“The situation is stable but unpredictable,” Army chief General Manoj Pande said on November 12 about the Line of Actual Control with China, while speaking at a Delhi think tank. “We need to very carefully calibrate our action on the Line of Actual Control to be able to safeguard both our interests and our sensitivities, and yet be prepared to deal with all kinds of contingencies”.
Such a contingency came up almost exactly a month later, in the early hours of December 9, when Chinese troops arrived at an Indian post on the LAC in the Yangtse area of Tawang in Arunachal Pradesh. Four days later, in a brief statement to Parliament, Defence Minister Rajnath Singh said their intention was to alter the status quo in the region.
The facts of the incident are still unclear. Broadly, Chinese soldiers crossed over into the Indian side at 3 am. The number of soldiers is said to have been in the hundreds, with 600 the highest estimate and 200 the lowest, indicating serious intent. There was a fierce clash, both sides using sticks, canes and clubs wrapped with barbed wire. On the Indian side, some 40 soldiers were injured.
Anticipating the unpredictable
A little over a third of the 3,488-km LAC — 1,346 km — falls in the Eastern sector. Ever since the stand-off in eastern Ladakh, trouble in some other sector of the contested border was anticipated, specially in Arunachal, where China claims virtually the entire state, and particularly Tawang, an important centre of Tibetan Buddhism.
Gen Pandey’s use of the word “unpredictable” to describe the situation at the LAC was accurate of the reality that anticipation is one thing, but knowing exactly where the PLA might precipitate a situation is another.
India and China have differing perceptions of the LAC at many places, and some 16 such points are listed in mutually agreed-upon documents. Unlike in Ladakh, where there had been no overlapping Chinese claims in three places where the incursions took place in 2020 — Gogra, Hot Springs and Galwan — the trouble in Tawang, the western-most district of Arunachal, erupted at an “agreed” disputed point.
In 2021, Gen Pande, who was then the GOC-in-C of the Eastern command, told a press contingent, which was flown by the Army to Arunachal Pradesh for a media tour of the eastern sector, that while there had been little spillover of the Ladakh standoff in the eastern sector, a “marginal increase” had been noticed in patrolling by the PLA in some areas. He also said that the Chinese were building housing infrastructure close to the LAC on their side, and that had led to higher troop presence.
The December 9 face-off was in Tawang.
Counter measures
In the last two years, India has taken several steps to beef up its own infrastructure. The Border Road Organisation’s Sela Pass tunnel project, which could be ready by January 2023, will provide crucial all-weather connectivity between Tezpur in Assam and Tawang. A 1,500-km Frontier Highway project, shadowing the LAC in Arunachal, is also coming up. It will run from Tawang in the west to Vijaynagar in east Arunachal along the state’s frontier with China.
The visiting journalists were told that infrastructure expansion in Arunachal was taking place along five “verticals”: habitat, aviation, road infrastructure, operational logistics and security infrastructure.
A significant intervention was an increase in surveillance, “both close to the LAC as well as depth areas” on the Chinese side, Pande disclosed. A number of “niche technologies” had been deployed for this, he said. Other than regular satellite imagery, he listed ground-based cameras with night vision ability, surveillance drones, long distance surveillance UAVs, and better communication systems. All the imagery and information from these sources is transmitted to a surveillance centre at Rupa in Arunachal Pradesh, which is monitored 24/7. The media team visited the centre.
Earlier this week, The Indian Express reported that due to the cloud cover during the December 9 incident, there were gaps in the satellite imagery. Radio Frequency (RF) signal geolocation equipment was being used to pin-point the location of the troop build-up and send signals from different antenna positions to satellites for a high resolution reconstruction of images.
It is not clear if the other surveillance measures said to be in place, including in the “depth” areas on the Chinese side of the LAC, picked up advance signs of the Chinese incursion. The 532-word statement by Rajnath gave no indication of this.
Tawang, MacMahon Line and LAC
China claims Arunachal Pradesh as part of the Tibet Autonomous Region, and describes it as south Tibet. It views Tawang as an area of strategic importance for its control over Tibet and its Buddhist leadership. The Buddhist monastery in Tawang is India’s biggest, and in 2017, the Dalai Lama spent over a month there, amid Beijing’s angry demonstrations.
The dispute over Tawang and Arunachal goes back to the India-China dispute over the McMahon Line. For India, this is the settled boundary in the eastern sector – from the eastern trijunction in Bhutan to the Myannmar trijunction. But China rejected it as a “colonial” line imposed by the British Indian administration after an agreement with Tibet, never a sovereign entity in its view.
In 1959, Premier Zhou Enlai wrote to Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, suggesting that both sides withdraw 20 km from a so-called Line of Actual Control (which was when the term was first used) along which Chinese forces had captured some Indian outposts, marking its own territory as per the McMahon Line. Zhou wrote that the LAC in the east would be the “so-called McMahon Line”, and in Ladakh, the line up to which each side exercised control.
In his book Choices, Inside the Making of India’s Foreign Policy, former National Security Adviser Shivshankar Menon details how during his visit in 1960, Zhou suggested to Nehru that China might accept the McMahon Line if India accepted the Chinese control of Aksai Chin. India rejected the offer.
In the 1962 war, Tawang was the place where India suffered its worst defeat, the psychological scars of which the Indian Army still carries.
The Chinese ceasefire and withdrawal to 20 km behind its 1959 “LAC” was unilateral. While the LAC in the east is broadly aligned to McMahon Line, that is not so at all places, as became evident in the 1986 military standoff at Sumdorongchu, east of the trijunction with Bhutan, that took seven years to resolve.
According to Menon, Zhou’s offer to recognise the McMahon Line in exchange for India accepting the Chinese claims in Ladakh was last reiterated by Deng Xiaoping in 1982 in a conversation with G Parthasarathi, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s emissary. Since then, Beijing has demanded concessions in the east for it to make a reciprocal concession in the west. In 1985, China specified that the concession it wanted was Tawang.
Such a concession is now extremely unlikely. Unlike Aksai Chin, of which Nehru famously said that “not a blade of grass grows there”, Tawang is a thriving Buddhist pilgrimage centre. It is one of 33 assembly segments in the West Arunachal Pradesh parliamentary constituency, which has been represented in every Indian parliament since 1950.
For India, there is no easy way out of its border quagmire with China. General Pandey said on November 12 that it was “through talks, through negotiations and dialogue that we hope to find resolution” but it is also clear that India needs to be prepared, in his words, for “all kinds of contingencies”.
Army Chief Gen Manoj Pande, then Eastern Army Commander, in Arunachal with other senior officials in July 2021. (Source: Twitter/@adgpi) 
The December 9 face-off was in Tawang.
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