About twenty Indian soldiers are hospitalized after a skirmish with Chinese troops in the Himalayas. The clash occurred last Friday on Tibetan land under Indian control, although disputed by both states, in Tawang. The number of Chinese casualties has not been disclosed, but Indian sources say they are "even more".
The Indian Defense Minister, Rajnath Singh, described what happened on Tuesday as an incursion by the People's Liberation Army to change the status quo in the Line of Control. An attempt that would have been repelled with blows and punches, which explains why there are no deaths to be regretted.
This was not the case two and a half years ago, in the most serious incident in recent times, in Ladakh, when another border riot killed twenty Indian and four Chinese soldiers.
The Chinese mutism implies that the message he wanted to convey does not require words. This message, for Indian diplomat Yogesh Gupta, is China's annoyance over the joint exercises of the Indian and US armies in the Himalayas, which ended just a week before the Chinese incursion.
Indeed, the annual joint maneuvers, which took place in Alaska last year, were held this year in Auli, in Uttarakhand, 50 kilometers as the crow flies from one of the areas where the border dispute is most pronounced. Over the past decades, China has resolved its land border disputes with all of its neighbors except India and Bhutan (a satellite of New Delhi).
China's message seems directed at the most sensitive area that the Indian Union inherited from British India. The Tibetan district of Tawang, on the western edge of the North East Frontier Agency that New Delhi converted a few decades ago into the Mongoloid-populated state of Arunachal Pradesh.
