The Himalayan Face-Off: Chinese Assertion and the Indian Riposte by Shishir Gupta

Author:Shishir Gupta [Gupta, Shishir]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hachette India
Published: 2014-04-14T18:30:00+00:00

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TRIGGERS ON THE HIMALYAN BELT

The days when Jawaharlal Nehru used to walk down the corridors from the Prime Minister’s Office to the Defence Ministry in South Block or even cross the road to meet Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel in times of crisis are long gone. Given the security requirements and the paraphernalia surrounding the prime minister, it is the defence minister or home minister or any member of the hallowed CCS who now call upon the PM with a retinue of officials to discuss matters of national importance.

Which is why the corridors of power went abuzz on 19 April 2011, when Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, accompanied by NSA Shivshankar Menon and then Principal Secretary to the PM T.K.A Nair walked up to the DGMO in the Defence Ministry for an urgent presentation. Behind the foreboding black iron-grill doors of the DGMO, Defence Minister A.K. Antony, then Army Chief General V.K. Singh, DGMO chief Lt. Gen. A.M. Verma and other senior Army officials awaited them in the operations room.

The Indian Army’s military operations room is the nerve centre for conducting war in times of hostilities. It is also where daily situation on the live borders with Pakistan and China are monitored with first-hand situation reports, ‘sit-reps’ in military parlance, pouring in from the LOC or the LAC.

Inside the operations room that morning, large-scale maps of Xinjiang, Tibet and the LAC were highlighted. Over the past decade, due to tremendous infrastructure improvement in Tibet and Xinjiang, increased Chinese military capabilities have been a serious cause of concern for India. It was not long ago that the PLA and the Indian Army deployments on the LAC mirrored each other, with each side holding seven military divisions with over 140,000 men respectively at the border. At the beginning of the new millennium, the Indian military assessment was that with improved infrastructure in Tibet, China could increase its force levels to 21 divisions (over 450,000 troops) within a month of hostilities breaking out. The situation had dramatically changed further after the opening of the QTR and new advance landing grounds along the LAC.

On that morning, General Verma informed everyone present that the PLA now had the capacity to deploy 34 divisions (around 750,000 troops) within 22 days. In contrast, India could only mobilize 17 divisions (around 350,000 men) in the same period, with five dual task divisions being pulled out of the Indo–Pak border. The Army argued there was a serious and urgent need for force accretion with China to even defend India’s borders; this meeting sowed the seeds for raising India’s first Mountain Strike Corps in the minds of the PM and Defence Minister. The top military brass argued that the three existing Indian strike corps – I, II and XXI – were primarily designed to counter a threat from Pakistan and there was hardly any reserve force for application in a worst-case scenario with China. After much delay, the armed forces’ proposals for a mountain strike corps, upgradation of airbases with operational role across the LAC and purchase of aerial strike platforms were cleared by the CCS in July 2013.

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