated as the PLA soldiers refused to vacate their positions and the Indian soldiers removed the tents and the OP that were on the Indian side of the LAC. In a matter of minutes, the soldiers were locked in hand-to-hand fighting that triggered a seven-hour violent face-off involving reinforcements from both sides. The clashes spread out from the PP-14 area to a nearby narrow ridge overlooking the river. It was there that both sides suffered casualties. The soldiers exchanged blows, threw stones at each other, and the PLA troops attacked Indian soldiers with iron rods and nail-studded clubs. Some soldiers, from both sides, fell into the water and their bodies were later retrieved on Tuesday June 16 morning. India’s Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) corroborated this sequence of events on June 17 when it detailed a conversation between Foreign Minister S Jaishankar and his Chinese counterpart Wang Yi. In a phone call, Jaishankar told the Yi that the PLA soldiers’ actions “reflected an intent to change the facts on the ground in violation of all our agreements to not change the status quo”. Jaishankar, in his call, underscored the need to implement the June 6 understanding reached by the military officials of both sides as part of a phased de-escalation strategy to ease tensions that had persisted for weeks. The plan was discussed between Lt Gen Harinder Singh, GOC of the Indian Army’s Leh-based XIV Corps, and Maj Gen Liu Lin, Commander of the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) South Xinjiang Military District. According to it, the PLA was supposed to have fallen back around 5km to the east of the location. It had retreated a bit last week but came back to retake the positions they had temporarily vacated. On June 15, the PLA deployment had numerical superiority over the Indian side—more than 250 of them were present in the area when the Indian squad, despite being fewer in numbers, demanded that the PLA remove the structures and withdraw in order to return to status quo. The PLA was, however, adamant on holding its ground. It seemed prepared for a face-off. In the first wave of clashes on June 15 night, Col Babu and two other soldiers were grievously hurt and succumbed to their injuries. Reinforcements arrived from the Indian side within an hour and the brawl spilled over to beyond midnight, and the face-off involved more than 500 soldiers from both sides. The clash took place in pitch-dark conditions and resulted in 20 deaths on the Indian side, and possibly 46 casualties including injuries on the PLA side, pushing the bilateral relationship between the two nuclear powers to an all-time low. They were the first Indian casualties in a border skirmish with the PLA since October 1975 when PLA troops ambushed an Indian Army patrol in Arunachal Pradesh’s Tulung La sector and shot four soldiers dead. The deadly confrontation came on a day when Army delegations from India and China held talks at two locations along the LAC--one involving Brigadier-ranked officers who met at the Galwan Valley, and the other between Colonel-ranked officers at Hot Springs--as part of continuing efforts to resolve the standoff. The Indian Army acknowledged three casualties in a statement issued on June 16 afternoon. It later issued another statement in the evening saying, “17 Indian troops who were critically injured in the line of duty at the stand-off location and exposed to sub-zero temperatures in the high-altitude terrain have succumbed to their injuries, taking the total killed in action to 20.”

Galwan River-Valley

Gogra-Hot Springs

Panggong Tso Lake

Depsang Bulge-Trig Heights-Burtse

The PLA has marked its presence at a crucial Y-junction near the Burtse patrol camp in Ladakh. Barely 30km south of the strategically important Daulat Beg Oldie ALG, this Y-junction is also known as ‘bottleneck’ in Indian strategic circles because any patrol seeking to reach either Point 10 or Point 13 along the Line of Patrol, must cross this junction. It is interesting to recall that the PLA had crossed the Y-junction and stopped barely 1,500 metres short of the Burtse camp in April 2013. Both India and China use the route along Raki Nala, north of Y-junction, for patrolling purposes and it is not uncommon for both sides to run into each other. In 1976, the Govt of India had constituted a China Study Group (an in-house think-tank of the MEA), which revised the patrolling limits along the LAC. As can be seen from the map, patrolling points 10, 11, 11A, 12 and 13 fall slightly short of the LAC.

IA & PLA Martyrs