New Delhi, India — India’s armed forces are locked in multiple ongoing face-offs with the Chinese army along the border in the northeastern state of Arunachal Pradesh, the chief of India’s paramilitary border force guarding the Himalayan frontier with China has said. The remarks late last week by Shatrujeet Kapur, the director general of the Indo-Tibetan Border Police (ITBP) paramilitary force, come nearly four months after local civil society groups in the remote northeastern region told Al Jazeera that Chinese forces are increasingly encroaching on Indian territory and denied Indian troops access to patrolling points, angering locals. Chinese President Xi Jinping was in New Delhi last month — his first trip to India in seven years — for the BRICS summit, where he met Prime Minister Narendra Modi on the sidelines, as the two capitals pursued a cautious thaw in bilateral ties.
That thaw is partly driven by US President Donald Trump’s trade war, which has pushed nuclear-armed rivals Beijing and New Delhi closer. Yet the alleged Chinese incursions into India underscore how despite warm handshakes in New Delhi, tensions along the 3,488-km border between the neighbours threaten to undercut efforts to normalise ties. They also pose a major political challenge to PM Modi, who has built an image as being strong on national security, but who has in recent years faced difficult questions on the relationship with China.
The face-offs with Chinese forces in Arunachal Pradesh — that “still continue,” according to Kapur — come six years after at least 20 Indian troops were killed in hand-to-hand combat with Chinese forces in mountainous Ladakh. Though satellite imagery and multiple accounts, including from within the Indian security establishment, have since pointed to China effectively taking control of parts of previously disputed territory since that fight, the Modi government has refused to concede that it has given up any land. And five days after Kapur’s comments on recent standoffs, the Indian government is yet to confirm the nature of the border tensions, instead offering more boilerplate criticisms of China.
Kapur, the ITBP chief, was speaking at a felicitation ceremony for the paramilitary force’s personnel, where he revealed that commandos have been active in the continuing confrontations on the border with China. Arunachal Pradesh’s remote Upper Subansiri region — where the ongoing face-offs are reported — had seen the first clash between independent India and China in August 1959, which killed at least two Indian soldiers. Then-Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru spoke of the remoteness of the region in his account of the clash, when he told Parliament that the border post under Chinese attack was roughly three weeks’ march from the nearest roadhead.
The decades-long India-China border dispute is rooted in a British-drawn border, called the McMahon Line. In 1914, British India and Tibet, not under Chinese control at the time, signed the Simla Convention, demarcating their border. Since gaining independence in 1947, India has treated the McMahon Line as its border with China.
But China, which came under communist rule in 1949, rejects the line as the boundary with India, arguing that it wasn’t involved in the Simla Convention negotiations. Beijing claims the entire state of Arunachal Pradesh and refers to it as “South Tibet” or “Zangnan”. China also controls Aksai Chin, a slice of the disputed Kashmir region that India and Pakistan claim in full.
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