Asituation of ‘no war, no peace’ on the western border with Pakistan and a hot peace with China on the northern border increasingly threaten to become the new normal of India’s frontier policy. India is beefing up its forces and redeploying them, Army Chief General Bipin Rawat has confirmed. The Army is raising, indeed it has partly raised, its 17 Mountain Strike Corps specifically for the undemarcated 3,488 km Line of Actual Control (LAC) with China. In addition, the Border Security Force (BSF) and the Indo Tibetan Border Police (ITBP) are raising additional battalions.
All of this is contextualised by China’s outreach to countries in the Indian Ocean Region. China has sponsored Pakistan’s Gwadar Port, a crucial element of its One Belt One Road and China-Pakistan Economic Corridor initiatives. Now, China is also looking to develop another port near Gwadar at the Jiwani Peninsula that may be used as a naval base to service its warships and submarines that have been maintaining a continued deployment in the name of counter-piracy operations. It has already established a base at Djibouti in the Horn of Africa. All of this points to a militarisation of the North Arabian Sea, waters that the Indian Navy considers its zone of responsibility—from the Strait of Malacca to the Strait of Hormuz.
The fact that China is establishing a military garrison at Doklam in Bhutan, where Indian and Chinese troops were involved in a face-off for 73 days last year, means that the PLA is forward deploying. Also, the incursion at Tuting in Arunachal Pradesh, hitherto not a hotspot, along the LAC in deep winter, could take the subcontinent to a hot summer. Even without a shot being fired on the LAC, tensions are building up because, as Gen. Rawat says, Indian troops are now patrolling areas that they would not normally go to. Brinkmanship of this sort is fraught with dangers especially in politically intense years when the countries in the subcontinent are heading into elections.