As China hypes up its assertiveness along Arunachal and Ladakh, India needs to intensify force deployment

It is not only essential to learn the lessons from the past conflicts but it is more important to implement those lessons learnt for addressing the emerging conflict space in the national interest. This approach makes the nation proactive as against remaining reactive. This becomes more important for India as we are surrounded by adversaries on both - western and eastern - sides of our national borders, namely Pakistan and China respectively. On top of that, both of these nations are not only nuclear nations but also have deep collusivity between them to work against the Indian state. Borders with Pakistan were drawn in the form of the Radcliffe Line which was made official on 17 August 1947, two days after Indian independence. The border was not fully manned, besides, the issue of Jammu and Kashmir was unresolved at that time as J&K was still a princely state then. After J&K’s accession to India, war with Pakistan continued in response to its aggression which culminated in a ceasefire Line (CFL) on 05 Jan 1949. Pakistan’s aggression could not be observed as J&K was still an independent princely state when operations were commenced by Pakistan. Even after this, borders were not fully guarded resulting in Pakistan’s pre-emptive actions for the 1965 war. The similar situation continued even after the 1971 war when the border in J&K was delineated as Line of Control (LOC). There were large gaps between the manned locations in the J&K area which resulted in Pakistan surprising India by occupying unheld areas in the Kargil Brigade sector resulting in the Kargil war of 1999 in the form of Operation Vijay. Our professional mindset that the adversary will launch the operations only in those areas where it gets value objectives resulted in not holding the LOC in the manner we have done now as a reactive posture post Kargil operations. What prevented us from holding these locations prior to 1999 when we were suffering from an effective proxy war by Pakistan for more than a decade, needs a detailed analysis. Mountainous, semi-mountainous terrains as well as island territories require manning as well as surveillance all along when one has adversarial nations bordering the country. As far as the Pakistan front is concerned, the border guarding in terms of manning is largely adequate now though it still requires some fine tuning which can be clubbed with border infrastructure development along with the deployment of long range surveillance devices. However, the situation on the China border is relatively disturbing. Despite Britishers drawing the McMahon line for delineating the border in the eastern sector and the western sector’s boundary being based on Johnson - Ardagh line which runs along Kunlun mountains, these remained largely unmanned. When a nation becomes independent, the first and foremost requirement is not only to delineate the borders but also make arrangements to man it physically more so when there is no effective fencing which is also required to be kept under surveillance. There is no dispute that our manning of the Chinese border has been lacking since independence but what is more important is the similar posture continues less or more till the date. Had India put in some effort to ensure physical presence closer to Kunlun mountains, our claimed area post-independence, the history may have been different. Yet, the lesson has not been learnt in all the areas. We manned the Sikkim border along Tibet and achieved a positive result in 1967 skirmishes against China due to our effective presence near/ on the Nathu La and Cho La passes. We ignored the same in Eastern Ladakh as well as in Arunachal Pradesh on the pretext of being a High altitude area and lacking surface connectivity for maintenance of forces and resources. The country suffered in 1987 again, as China occupied Wangdung camp South of Samdurong Chu. Though the Indian Army mobilised the troops and has held multiple locations on/close to Line of Actual Control (LAC) in this particular sector, Wangdung camp continues to be occupied till date by China. Further, it is really strange that we occupied Siachen glacier physically in 1984 despite so much geographical and weather adversities where India had to face both the adverse weather as well as adverse enemy but we did not focus on Eastern Ladakh and Arunachal Pradesh where only weather was adverse at that time that too much lesser than what we faced on the Siachen glacier. There was writing on the wall for ‘1987’ coming from the Chinese side. Though as part of our forced response on the LAC in the Eastern Ladakh, we have increased presence of border guarding troops in certain areas but there are still large areas of Eastern Ladakh as well as Arunachal Pradesh which lack the physical deployment of border guarding troops which may result in more adversarial actions by China in the days to come as China is upending the threshold of conflict with every passing day. India may justify this due to adversarial terrain, lack of connectivity or the higher outgo of the expenditure but any delay is likely to be counter-productive to our national interest. The deployment on the borders may be categorised in two forms - one where infrastructure leads the deployment and the other where deployment leads the infrastructure. The border areas with China necessitate the adoption of a second model wherein deployment of border guarding troops must be undertaken all along the LAC irrespective of state of surface connectivity. The surface connectivity needs to catch up thereafter. As India suffered in Kargil due to large unheld gaps on the LOC, a similar possibility cannot be ruled out on the LAC if we delay our physical deployment of border guarding troops any further. Rushing physically to the borders is the only option to checkmate China at the moment. The writer is a retired army veteran. Views expressed are personal. Read all the  Latest News ,  Trending News ,  Cricket News ,  Bollywood News , India News  and  Entertainment News  here. Follow us on  Facebook,  Twitter and  Instagram.