Dozens of Chinese soldiers have set up camp in a Himalayan region claimed by India, Indian government sources have said, signaling a potential renewal of border tensions between the nuclear-armed neighbors.
China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) troops entered Indian-claimed territory in eastern Ladakh and erected a camp at night on Monday last week, the sources said.
Meanwhile, troops from the Indo-Tibetan Border Police have set up a camp 300m opposite the tents pitched by the Chinese, the sources said.
New Delhi is confident it can settle the high-altitude territorial dispute “peacefully” through diplomatic channels, the sources added.
India and China have an unresolved frontier dispute, and relations are often prickly and marked by mutual suspicion — a legacy of a brief border war in 1962 that was waged in Ladakh and in the northeastern state of Arunachal Pradesh.
The Asian giants have held numerous sets of talks to resolve the future of their disputed regions, but have made little progress.
A senior Indian government source said the nations are in touch via a working committee set up to defuse India-China border tensions.
India says China, which inflicted a bloody defeat on Indian forces in the 1962 war, occupies 38,000km2 of its Himalayan territory, while Beijing claims all of Arunachal Pradesh, an area of 90,000km2.
The de facto border separating China and India is known as the Line of Actual Control. While it has never been formally demarcated, the countries signed two accords to maintain peace in frontier areas in 1993 and 1996.
“As regards the distance that the Chinese are inside [Indian territory], this is an area where there have been differing perceptions of the Line of Actual Control,” the Indian government source said.
However, the Press Trust of India news agency reported the Chinese platoon of about 50 soldiers was 10km inside the line in the Daulat Beg Oldi sector that has an Indian military airstrip.
“The Indian government chooses to underplay Chinese actions so as not to provoke greater aggressiveness,” veteran Indian foreign policy analyst Brahma Chellaney wrote in a recent column for Mint newspaper.
However, he said government figures show the number of stealthy Chinese forays into territory claimed by India has steadily increased.
ROCKY RELATIONS: The figures on residents come as Chinese tourist numbers drop following Beijing’s warnings to avoid traveling to Japan The number of Chinese residents in Japan has continued to rise, even as ties between the two countries have become increasingly fractious, data released on Friday showed. As of the end of December last year, the number of Chinese residents had increased by 6.5 percent from the previous year to 930,428. Chinese people accounted for 22.6 percent of all foreign residents in Japan, making them by far the largest group, Japanese Ministry of Justice data showed. Beijing has criticized Tokyo in increasingly strident terms since Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi last year suggested that a military conflict around Taiwan could
A pro-Iran hacking group claimed to breach FBI Director Kash Patel’s personal e-mail inbox and posted some of the contents online. The e-mails provided by the hacking group include travel details, correspondence with leasing agents in Washington and global entry, and loyalty account numbers. The e-mail address the hackers claim to have compromised has been previously tied to Patel’s personal details, and the leaked e-mails contain photos of Patel and others, in addition to correspondence with family members and colleagues. “The FBI is aware of malicious actors targeting Director Patel’s personal email information,” the agency said in a statement on
RIVALRY: ‘We know that these are merely symbolic investigations initiated by China, which is in fact the world’s most profligate disrupter of supply chains,’ a US official said China has started a pair of investigations into US trade practices, retaliating against similar probes by US President Donald Trump’s administration as the superpowers stake out positions before an expected presidential summit in May. The move, announced by the Chinese Ministry of Commerce on Friday, is a direct mirror of steps Trump took to revive his tariff agenda after the US Supreme Court last month struck down some of his duties. “China expresses its strong dissatisfaction and firm opposition to these actions,” a ministry spokesperson said in a statement, referring to the so-called Section 301 investigations initiated on March 11.
When a hiker fell from a 55m waterfall in wild New Zealand bush, rescuers were forced to evacuate the badly hurt woman without her dog, which could not be found. After strangers raised thousands of dollars for a search, border collie Molly was flown to safety by a helicopter pilot who was determined to reunite the pet and the owner. A week earlier, an emergency rescue helicopter found the woman with bruises and lacerations after a fall at a rocky spot at the waterfall on the South Island’s West Coast. She was airlifted on March 24, but they were forced to
RSS