Amid ‘total breakdown of trust’, Generals to meet soon

NEW DELHI: India and China will hold their sixth round of top-level military talks within the next few days in a bid to defuse the tinderbox-like operational situation in eastern Ladakh, which has seen casualties and shots being fired for the first time in 45 years.
People’s Liberation Army (PLA) may not have made any “aggressive or provocative” moves for the last couple of days but there is a “complete breakdown of trust” between the two armies, with thousands of rival soldiers, tanks and howitzers amassed within shooting distance of each other in the Pangong Tso-Chushul area as well as other stretches of the frontier in Ladakh.
“It remains to be seen if diplomatic consensus translates into ground realities. Talks between military commanders will work only if there are clear-cut political directions from the top to PLA to disengage and refrain from its strategy to push the Line of Actual Control (LAC) westwards,” said a senior official.
The military situation along the 3,488-km long LAC from eastern Ladakh to Arunachal was reviewed by defence minister Rajnath Singh in a two-hour meeting with the chief of defence staff and the three Service chiefs on Friday.
The rival corps commanders, 14 Corps commander Lt-General Harinder Singh and South Xinjiang Military District chief Major General Liu Lin, have not met since August 2, though communication channels have been kept open at the brigadier and colonel levels on a daily basis.
“The exact date and modalities for the corps commander-level meeting are being finalised. We will have to wait and watch whether PLA is open to troop disengagement from the friction points,” another official said. “PLA, after all, had earlier reneged on its promise to withdraw from ‘Finger-4’ on the north bank of Pangong Tso. Restoration of the status quo as it existed in April is nowhere on the horizon,” the official added.
A lot will depend on what directions Chinese President Xi Jinping gives to the PLA hierarchy, including Western Theatre Command (WTC) chief General Zhao Zongqi, who was also in charge during the 73-day Doklam face-off in 2017, and WTC ground forces commander Lt-Gen Xu Qiling. “PLA’s multiple and coordinated incursions in April-May, the amassing of huge forces along the LAC and the ongoing military confrontation with aggressive behaviour, after all, is all being driven from the top in China,” the official said.