Significant improvement in understanding with Chinese army at border: Gen Suhag

NEW DELHI: India wants to have “constructive engagement” with China, and the armies of the two countries have already implemented several concrete confidence-building measures along the 4,057-km Line of Actual Control (LAC) to prevent troop confrontations, says Army chief General Dalbir Singh Suhag.
Addressing an impressive Army Day parade here on Friday, Gen Suhag said though there were transgressions from both sides in the disputed stretches along the LAC, there had been “a significant improvement” in the “understanding” between the two armies.
This, he added, was reflected in the recent exchange of top-level military visits. A senior Indian Army delegation, led by Northern Command chief Lt-General D S Hooda, for instance, visited China last month as part of the ongoing policy to step up bilateral military engagements and exchanges to boost CBMs along the LAC.
The two armies are now also discussing the setting up of a direct hotline between their DGMOs as well as an additional border personnel meeting (BPM) point in the Uttarakhand sector, which will add to the five already existing at Daulat Beg Oldi and Chushul in Ladakh and Nathu La (Sikkim), Bum La and Kibithu (Arunachal) in the east.
India will, however, not let its guard down. Gen Suhag says there is no slowdown in the ongoing raising of the new mountain strike corps (17 Corps), which had earlier been approved with 90,274 soldiers at a cost of Rs 64,678 crore. “The target was to raise it in nine years…we are on course to fully raise it by 2021,” he said.
It was in January 2014 that the Army had kicked off the raising of the 17 Corps to build “quick-reaction ground offensive capabilities” against China. With two new infantry divisions geared for high-altitude warfare as well as armoured, artillery, air defence, engineer brigades spread from Ladakh to Sikkim, the 17 Corps will have its headquarters at Panagarh in West Bengal.
There has certainly been a slight decline in troop face-offs along the LAC, but the border defence cooperation agreement (BDCA) inked between the two countries in October 2013 is yet to become fully operational on the ground to ensure troop face-offs are effectively defused and managed at the local level itself, as reported by TOI earlier.
Eastern Ladakh, in particular, has been a major flashpoint in recent times. With both sides resorting to aggressive patrolling to lay claims to disputed areas, rival troops also continue to tail each other’s patrols, which was specifically prohibited by the BDCA.