Opinion | How rising tensions on the India-China border are dashing hopes of an ‘Asian century’

Name: Death toll rises to 20 in border clash between India and China
Uploaded: 2020-06-19T01:30:14.000Z
Duration: 1 min 59 s
Description: Death toll rises to 20 in border clash between India and China

With China standing its ground, India determined to prevent a repeat of its 1962 humiliation and tensions rising in the region, the stakes are high for both President Xi Jinping and Prime Minister Narendra Modi

Reading Time:4 minutes

Why you can trust SCMP

Indian Border Security Force soldiers guard a highway leading towards Leh, bordering China, in Gagangir on June 17. Photo: AFP

C. Uday Bhaskar

Published: 9:30am, 19 Jun 2020Updated: 9:47am, 19 Jun 2020

In a major setback to the already uneasy and troubled relationship between India and China, 20 Indian soldiers were killed on Monday in clashes with People’s Liberation Army troops in the Ladakh region of the contested border known as the Line of Actual Control (LAC).

This includes a colonel who was commanding the local infantry battalion – the first combat casualty since 1975. The Indian army issued a late-night statement confirming the death toll, while reports of casualties on the Chinese side have not been confirmed by Beijing.

This level of unprecedented violence follows a tense military face-off between the army border patrols in the eastern Ladakh region that includes the Galwan valley and along the Pangong lake that had been simmering since mid-April.

The LAC is a notional line that runs from the high Himalayas in the west to the extreme east of India for almost 4,000km, and is an unmapped, contested territorial demarcation awaiting political resolution. An informal de facto status quo has been in place for decades and this eastern Ladakh region has not been claimed by Beijing since 1963.

Both India and China have claim lines along this mountainous LAC and their border patrols periodically assert their presence, but an uneasy but relatively stable status quo has prevailed since 1993, when the two nations signed off on a peace and tranquillity agreement.

01:59

Death toll rises to 20 in border clash between India and China

It has been often noted with satisfaction that while India and China are two nuclear-armed nations who fought a short border war on October 1962 and despite their proximate military deployment along the contested LAC for almost 60 years, not a single shot has been fired in anger since the 1993 agreement.

Select Voice

Choose your listening speed

Get through articles 2x faster

1.25x

250 WPM

Slow

Average

Fast

00:0000:00

1.25x