Ladakh: No 'Deal' was Struck with China

[Spring Onion]

Why withdraw from our own territory, asks Omar



Seeks Centre’s explanation on why Indian troops vacated the area

Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Omar Abdullah on Monday expressed satisfaction that the Chinese troops withdrew from Daulat Beg Oldi [DBO] in Ladakh but asked why Indian forces had to pull back from an area claimed to be our own territory.

Addressing journalists at the opening ceremony of the Civil Secretariat and other ‘Durbar Move’ offices, which had been functioning in the winter capital of Jammu for six months, Mr. Abdullah said he was happy that diplomacy had worked and the Chinese troops went back after staying on Indian territory for 19 days. However, he said he was surprised over media reports that the Indian soldiers also withdrew.

It was for the Centre to explain this, he said. “The visit of our External Affairs Minister to China, which had come into question, can now go ahead.”

“The only doubt one has is based on the media reports which said it was a withdrawal by both sides. I am wondering where from and where to have the Indian troops withdrawn?”

The Chief Minister parried questions about Union Health Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad’s purported statements during and after the latter’s visit of Doda district over the State government’s “inadequate relief measures” in the areas hit by an earthquake last week.

He said he would not go by media reports. Mr. Azad or his Ministry had not communicated anything adverse to the State government, he claimed.

On the recent attack on a Pakistani prisoner in Kot Bhalwal jail of Jammu and the ‘spurious drugs scam,’ the Chief Minister argued that separate departmental inquiries and criminal investigations were under way in both the cases.

Mr. Abdullah said he would not repeat the mistake of commenting on issues that were under investigation or sub judice after the lessons he learnt from the 2009 Shopian rape-murder.

Shutdown in valley

On a call given by the Doctors Association of Kashmir and supported by different civil society groups as well as the separatist political alliances, Kashmir Valley on Monday observed a shutdown against the ‘spurious drugs scam.’ Transport was off the road and businesses remained shut for the day even as government offices, banks and educational institutions functioned with thin attendance.


Why withdraw from our own territory, asks Omar - The Hindu

 

[AUSTERLITZ]

With due respect, where is the evidence to back up these brave words?

Suppose I explain to you a scenario in which the PLA could cut right into our heartland in a two-week campaign? Notwithstanding what anyone thinks? Or goes on record, confirming? Or maintains?

Your being far too pessimistic.......Your already aware of the airpower balance as i explained in the other thread.Its nowhere near as grim as numbers on a paper suggest.
All that huge military material needs supply lines,supply lines that come through the himalayas and those raillines are the sole lifeline of any invasion force.Also in mountains they would need 10 to 1 superiority .The armour would also be drastically less effective.Cutting into the heartlands is just ludicrous.......we would not only sever their outstretched logistics but also outnumber them completely if they penetrate deep.Geography is our primary advantage.
A thousand tanks are useless metal junks without ammo.Infact this is the reason they retreated in 1962 after taking arunachal,they left not because of goodwill but because of supplies and fear of counterattack.
This is not 1962 sir....and in the mountains advancing is hell paid in blood.India learnt the lesson in kargil.Our troops are alos much more battle hardened in mountain warfare..with kargil and the continous insurgency.

 

[IND151]

Alternative interpretation of events: this whole episode was engineered by India.

India knew that infrastructure work so close to the LAC would be seen as provocation by China and that it (China) would have to make a statement, however perfunctory. Also, knowing that China is already embroiled in tensions to its East, India knew that China would not be keen on a two-front escalation right now. Add to that China's desire to keep tensions with India to a minimum to avoid an opening for the West.

Therefore, from the Indian viewpoint, the infrastructure provocation was calculated and the Chinese reaction predicted. The Indian media circus was also a preordained part of the scenario. Chances are the Chinese knew what game was being played, but they could not let the Indian provocation go unanswered; they had to respond.

All in all, a well played chess move by the Indian establishment.

Hats off to GOI if its true

 

[Srinivas]

Hey genius, if you google up “Albert Einstein, General Relativity Theory, Mao Tse Dong, Modern Guerrilla Warfare”, perhaps, with some divine assistance hopefully, you might have inspiration to connect the dots one day in the unforeseeable future.

These days it is difficult to answer every one since you never know who is false flagger and who is real one.

 

[shuttler]

Relax, if you see tents, that's means they want to tell you something, if you see some fixed building you should act; So at first when I heard tents that means they will remove the tents at last, nothing serious; Just tell another ones red line

what do you mean？ telling indians to shoot us if we erect buildings in our territory？

 

[Spring Onion]

Making sense of the Depsang incursion
China’s new activism on the border dispute provides an opportunity to take stalled negotiations forward

The People’s Liberation Army’s decision to dismantle its encampment on the Depsang plain abutting Aksai Chin makes it a bit easier to assess the motivation and goals of recent Chinese actions.



If the Chinese action on the ground on the Depsang plain, initiated on April 15, is taken in conjunction with President Xi Jinping’s March 29 statement in Durban that the border issue should be resolved “as soon as possible”, we can conclude that China is signalling a new activism in its border dispute with India. This also becomes evident through Beijing’s official statements of the past two weeks that accompanied their three week-long non-threatening, but provocative, military action.



China steadfastly refused to acknowledge that its forces had in any way breached the Line of Actual Control (LAC) but agreed that the issue could be resolved through diplomacy and negotiations. “The two sides are in communication through the working mechanism for consultation and coordination on boundary affairs… for a solution to the incident…” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying told reporters last Friday.



She added that both countries were “committed to resolving disputes, including the boundary ones, through peaceful negotiations and [to] try to ensure that this kind of dispute will not affect the development of the bilateral relations”.



The Chinese action needs to be viewed at two levels. The first is an established pattern where the PLA keeps nibbling at Indian territory to create new “facts on the ground” or a “new normal” in relation to their claimed LAC. They do this, as they have done in the past — occupy an area, then assert that it has always been part of their territory, and offer to negotiate. In this very sector, Chinese claim lines have been varying since 1956. At that time, for example, the entire Chip Chap and Galwan river valleys were accepted by China as being Indian territory. But in 1960 China insisted that these areas were within their claim line and occupied them following the 1962 war. The April 2013 Depsang encampment seemed to be pushing even further westward.



The fact that the border is neither demarcated nor inhabited, and there is no agreement on the alignment of the LAC in many areas, aids this process. We need to keep a sharp watch in the coming months to see if this pattern is repeated in other areas where there are differing perceptions as to the LAC’s location.



Indian build-up



At another level, China appears to be expressing its unhappiness over the Indian military build up on the Sino-Indian border. In the past five years, India has activated forward airfields in the Ladakh sector, completed important road building projects in the Chumar sector, begun work on the road to link Daulat Beg Oldi with Leh, and moved high-performance fighter aircraft to bases proximate to Tibet. In addition, it has raised two new mountain divisions, plans to establish two armoured brigades across the Himalayas and may raise a new mountain strike corps. In other words, the Indian posture is moving from the purely defensive vis-à-vis the PLA in Tibet, to one which could also include offensive action. In addition, India’s strategic forces have begun to mature with the test of the Agni V and the launch of the Arihant.



If you faced a country with which you have a disputed border, you would not be happy about its growing military profile. But China seems to have developed some amnesia here. After all, its own infrastructure and military build up has outpaced that of India’s by at least a decade and a half. In this period, China has developed a railway, an extensive road network in Tibet and Xinjiang. In addition it has deployed powerful forces, which include armour, rocket artillery and battlefield support missiles. They have developed new airfields and have conducted as many as four major military exercises in Tibet in 2012.



It is useful to look back at the last major crisis which took place in 1986-1987 over Sumdorong Chu. This coincided with ‘Exercise Chequerboard’ involving the movement of forces from the plains of Assam to the Arunachal mountains. When the panicked Chinese moved forward their forces, India began Op Falcon and used its heavy helicopter lift capability to build up rapidly across the entire LAC and even deployed infantry combat vehicles and tanks in some areas.



Far-reaching agreements



The result was the 1993 and 1996 confidence building agreements. They are far reaching and important, and yet they have never been seriously implemented. For example clause 2 of the 1993 agreement accepted that there should be ceilings on forces on either side, that the two sides would reduce their forces along the LAC and that the “extent, depth, timing, and nature of reduction of military forces” would be determined through mutual consultations.

Article 3 of the 1996 agreement specified that the major category of armaments such as tanks, infantry combat vehicles artillery guns, heavy mortars, surface-to-surface and surface-to-air missiles would be reduced with the ceilings to be decided through mutual agreement.



However, to implement such an agreement required one key step spelt out in Article 10 of the 1996 agreement — that the two sides would work out a common understanding of the alignment of the LAC. But the Chinese have baulked at working this out and so the key clauses of the agreements remain in a limbo.



Indian chicken hawks who have been advocating a military response to the Chinese action on the LAC are wrong on two counts. First, we are in the middle of our modernisation cycle, lacking vital elements such as mountain artillery and heavy lift helicopters. Second, an over-the-top military response to what was a non-threatening military action on the part of the PLA would have needlessly escalated the situation. In the last count there appeared to be five tents and seven men and a dog in the Chinese encampment. In retrospect, the handling of the situation which involved a symmetrical non-threatening military response by Indian forces, along with patient diplomacy, paid off.



The message from China right now seems to be that it is ready to engage India across the entire spectrum, which includes the disputed border. There is nothing in Chinese actions suggesting that they are looking for a fight. New Delhi needs to firmly tell the Chinese not to put the cart before the horse, and that it cannot and will not freeze its border dispositions or its modernisation schemes.



The upcoming visit of Chinese Premier Li Keqiang should be used to push the long pending exchange of maps detailing the Chinese and Indian versions of the LAC as a prelude to working out a common alignment of the LAC in a time-bound manner. Only this will ensure peace and tranquillity on the Sino-Indian border and open up the possibility that the border dispositions are not only frozen, but actually drawn down as per the 1993 and 1996 agreements. This in turn could give life to the stalled Special Representative process which was set up in 2003 to work out a mutually agreed border.

(The writer is a Distinguished Fellow at the Observer Research Foundation, New Delhi)

Making sense of the Depsang incursion - The Hindu

 

[DARIUS]

What most people and by most people I mean Chinese and Pakistani members on this forum do not understand is that the GoI dare not secede any part of India to any foreign nation simply owing to the fact that we are working democracy and in a working democracy we,unlike both our western and especially our Eastern neighbours have got a hawkish opposition party whose one and only objective is to squeeze the balls of the ruling party as hard as possible until they go out of power.As far as the India media is concerned I am pretty sure that they are trying pretty hard to find out other reasons for the Chinese withdrawal like the one being discussed on this thread and God forbid if they are capable of finding out any such fact on the ground and start raking up the issue it would be the last blow to Manmohan Jees balls so such speculations as to whether any compromise was arrived at are entirely foolish.Secondly this Chinese withdrawal is not the end,now the UPA has to submit a detailed report as to what factors paved the way for the Chinese withdrawal and I am not ruling out a JPC on this issue either!!And most importantly if the Chinese would have gained anything out of the stand off I do not think the PLA and the CCP would have remained quite instead of trying o gain political mileage out of this gain in their own country,HEADLINES LIKE "INDIA SUCCUMBS TO CHINESE PRESSURE,SECEDES CHUSHUL " or "CHINA SHOWS INDIA WHO'S THE BOSS" etc. would have already started to make to the first page of Chinese dailies.

 

[panyimao]

The territorial dispute is no other way is the best way of war, India is not every day that the share of their territory, then do not hesitate to hit New Delhi.

 

[cirr]

Indians are living in denial again。

Face it，your bunkers are gone！

 

[Sashan]

The parties need to demand that someone like the PM make a statement in the parliament. If something has been conceded, the embarassement and the subsequent din should serve as a wake up call for the mandarins at the center to modernize and plug the deficiences of the Indian armed forces quickly. I would say if this is the case, India learnt the lessons second time around with much lower loss than the first time around.

 

[ExtraOdinary]

Indians are living in denial again。

Face it，your bunkers are gone！

Give a credible link to support your claim.

 

[Windjammer]

Seems the Cat is out of the bag.


India to give up Chumar post for Chinese withdrawal? - The Times of India

 

[Tractor]

What most people and by most people I mean Chinese and Pakistani members on this forum do not understand is that the GoI dare not secede any part of India to any foreign nation simply owing to the fact that we are working democracy and in a working democracy we,unlike both our western and especially our Eastern neighbours have got a hawkish opposition party whose one and only objective is to squeeze the balls of the ruling party as hard as possible until they go out of power.As far as the India media is concerned I am pretty sure that they are trying pretty hard to find out other reasons for the Chinese withdrawal like the one being discussed on this thread and God forbid if they are capable of finding out any such fact on the ground and start raking up the issue it would be the last blow to Manmohan Jees balls so such speculations as to whether any compromise was arrived at are entirely foolish.Secondly this Chinese withdrawal is not the end,now the UPA has to submit a detailed report as to what factors paved the way for the Chinese withdrawal and I am not ruling out a JPC on this issue either!!And most importantly if the Chinese would have gained anything out of the stand off I do not think the PLA and the CCP would have remained quite instead of trying o gain political mileage out of this gain in their own country,HEADLINES LIKE "INDIA SUCCUMBS TO CHINESE PRESSURE,SECEDES CHUSHUL " or "CHINA SHOWS INDIA WHO'S THE BOSS" etc. would have already started to make to the first page of Chinese dailies.

An ousider knowing well our shortcoming which on the other hand good things to them.
It' our long lasting tradition that the followers of the rulers to give statements to cheat on our own people for no real privilege but only so called political mileage just as real as stones stuck in their minds.

 

[danger007]

Seems the Cat is out of the bag.


India to give up Chumar post for Chinese withdrawal? - The Times of India

suddenly ToI become credible source...... lol

 

[acid rain]

Indians are living in denial again。

Face it,your bunkers are gone!

Dont jump too high, prove it first.