Cut the Fence

Pravin Sawhney

Two events, since April 2020 when the PLA in a lightening move occupied nearly 1,000sqkm of Indian territory, have made the LAC extremely complex: Prime Minister’s statement of 19 June 2020 that no one was in occupation of Indian territory; and the 10 September 2020 joint statement signed by Indian and Chinese foreign ministers.

Prime Minister Modi’s astonishing declaration, which took the nation by surprise, signalled to China that India had accepted its 7 November 1959 Line of Actual Control (the LAC which Indian Army had been policing since 1993 was rendered obsolete). Modi’s unprecedented appeasement of the dragon was the consequence of the 15 June 2020 Galwan clash where Indian Army lost 20 soldiers and 10 were taken prisoners of war without a shot being fired by either side. Since Galwan was not an agreed ‘disputed area’, it was assessed in Delhi that an escalation might go horribly wrong with Pakistan too jumping in the fray.

India’s weak-kneed reaction had a fall-out on its foreign policy. Since the Indian Prime Minister had given clean chit to the PLA overlooking its aggression, the US does not mention Indo-China crisis in the list of d