Himalayas: military dispute between Beijing and Delhi reignites
Clashes with minor injuries in a sector in the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh. The Indians say they pushed back Chinese troops attempting to encroach. In June 2020 the last real military confrontation between the two sides. Indian retired general: Xi Jinping's (unsuccessful) attempt to regain prestige after the withdrawal of his 'zero-Covid' policy.
Beijing (AsiaNews) - A new flare-up in the territorial dispute between India and China along their Himalayan border. Yesterday, the Indian army revealed that on 9 December its troops clashed with Chinese troops in the Tawang sector, Arunachal Pradesh state.
The Ministry of Defence in Delhi specified that it was a minor confrontation: some Indian soldiers suffered minor injuries; Beijing has not yet commented on the incident, but there were also injuries in its ranks.
According to the Indian version, Delhi units pushed back Chinese troops attempting to cross the provisional border (Line of Actual Control, Lac) in the Yangtse area. The respective military forces then disengaged from the theatre of confrontation and the commanders reportedly held talks to defuse the tension.
The last skirmish between the two sides had taken place in January 2021 on the border between China and the Indian state of Sikkim. A few months earlier, in June 2020, Indian and Chinese troops clashed in the Galwan valley between Indian Ladakh and Chinese Aksai Chin, with an official death toll of 20 Indian soldiers and four Chinese casualties.
China and India share a 3,488-kilometre border in the Himalayas, over which they fought a brief but bloody conflict in 1962. Delhi claims large parts of Aksai Chin (which the Chinese took from Pakistan); Beijing claims Arunachal Pradesh.
For some time now, the two countries have deployed 50-60 thousand troops and an increasing amount of heavy weaponry on their side of the border, the most militarised in the world after the Russian-Ukrainian border. Delhi has accelerated the construction of new infrastructure near the border that can serve military purposes, and Beijing is doing the same.
According to Rajiv Narayanan, retired general of the Indian Armed Forces, the Tawang incident is not the first and in all likelihood will not be the last such incident in the area. According to him, the Chinese blitz may have been a kind of diversion: "After losing face following the withdrawal of his 'zero-Covid' policy, [the Chinese president] may have tried to do something tactically [on the Himalayan side] to regain prestige, but he failed," the former Indian army officer told AsiaNews.
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08/12/2020 11:22
05/09/2020 02:11
