Danger Ahead|| September 2022

Pravin Sawhney

A good method to assess India’s military power is to understand the dynamics of its two military lines with Pakistan and China. The Line of Control (LC) which came into being in 1972 after the 1971 war with Pakistan has consumed maximum attention of the Indian military with little results to show. The Line of Actual Control (LAC) with China which came into being in 1993 illustrates shallowness of Indian statecraft and rapidly diminishing Indian military power vis a vis China.

Ironically, India’s future depends on how it handles these lines. Would they remain millstones around India’s neck prohibiting its vast potential to translate into real national power, or would India continue to mishandle them, especially under the Modi government, leading to a war which none of the three nations want? To understand this, the need is to assess how these have been managed thus far.

In the euphoria of the 1971 which created Bangladesh, it was overlooked in India that the Indian military had failed to make any headway on the ceasefire line in the west which was the consequence of the 1947-1949 war over Kashmir. With a give-and-take of territory, the ceasefire line was renamed the LC. The 772km long LC, which runs from a place called Sangam close to Chhamb in the south up to map grid reference NJ 9842 in Ladakh in the north is unstable at both ends. The northern end which terminates at map point NJ 9842 resulted in the 1984 Siachen conflict. This created the 110km Actual Ground Position Line (AGPL), which Pakistan does not accept.

The southern end of the LC at Sangam does not join with the International Border (IB). Instead, there is the 189km long quasi-LC between Sangam and Boundary Pillar 19 further south where the IB recognised by both begins. The quasi-LC in the Jammu division—called the Working Boundary (WB) by Pakistan and IB by India—was traditionally the revenue boundary between the erstwhile state of Jammu and Kashmir and the undivided Punjab. Pakistan accepts this portion neither as IB nor LC. Accepting it as IB would mean that it accepts the b