THE TIBETAN GHOST WARRIORS

INDIA WRESTS HIGH GROUND IN EASTERN LADAKH WITH SOME HELP FROM A SECRET COMMANDO FORCE

- SANDEEP UNNITHAN

Up until last week, it appeared that the military standoff between India and China in eastern Ladakh was settling into an uneventful deep freeze as winter approached. Nearly a dozen rounds of talks between both sides had failed to resolve a deadlock, mainly because the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) of China refused to pull back its troops to their positions before April 2020. The deadlock was acute along the north bank of the Pangong Tso where the PLA had moved forward by nearly eight kilometres to a point known as Finger 4.

Then, on the night of August 30, the situation changed dramatically. The Indian Army, accompanied by special forces, occupied five key features along a ridgeline south of the Pan gong lake—Helmet, Kala Top, Camel’s Back, Gurung Hill, and Requin La. These five strategic features are in an area India considers to be within its perception of the LAC (Line of Actual Control). An Indian Army statement on August 31 said that they had ‘thwarted Chinese intentions to alter the ground situation’. ‘The Chinese had violated the previous consensus arrived at during military and diplomatic engagements in the ongoing standoff in eastern Ladakh and carried out provocative military movements to change the status quo,’ army spokesperson Col. Aman Anand said in a release. ‘Indian troops had pre-empted PLA activity and undertaken measures to strengthen our positions and thwart Chinese intentions to unilaterally change facts on the ground.’ The army has an official word for this—quid pro quo or QPQ, defined as an action to grab territory in exchange for a settlement. It is still unclear whether this was such an operation, but there has been a shift in the ground position. India now holds some cards on the table.