Courcy’s Intelligence Brief

Subscribers to this service will not have been overly surprised by the decision made last Wednesday (17 July) by the Indian government’s Cabinet Committee on Security (CCS) to approve in principle the creation of a new mountain strike corps for deployment along the border with China.  Although the Indian government played down the Chinese incursion on 15 April in Ladakh, we noted at the time that pressure was building for a robust response.  Former defence minister Mulayam Singh Yadav accused the government of being “cowardly, incompetent, and good for nothing” and told parliament that China was India’s “biggest enemy”.  Well-placed sources in Delhi say that while the idea for raising the mountain strike corps has been on the table for a decade, it was indeed the April incident that prompted the move to approve the new corps.

The army is said to have proposed the raising of a mountain strike corps, two independent infantry brigades, and two independent armoured brigades to strengthen India’s capabilities along the entire Line of Actual Control (LAC) with China.  What has been agreed is a strike corps of about 45,000 troops headquartered at Panagarh in West Bengal and capable of launching offensive operations into the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR).  This will bolster the two infantry divisions at Lekhapani and Missamari in Assam, which were raised in 2009-10 for the defence of Arunachal Pradesh.  The strike corps will be supported by Indian Air Force fighters operating from some six upgraded bases in the northeast.

This is still considerably less than China’s potential capabilities along the joint border, where its infrastructure extends to 58,000km of roads and an extensive rail network.  This network and China’s five airbases in the region would enable it to move around 30 divisions (each of 15,000 soldiers) to the LAC.

Commenting on these developments, Srikanth Kondapalli, chairman of the Centre for East Asian Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University, said: “The PLA [Chinese People’s Liberation Army] has led at least 21 exercises in the Tibet region over the past one-and-a-half years.  These have been designed for specific scenarios.  These exercises also convey to India that they are gearing preparations in high altitude conditions.  China wants to convey that it is testing and strengthening its conventional deterrents and enhancing military capability in hostile territory.”

In contrast to its reactions to any enhanced Japanese defence measures, China’s foreign ministry was restrained in responding to the CCS decision, saying simply: “The Chinese and Indian governments have signed several agreements on safeguarding peace and tranquillity in the border areas and on taking trust-building measures in the field of the military.” 

Five days after the CCS decision was announced, on 23 July, China’s official Xinhua news agency published an equally restrained commentary in which it just criticized India’s media for playing up border incidents.  The commentary said that China and India had much to gain by further deepening political and economic ties, and it only quite gently reprimanded “Indian media hype” about “sensational reports…[that are] harmful to the China-India relationship”.

It is, of course, a good thing that China and India are not indulging in the kind of name calling that is constantly heightening tensions in the East China Sea between China and Japan, but as the decision on India’s new mountain strike corps confirms, the reality behind the scenes is tenser than the restrained rhetoric reveals.

NOTE: The past week has seen yet another spat between China and Japan over the disputed Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands.  On 17 July, Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe made a visit to two small islands in Japan’s southwest, Ishigaki and Miyako, where he spoke to Coast Guard officers, promising “to decisively protect people’s lives and property, our country’s territorial lands, waters, and airspace”. 

In a campaign speech on Ishigaki Island the prime minister said: “The Senkakus are an inherent part of Japan’s territory in terms of history and international law and there is no territorial dispute between the two countries [Japan and China].”

China’s foreign ministry responded to this by urging Japan to “stop all words and actions that damage China’s territorial sovereignty”.  Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying added that China has indisputable sovereignty over the Diaoyu Islands and that Tokyo should “face up to the history and reality”.

Separately, on 23 July China announced that it is to carry out a survey of its “territorial islands”.  According to the State Oceanic Administration the full survey will take about five years and cover around 10,000 islands. 

According to Xinhua, the survey will gather data on the “distribution, quantity, and quality of the islands’ resources”.  It will also help China “formulate a strategic blueprint for maritime development and social construction on the islands in the 13th Five Year Plan (2016-2020)”.