Indians are demanding revenge on China after soldiers of the nuclear-armed nations brawled with nail-studded clubs leaving up to 70 dead at the disputed Himalayan border.
India’s government was silent today on the fallout from the Medieval clashes with China’s People’s Liberation Army that the Indian army said claimed 20 soldiers’ lives on Monday night.
China reported 43 casualties without specifying how many PLA men were killed in the grisly battle fought with sticks, batons and nail-studded bamboo in the Ladakh region.
Despite India initially reporting just three deaths, its army yesterday revealed the horrific scale of the violence which left 20 Indians dead, including a colonel.
What had started out as an effort at disengagement after a month-long standoff along the frontier unravelled last week when Indian troops furiously dismantled a camp set up by the Chinese on their side of the border.
Scuffles broke out and several men were injured, but the Chinese only retreated briefly to flood back in greater numbers over the weekend, with stones being hurled on Sunday.
On Monday these skirmishes boiled over into a full-scale brawl atop a ridge-line above the Galwan River, with many men said to have died after plunging into the frigid glacial waters below.
It had been Colonel B. Santosh Babu, Commanding Officer of the 16 Bihar regiment, who had made the first approach to the Chinese, hoping for discussion.
But the Indian delegation was attacked, India Today reported, with the Chinese hurling rocks wrapped in barbed wire and whacking their counterparts with nail-studded wooden logs.
Babu was fatally injured, along with another soldier, and they were rushed back to base, leaving other Indians to be taken prisoner by the Chinese. After around 40 minutes, the same Indian unit, led by a major, arrived to confront the Chinese again.
The Indians attacked the Chinese outpost with ruthlessness and reportedly caused serious injury to around 60 men. All of this taking place over the river valley and lasting well over three hours, despite attempts by a Chinese brigadier to wave the white flag.
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RECENT TENSIONS: Believed to have been filmed in mid-May on the banks of Pangong Lake, a mile into Indian territory, footage purports to show Indian forces battering a People’s Liberation Army soldier and smashing up a Chinese armoured car
RECENT TENSIONS: Pro-Beijing social media accounts recently posted images purporting to show Indian troops battered and bound with rope on the banks of a lake in the disputed region on the Himalayan border
Three Indian soldiers, including a senior army officer, were killed Monday night in a confrontation with Chinese forces along a disputed border area in the Himalayas (the red territory is controlled by India, and the beige and grey stripes, Aksai Chin, is Chinese but claimed by India)
Uninhabitable desert: The Galwan Valley where the mass brawl between the Indian and Chinese forces took place
Colonel B Santosh Babu (pictured) was one of the officers reported dead in the confrontation on the Ladakh border today
Club-like weapons and rocks featured heavily in the battle and for this reason many of the troops are said to have sustained grievous head injuries.
By the time the fighting relented just after midnight many of the men who had fallen into the river had already succumbed to hypothermia, with others being fished out at sunrise.
Colonel Babu’s mother Manjula told the New Indian Express: ‘I lost my son, I cannot bear it. But he died for the country and that makes me happy and proud.’
Indian security forces said neither side fired any shots in the clash which was the first deadly confrontation along the 2,175 mile frontier since 1975.
As per a 1996 bilateral agreement, Indian and Chinese soldiers are barred from taking guns within two kilometres of the Line of Actual Control, known as LAC, the border established after the 1962 war between the two nations.
Thousands of troops have faced off since early May along a remote stretch of the LAC, with several social media posts purporting to show the aftermath of vicious brawls and the capturing of prisoners.
The Indian Army said three soldiers died initially. The 17 others died after being ‘critically injured in the line of duty and exposed to sub-zero temperatures in the high-altitude terrain,’ it said in a statement Tuesday that did not disclose the nature of the soldiers’ injuries.
The troops fought each other with fists and rocks, Indian security officials said on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to disclose the information.
After the clash, the two sides ‘disengaged’ from the area where the the fighting happened, the Indian Army statement said.
The United Nations urged both sides ‘to exercise maximum restraint.’
‘We are concerned about reports of violence and deaths at the Line of Actual Control between India and China,’ U.N. associate spokesperson Eri Kaneko said. ‘We take positive note of reports that the two countries have engaged to de escalate the situation.’
While experts said the two nations were unlikely to head into a war, they also believe easing tensions quickly will be difficult.
Hundreds of Indians took to the streets yesterday to burn posters of President Xi Jinping and held slogans urging people not to buy Chinese goods.
Indian Defence Ministry spokesman Col. Aman Anand did not respond immediately to queries on the situation Wednesday or whether talks were planned to defuse the tensions.
‘This will likely be a watershed moment in India-China relations and the geopolitics of the Indo-Pacific,’ said Abraham Denmark, Asia program director at The Wilson Center. ‘We’ve already seen the deadliest clash on the China-India border in over 50 years, both countries are led by men who have embraced nationalism, and both countries are facing tremendous domestic and international upheaval as a result of COVID-19 and other long-standing problems.’
The main questions now are if either side can find a path to deescalation and whether India’s allies such as the United States will help. ‘It is a highly volatile and dangerous situation between two nationalistic, nuclear powers at a time when American influence has badly diminished,’ Denmark said.
The editorial published in the Beijing propaganda mouthpiece, the Global Times, on Wednesday said India’s reaction was largely due to encouragement from the U.S., China’s chief strategic rival which has been steadily building relations with India’s military.
‘The arrogance and recklessness of the Indian side is the main reason for the consistent tensions along China-India borders,’ the editorial said. China ‘does not and will not create conflicts, but it fears no conflicts either,’ it said.
China claims about 35,000 square miles of territory in India’s northeast, while India says China occupies 15,000 square miles of its territory in the Aksai Chin Plateau in the Himalayas, a contiguous part of the Ladakh region.
Indian army soldiers rest next to artillery guns at a makeshift transit camp before heading to Ladakh, near Baltal, southeast of Srinagar today
An Indian Border Security Force soldier walks near a check post along the Srinagar-Leh National highway today
Indian soldiers erect a military bunker along the Srinagar-Leh National highway today
India unilaterally declared Ladakh a federal territory while separating it from disputed Kashmir in August 2019. China was among the handful of countries to strongly condemn the move, raising it at international forums including the U.N. Security Council.
Michael Kugelman, a South Asia specialist at the Wilson Center, said that the two countries were unlikely to go to war because they cannot ‘afford a conflict.’
‘But let’s be clear: It beggars belief to think that they can magically deescalate after a deadly exchange with such a higher number of fatalities,’ he said. ‘This crisis isn’t ending anytime soon.’
Vivek Katju, a retired Indian diplomat, said the deadly violence represented a dramatic departure from the four-decades-old status quo of troops from the two countries staring each other down without any fatalities.
‘The political class and the security class as a whole will have to do very serious thinking about the road ahead,’ he said.
India’s Ministry of External Affairs said in a statement that the incident happened ‘as a result of an attempt by the Chinese side to unilaterally change the status quo’ in the Galwan Valley.
Thousands of soldiers from the two countries, backed by armoured trucks and artillery, have been stationed just a few hundred yards apart for more than a month in the Ladakh region that lies near Tibet. Military and diplomatic meetings have yielded no breakthrough.
Indian authorities have officially maintained near-total silence on the issues related to the confrontation
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi had a televised meeting with state officials Tuesday and did not comment on the clash.
Activists of Sanskriti Bhchan Manch shout slogans as they stage a protest against China, holding posters of Chinese President Xi Jinping, in Bhopal, India, 16 June
Indians burn images of Chinese President Xi Jinping in Bhopal today after news of the violence at the border broke
The tense standoff started in early May, when Indian officials said that Chinese soldiers crossed the boundary in Ladakh at three different points, erecting tents and guard posts and ignoring verbal warnings to leave.
That triggered shouting matches, stone-throwing and fistfights, much of it replayed on television news channels and social media.
One incident purported to show a Chinese PLA soldier being beaten up by Indian forces, on the banks of Pangong Lake, a mile into Indian territory.
The Indian Army warned local media that circulating the ‘mala fide’ (dishonest) footage was ‘likely to vitiate (damage) the current situation on the borders.’
Wherever this video was circulated on Twitter, there were Chinese accounts which were hitting back with a photo which purported to show bloodied and unconscious Indian soldiers bound with rope.
Indian soldiers erect a military bunker along the Srinagar-Leh National highway on June 16, 2020
Troops from the two countries have been facing off along the disputed frontier for more than a month (file photo)
Relations were believed to have eased following two meetings between Chinese President Xi Jinping (left) and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi (right) in recent years. Pictured: The pair at a meeting in India in 2014
China has sought to downplay the confrontation while saying the two sides were communicating through both their front-line military units and their respective embassies to resolve issues.
Though skirmishes aren’t new along the frontier, the standoff at Ladakh’s Galwan Valley, where India is building a strategic road connecting the region to an airstrip close to China, has escalated in recent weeks.
The last fatalities along the disputed border was in 1975, when Chinese troops killed four Indian soldiers in an ambush in the Twang region of northeastern India’s Arunachal Pradesh state, said Lt. Gen. D.S. Hooda, a former head of the Indian military’s Northern Command.
‘It’s a very complicated and serious situation, and it will take real, hard negotiating skills to resolve this,’ Hooda said.