Situation along LAC tense with full army deployment

Though the situation has not escalated since the Galwan incident, the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) is continuing troop accretion with support elements on standby, Indian officials familiar with the matter said.

Updated on: Jun 22, 2020, 02:30:02 IST

Hindustan Times, New Delhi | By Shishir Gupta

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The situation continues to remain tense along the 3,488km-long Line of Actual Control, with both the Indian and Chinese armies fully deployed, air bases activated, and the navy on standby, following the June 15 face-off in the Galwan sector.

A satellite image of Galwan Valley in Ladakh, India. (via REUTERS)

Though the situation has not escalated since the Galwan incident, the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) is continuing troop accretion with support elements on standby, Indian officials familiar with the matter said. The Indian Army positions are also being beefed up in response to the PLA build-up in the Xinjiang and Tibet regions, and the air forces of the two sides are keeping surveillance watch on each other, the officials added.

One of them said on condition of anonymity that Indian military commanders have issued instructions to use force if PLA troops cross the Galwan nullah to attack the Indian Patrol Post 14. The PLA has amassed troops across the nullah, and both sides are holding ground, he said.

The situation on ground is no different from June 16, with the two armies not thinking in terms of disengagement at the moment along the lines of the June 6 framework laid down in a Lt General-level meeting. Senior Indian military commanders are watching the PLA movement in the Aksai Chin region, while the ministry of external affairs is trying to search for a diplomatic solution. “The situation has cooled to a little extent, but de-escalation appears to be a long haul due to the position China has taken on the Galwan Valley,” said a senior Indian diplomat.

Military watchers said they were shocked by the level of aggression on social media -- on both sides of the border -- with several people asking their respective armies for retribution. “All those asking for revenge are war mongers who do not have any idea of destruction a war between two nuclear nations can cause. If the Indian or Chinese soldiers had not obeyed the 1996/2005 military protocol for the LAC on June 15, there would have been carnage leading to a vertical escalation all across the border with immediate violence on nearby patrolling point 15 and 17,” said a former Indian Army chief.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Shishir Gupta
Shishir Gupta is Executive Editor at Hindustan Times and one of India's top journalists covering national security, strategic affairs, foreign policy and geopolitics. Over the past three decades, he has extensively reported on India's military, diplomatic and security landscape, covering every major conflict and national security challenge, from the 1999 Kargil War and the 2020 East Ladakh standoff to Operation Sindoor in 2025. He has also covered major terror attacks, including the IC-814 hijacking, the 26/11 Mumbai attacks and the 2025 Pahalgam terror strike, along with numerous Pakistan-backed terrorist incidents in the Kashmir Valley and across India. He has reported on national and state elections for more than three decades. A recognised authority on strategic affairs, Gupta has covered India's nuclear programme since the Pokhran-II (Shakti series) tests in May 1998 and has written extensively on global nuclear issues, Indian diplomacy and the country's expanding global outreach. He has also reported widely on international conflicts and terrorism, with a special focus on the Indian subcontinent. Gupta has interviewed Prime Minister Narendra Modi more than four times, including Modi's first interview with the print media after becoming Prime Minister in May 2014. His other interviews include three with the Dalai Lama, as well as conversations with Benjamin Netanyahu, Amit Shah, Yogi Adityanath, S. Jaishankar, Nirmala Sitharaman and Piyush Goyal. He is the author of Indian Mujahideen: The Enemy Within (Hachette, 2011) and Himalayan Face-off: Chinese Assertion and Indian Riposte (Hachette, 2014). He was awarded the Chevening-Wolfson Joint Scholarship at Wolfson College, University of Cambridge, UK, in 1998 and participated in the International Visitor Leadership Program (IVLP) of the US State Department in 2006. He received the Ben Gurion Prize from Israel in 2011 and the K. Subrahmanyam Prize for Strategic Studies in 2015 from the Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (MP-IDSA). Since 2024, he has hosted Point Blank, Hindustan Times' weekly YouTube show on global geopolitics.Read More

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