Around the time India’s Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was telling off Chinese Premier Li Keqiang about Chinese shenanighans on the LAC, Defence Minister A.K. Antony was chairing a meeting in the Ministry of Defence reviewing progress on border infrastructure. Informed sources indicated that the minister seemed less than happy. Like it or not, there doesn’t seem to be any sense of urgency in India when it comes to building roads along sensitive frontiers.
That complicates Antony’s agenda when he heads to Beijing for talks with his counterpart, likely next month. He knows and the Chinese know that along much of the western and eastern sectors, there are gaps where the Chinese can walk in, perhaps do another face-off. There’s nothing in the May 20 India-China joint statement that followed Manmohan Singh-Li talks to suggest the Chinese won’t do a repeat. You can bet they will, but probably not immediately.
The gaps need to be closed, the forces on the ground beefed up, but the pace at which India moves is elephantine. The constraints range from bureaucratic sluggishness to environmental issues and plain incompetence. But in all fairness the situation along the LAC today is not akin to 1962; things have vastly improved and it’s something the Chinese understand. “Since Kargil, the Chinese have revised their opinion about the Indian army,” said a senior army officer. There’s new respect for the capacities of the Indian Navy, especially its undersea nuclear element. And there’s no doubt about the IAF’s abilities either. The Chinese do have the advantage of numbers, but don’t forget they haven’t fought a war since 1979 (against Vietnam when they got a drubbing!).
Antony may (like Manmohan Singh) want to know from the Chinese why they did what they did at Raki Nulla in Depsang Valley in Ladakh April 15, but as a senior diplomat with long experience of China warned: “Don’t expect the Chinese to ever explain why the Raki Nulla face-off happened. But reading the tea leaves, it would seem somebody perhaps in the military overstepped his brief. We’ll probably learn of some action against that person or persons in course of time.”
The face-off has also lent weight to another argument, that China’s powerful People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has a problem responding to the directions of the Chinese state as opposed to the Communist Party. Traditionally, the PLA has been identified with the party and it could well be that the PLA generals have issues with directions given by the government bureaucracy.
This is not to imply a civil-military divide, there isn’t one, says the diplomat. President Xi Jinping heads the Central Military Commission and in the Chinese system, no military commander can act on his own. The face-off was carefully planned, but the media outcry in India perhaps resulted in the face-off lasting longer than the Chinese may have intended.
The official word is India conceded nothing to get the Chinese to leave, but there are reports of the army having to dismantle shelters for surveillance cameras at Chumar in southern Ladakh. There are also reports suggesting the army has ceased “aggressive patrolling” in the Raki Nulla area.
The diplomat clarified that it is the Cabinet Committee on Security alone which defines the limits of patrolling. This is based on inputs from the army, which is hardly likely to suggest measures that could constrain it on the ground. Also, while it is the Ministry of External Affairs that leads discussions with the Chinese on the border, “the MEA basically fronts for the army, basing its discussions with the Chinese on the briefs provided by the army.” (And contrary to media reports, the China Study Group is only an advisory body headed by the Foreign Secretary. It has no executive powers.)
The mystery about the incursion is not going to clear anytime soon. But one point is clear: Antony would have given the word to speed up infrastructure work on the LAC. Hopefully, the elephant’s pace will quicken.
(Surya Gangadharan is Strategic Affairs Editor, CNN-IBN, India’s leading TV news channel)
Author Profile
