With aggressive posturing along LAC, China turning bilateral relationship back to 1990s, says India

Short of saying that Xi Jinping, who is also commander in chief of the PLA, had literally torn the 1993 peace and tranquility agreement to shreds, the Modi government has served a diplomatic ultimatum on him with serious consequences on the bilateral ties.

Updated on: Jun 26, 2020, 15:37:57 IST

Hindustan Times, New Delhi | By Shishir Gupta

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India has accused China of turning the bilateral relationship clock back to 1990s by trying to foist a war-like situation along the 3,488-kilometre-long Line of Actual Control (LAC) through its aggressive military posture in East Ladakh.

Chinese President Xi Jinping takes a tour of a miltary bases in China in this file picture from 2018. (AFP)

Short of saying that Xi Jinping, who is also commander in chief of the PLA, had literally torn the 1993 peace and tranquility agreement to shreds, the Modi government has served a diplomatic ultimatum on him with serious consequences on the bilateral ties. The 1993 agreement signed during Narasimha Rao-Jiang Zemin era makes it amply clear that the military forces have to be kept to a “minimum level” along the LAC.

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The Indian statement on Thursday carries a sting in the very last line by conveying that all gains made in the bilateral relationship in the past three decades will be lost if China does not de-escalate and disengage the PLA forces from the LAC. “India is quite capable of handling the military to military posture on the LAC but the entire economic relationship will go for a toss if PLA does not de-escalate. It cannot be business as usual for China if this situation continues. It is this call that General Secretary Xi Jinping has to take,” said a senior official.

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Even though there has not been any military flying by the Chinese Air Force in the past three days, PLA has amassed troops all along the LAC with artillery and missile support. Its posture along the 1,597 km LAC in Ladakh is threatening with troops ready for the red flag to go up. Its military air bases at Kashgar, Hotan, Yarkand, Korla and Gor Gunsa are battle ready.

However, the PLA is rather unhappy at the change of military attitude showed by the 16 Bihar Indian Army unit at the June 15 Galwan flare-up and the Indian posture at Daulet Beg Oldi. With the Darbuk-Shyok-DBO road complete, India has made game changing military posture near the Karakoram pass with the deployment of T-90 tanks, Russian BMP amphibious infantry fighting vehicles and American M-777 155mm howitzers.

Also Read: At 4-hr long India-China border talks, focus on de-escalation and disengagement

With the Indian deployment of state-of-the-art weaponry at the highest DBO post and all advance landing grounds, including Nyoma active, the PLA will suffer heavy casualties in case it tries to bully across the LAC.

The DSDBO road has been the turning point for India as the strategic axis had put paid to all Chinese plans to occupy Ladakh by linking up to Siachen Glacier and virtually make Indian defences untenable in Kashmir. Had the Indian governments in the past agreed to so-called peaceniks who wanted Indian Army to demilitarize Siachen or turn it into a park, the Chinese plan would have become a reality.

While the Chinese posture on LAC continues to be aggressive, the clock is ticking on the bilateral relationship as India has made up its mind that it will slam the economic door on Beijing if dis-engagement does not take place within weeks.

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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