New Delhi, India — India’s armed forces are locked in multiple ongoing face-offs with the Chinese army along the border in the northeastern state of Arunachal Pradesh, the chief of India’s paramilitary border force guarding the Himalayan frontier with China has said.
The remarks late last week by Shatrujeet Kapur, the director general of the Indo-Tibetan Border Police (ITBP) paramilitary force, come nearly four months after local civil society groups in the remote northeastern region told Al Jazeera that Chinese forces are increasingly encroaching on Indian territory and denied Indian troops access to patrolling points, angering locals.
Chinese President Xi Jinping was in New Delhi last month — his first trip to India in seven years — for the BRICS summit, where he met Prime Minister Narendra Modi on the sidelines, as the two capitals pursued a cautious thaw in bilateral ties. That thaw is partly driven by US President Donald Trump’s trade war, which has pushed nuclear-armed rivals Beijing and New Delhi closer.
Yet the alleged Chinese incursions into India underscore how despite warm handshakes in New Delhi, tensions along the 3,488-km border between the neighbours threaten to undercut efforts to normalise ties.
They also pose a major political challenge to PM Modi, who has built an image as being strong on national security, but who has in recent years faced difficult questions on the relationship with China.
The face-offs with Chinese forces in Arunachal Pradesh — that “still continue,” according to Kapur — come six years after at least 20 Indian troops were killed in hand-to-hand combat with Chinese forces in mountainous Ladakh.
Though satellite imagery and multiple accounts, including from within the Indian security establishment, have since pointed to China effectively taking control of parts of previously disputed territory since that fight, the Modi government has refused to concede that it has given up any land.
And five days after Kapur’s comments on recent standoffs, the Indian government is yet to confirm the nature of the border tensions, instead offering more boilerplate criticisms of China.
Unresolved, lingering dispute
Kapur, the ITBP chief, was speaking at a felicitation ceremony for the paramilitary force’s personnel, where he revealed that commandos have been active in the continuing confrontations on the border with China.
Arunachal Pradesh’s remote Upper Subansiri region — where the ongoing face-offs are reported — had seen the first clash between independent India and China in August 1959, which killed at least two Indian soldiers.
Then-Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru spoke of the remoteness of the region in his account of the clash, when he told Parliament that the border post under Chinese attack was roughly three weeks’ march from the nearest roadhead.
The decades-long India-China border dispute is rooted in a British-drawn border, called the McMahon Line. In 1914, British India and Tibet, not under Chinese control at the time, signed the Simla Convention, demarcating their border. Since gaining independence in 1947, India has treated the McMahon Line as its border with China. But China, which came under communist rule in 1949, rejects the line as the boundary with India, arguing that it wasn’t involved in the Simla Convention negotiations.
Beijing claims the entire state of Arunachal Pradesh and refers to it as “South Tibet” or “Zangnan”. China also controls Aksai Chin, a slice of the disputed Kashmir region that India and Pakistan claim in full.
In 1962, India and China agreed to treat the Line of Actual Control (LAC) — meant to acknowledge the actual areas they each control — as their de facto boundary while negotiating their broader border differences.
Those differences were never bridged in the following years, keeping the disputed frontier a persistent flashpoint in relations between the two nuclear-armed neighbours.
The dispute erupted into a deadly confrontation in June 2020, when Indian and Chinese troops clashed in the Galwan Valley in eastern Ladakh, with both sides accusing the other of crossing the LAC. At least 20 Indian soldiers were killed, and China later acknowledged four deaths among its troops.
Praveen Donthi, a senior analyst at the Brussels-based International Crisis Group, said that border tensions amid a thaw in bilateral relations now appear as “part of a pattern” — “likely a pressure tactic by Beijing,” he added.
And due to the undemarcated border, “stand-offs are bound to occur from time to time, some of which may go out of hand,” Donthi warned.
‘Chinese army on top of mountain’
But the 2020 clash also pushed PM Modi into a corner domestically, as the opposition parties pressured the government over its opaque handling of China. The Modi government also faced opposition complaints over restrictions on parliamentary scrutiny, questions about whether intelligence agencies had detected the Chinese troop build-up, and limited disclosure of operational details.
Contradictions between the government’s own stand, and Modi’s claims also sparked accusations that he was trying to minimise — or even hide — the scale of the crisis along the border.
On June 17, 2020, soon after the Galwan clash, Indian Foreign Minister S Jaishankar spoke to his Chinese counterpart Wang Yi.
“The Chinese side sought to erect a structure in Galwan valley on our side of the LAC,” the Indian foreign ministry said after the phone call. “While this became a source of dispute, the Chinese side took pre-meditated and planned action that was directly responsible for the resulting violence and casualties. It reflected an intent to change the facts on ground in violation of all our agreements to not change the status quo.”
Yet two days later, Modi said, on X that “neither has anyone been able to enter our territory, nor is anyone still on our territory” — an assertion that disputed the foreign ministry’s account. If no Chinese troops had crossed the LAC, why had Indian soldiers been forced to fight them, the oppostion and other strategic analysts asked?
The government has never answered those questions, with Modi’s office only issuing a clarification that the PM meant that there were no Chinese troops still in Indian territory after the clash.
Six years since the Ladakh clash, the Chinese incursion has returned to challenge Modi’s strongman image at home — which has already taken a hit from youth-led protests in the country that forced out Modi’s education minister in July this year.
In his address, ITBP chief Kapur also recalled the 2020 clash, outlining a specialised training programme “to better equip personnel to deal with” a Ladakh-like situation.
Kapur, who is due to retire this week, also warned that China’s frontier military capabilities had advanced — and Indian forces may not be able to take a fight head-on by traditional methods.
The Crisis Group’s Donthi said that the Modi government “presents an image of a hard security state with zero tolerance for national security failures,” but “the power differential with China is quite sharp, so it tends to downplay any event that reflects poorly.”
The opposition Congress party’s top leader in Arunachal Pradesh state, Bosiram Siram, said that Chinese troops have intruded nearly 50km (31 miles) deep into Indian territory in remote Upper Subansiri.
A Siram-led party delegation visited border areas in August after initial reports of China’s incursions and added that “Chinese personnel are stationed up there,” referring to Indian territory.
“You can see the [Chinese] Army. They are on top of the mountains, while we are down below,” Siram added.
In response to the ITBP chief’s remarks, India’s foreign ministry spokesperson Randhir Jaiswal said that “the situation in India-China border areas gets disturbed from time to time when Chinese forces diverge from established patrolling patterns.” He did not comment on the ongoing face-offs.
No lasting solution in sight
BR Deepak, a professor of Chinese studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) in Delhi, said that the reports of Chinese incursion pose a challenge to Modi’s “credibility and accountability”.
Since 2012, India and China have relied on an official channel that deters border disputes from snowballing, without resolving the underlying question of where their Himalayan boundary lies.
The so-called Working Mechanism for Consultation and Coordination on India-China Border Affairs (WMCC) has officials from both countries and operates alongside military channels.
Its latest round, the 36th WMCC, was held on August 6 — nearly a month after reports of Chinese incursion first emerged in Arunachal Pradesh. In September, a first-ever commander-level meeting was held in Arunachal Pradesh.
Deepak said that “the continuing face-offs show that these diplomatic efforts have not eliminated the friction.” He argued that “meetings at the military or local level can provide temporary relief and help prevent escalation, but they cannot, by themselves, deliver a lasting solution to a border dispute rooted in decades of historical, political and strategic differences.”
And in the absence of “clear political guidance and a coordinated response” in both capitals, Deepak said, any border-level arrangements will “remain fragile and reversible, as seen in [Ladakh] and now in Upper Subansiri in Arunachal Pradesh.”