The border affray is a sign of worrying military escalation between Asia’s giants
THE TWO armies each had guns, artillery and tanks to the rear. But they wielded only sticks and stones at the front, as night fell on June 15th. That was deadly enough. When the brawl ended, and the final rocks had been thrown, at least 20 Indian troops lay dead in the picturesque Galwan valley, high in the mountains of Ladakh. Chinese casualties are unknown.
Even then, India’s government played down the severity of the crisis, eager to avoid giving the impression that it had been caught napping on the border—and mindful that a nationalist backlash would make it harder to defuse the situation. As diplomats and generals worked the phones and met at the border, things seemed to be calming. On June 9th India’s government said China had pulled back troops, tents and vehicles at the Galwan valley and another site , and that India had reciprocated.
China’s government was unrepentant. It said that India had gone back on earlier agreements and “twice crossed the border line for illegal activities and provoked and attacked Chinese personnel”. Hu Xijin, editor of the Global Times, a state-run tabloid, acknowledged the Chinese casualties in a tweet. If PLA soldiers were killed, these would be China’s first fatalities in combat, outside of peacekeeping, since skirmishes with Vietnam in the 1980s.
Though India and China have been rivals for a half-century—the PLA thumped India’s army in a brief border war in 1962—their rivalry has grown more intense over the past decade. The border has turned stormier, with Chinese incursions in Ladakh occurring in 2013 and 2014, and a 73-day stand-off on the edge of Bhutan in 2017.
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