China, India in border skirmish ahead of Xi visit

The latest incident highlights the bitter differences between the two Asian giants despite the likely bonhomie that will mark the Chinese president's first Indian visit. India says boundary issue will be discussed during Xi's visit

Updated on: Sep 16, 2014, 14:15:03 IST

Hindustan Times | By Shishir Gupta, New Delhi

Prefer HTon Google

Share via

Copy link

The Chinese are at it again. Days before President Xi Jinping's arrival in India, possibly with promises of huge investments, his troops were locked eyeball-to-eyeball last week with Indian security forces, an incident serious enough to be escalated to PM Narendra Modi's office.

The face-off started on September 10 around the Line of Actual Control (LAC) in the Chumar sector of eastern Ladakh, an area which has seen a big increase in Chinese activity this year. According to authoritative government sources, a mixed patrol of Indian Army and Indo-Tibetan Border Police (ITBP) troops saw more than 200 Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA) troops with 12 heavy vehicles including cranes, bulldozers and a Hummer trying to level a rivulet and construct a temporary road two kilometres into Indian territory.

Read: Investment on agenda: 'Hindi-Chini buy buy' could be a reality

According to the army assessment, this was part of a PLA plan to build a road connecting Manza and Kyenjung outposts on the Chinese side of the LAC with Chepzi on the Indian side and install a surveillance camera for area domination and patrolling.

In no mood to allow this, Indian forces confronted the PLA and asked them to withdraw, resulting in no fewer than seven face-offs and even shouting matches. Some 15-20 metres of the temporary track was demolished by the Indian forces during the night of September 10 using heavy equipment.

The latest incident highlights the bitter differences between the two Asian giants despite the likely bonhomie that will mark Xi's first Indian visit. Modi is flying to Ahmedabad to meet Xi, who lands on Wednesday — incidentally the Indian leader's birthday.

Read: India says boundary issue will be discussed during Xi's visit

More than 130 Indian troops and 230 Chinese were involved in last week's standoff with additional men brought in on both sides as the situation threatened to deteriorate rapidly. But both sides backed off, with the Chinese deploying two surveillance helicopters to confirm whether the Indian Army troopers had withdrawn to its original position. The whole incident spanned five days.

"The Chinese PLA have increased their troop strength seven to nine times in Chumar over the past year and are involved in construction activity across the disputed LAC," said a senior South Block official, adding that between January and August, there had been 42 intrusions by the Chinese compared with nine transgressions during the same period last year.

Despite Indian efforts to exchange maps in the disputed eastern Ladakh or western sector with the Chinese side, Beijing has refused to exchange positions since 2002.

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

Get the latest India News, breaking headlines and real-time updates from across the country. Stay informed about politics, government policies, crime, weather and major national developments.