Detente At The Roof Of The World

After a 10-month haul, India and China have begun pulling their troops back from the brink in eastern Ladakh. How significant this is and what it does to change the situation on the ground

- Sandeep Unnithan

The Indian Army circulated the first videos from the world’s highest all-arms military standoff on February 11. A squadron of dun-coloured Chinese Type 99 main battle tanks (MBTs) driving down the rolling hills of the Kailash Range in eastern Ladakh. This was matched by Indian T-72 tanks wheeling away from the location. Five days later, a torrent of images from the Indian Army showed PLA (People’s Liberation Army) earthmoving machines clawing at stone bunkers and fortifications and trudging back to their side of the Line of Actual Control (LAC). The images were proof that India and China had begun disengaging their troops from eastern Ladakh, as defence minister Rajnath Singh had informed Parliament on February 11. They showed just how dangerously close the two sides had come at the border—rival tanks just a few hundred metres away from each other in the first superhigh-altitude armoured face-off since the invention of the battle tank a century ago. The images also revealed the depth and complexity of the PLA’s largest border incursion in decades—tents, fortifications, bunkers and armoured vehicles—and debunked initial Indian government assessment last year that the incidents were nothing to worry about.

The standoff began in April 2020 when the PLA converted its annual summer military exercise into a mobilisation along the 840-km LAC in eastern Ladakh. Nearly 30,000 soldiers were back-stopped by tanks, artillery and infantry combat vehicles at contentious boundary points. The Indian Army rushed in two additional infantry divisions (around 30,000 soldiers) into Ladakh even as it sensed it could not forcibly evict the intruders without the risk of a battle. And so began the standoff.