Five days after the man in charge of guarding India’s Himalayan frontier said his forces were locked in multiple ongoing face-offs with the Chinese army in Arunachal Pradesh, the Indian government had still not confirmed that anything was happening. Shatrujeet Kapur, director-general of the Indo-Tibetan Border Police (ITBP), said late last week that confrontations there “still continue,” Al Jazeera reported. Asked about his remarks, foreign ministry spokesperson Randhir Jaiswal offered boilerplate — “the situation in India-China border areas gets disturbed from time to time when Chinese forces diverge from established patrolling patterns” — and declined to comment on the face-offs themselves.
The timing is awkward by design or by accident. Xi Jinping was in New Delhi last month, his first India trip in seven years, meeting Prime Minister Narendra Modi on the sidelines of the BRICS summit as both capitals pursued a thaw pushed along by Donald Trump’s trade war. Whatever handshakes that produced, the 3,500-kilometre (2,200-mile) border is running on its own schedule, and it poses the durable political problem for Modi: an incumbent who campaigns on being hard on national security, answering questions about territory he insists India has not lost.
A border that was never agreed
The mechanism under all of this is a line that exists for one side and not the other. In 1914, British India and Tibet signed the Simla Convention, drawing the McMahon Line; India has treated it as the boundary since independence in 1947. China, under communist rule from 1949, rejects it, arguing Tibet lacked the authority to sign. Beijing claims all of Arunachal Pradesh as “South Tibet” or Zangnan, and separately holds Aksai Chin, territory India and Pakistan both claim in full. In 1993 the two sides agreed to keep the peace along the Line of Actual Control — the de facto boundary since 1962 — pending a final settlement. They still disagree on where that line runs, which means two armies patrol up to boundaries the other does not recognize. “Stand-offs are bound to occur from time to time, some of which may go out of hand,” warns Praveen Donthi of the International Crisis Group.
1959 — first clash between independent India and China, Upper Subansiri; at least two Indian soldiers killed. Nehru told Parliament the attacked post was roughly three weeks’ march from the nearest roadhead. 1962 — war; the ceasefire line becomes the Line of Actual Control. 1993 — agreement to maintain peace along the LAC pending settlement. Alignment never agreed since. 2020 — Galwan Valley, Ladakh: at least 20 Indian soldiers killed in hand-to-hand combat; China later acknowledged four dead. 2026 — ongoing face-offs reported in the same Upper Subansiri region as 1959, weeks after Xi’s first India visit in seven years.
The 2020 clash also produced the contradiction Modi has never resolved. On June 17, 2020, India’s foreign ministry said after the Jaishankar–Wang Yi call that “the Chinese side sought to erect a structure in Galwan Valley on our side of the LAC” and took “premeditated and planned action that was directly responsible for the resulting violence and casualties.” Two days later Modi posted that “neither has anyone been able to enter our territory, nor is anyone still on our territory.” If nobody crossed, the opposition asked, whom did 20 soldiers die fighting? The only answer was a Prime Minister’s Office clarification that no Chinese troops remained in Indian territory after the clash. Satellite imagery and accounts from within the security establishment have since indicated Chinese control of parts of previously disputed territory; the government concedes nothing.
‘They are on top of the mountains’
The specifics of the current incursion come from the opposition, not the government. Bosiram Siram, the Congress party’s top leader in Arunachal Pradesh, says Chinese troops have pushed nearly 50 km (31 miles) into Upper Subansiri; his party’s delegation visited border areas in August after the first reports, and “Chinese personnel are stationed up there,” he said. “You can see the [Chinese] Army. They are on top of the mountains, while we are down below.” Local civil society groups had told Al Jazeera nearly four months before Kapur spoke that Chinese forces were increasingly encroaching and blocking Indian troops from their own patrolling points.
Kapur, who retires this week, added two assessments that outlast him: the ITBP has built a specialised training programme for a Ladakh-type situation, and China’s frontier military capabilities have advanced to the point that Indian forces may be unable to meet them head-on by traditional methods. Donthi reads the incursions as “part of a pattern” and “likely a pressure tactic by Beijing,” executed against a government that, in his words, “presents an image of a hard security state with zero tolerance for national security failures” while “the power differential with China is quite sharp, so it tends to downplay any event that reflects poorly.” BR Deepak, a Chinese-studies professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University, says the reports strike at Modi’s “credibility and accountability” — a strongman image already dented this year when youth-led protests forced out his education minister in July.
The management machinery is the Working Mechanism for Consultation and Coordination (WMCC), running since 2012: officials on both sides, plus military channels, built to stop disputes from snowballing without ever settling where the boundary lies. Its 36th round met on August 6, nearly a month after the incursion reports first surfaced, and September brought the first-ever commander-level meeting in Arunachal Pradesh. Whether the government ever confirms what its own border-police chief described — and how deep the Chinese positions run — is the number that decides whether the 50 km stays an opposition claim or becomes an official one.