To the Yarkandi traders seeking the gold of Central Asia, the desolate camp was known as Mur-Go: the Gate of Hell. From there, their camel caravans would head into Burtsé, covered by dry scrub that could be used to stoke fires and the bleak Depsang plains. Fording the iced-over Chip-Chap River, the path came to Daulat Beg Oldi, a caravanserai where a rich trader had been buried. Finally, the towering black-gravelled pass into Central Asia, called the Karakoram, lay ahead.
Earlier this week, military commanders from China and India met for the 19th time since the lethal clashes at Galwan, seeking to hammer out an agreed frontier along those ancient paths. Ever since the lethal clashes at Galwan in 2020, the talks have already led to the creation of multiple no-patrol zones along the Line of Actual Control (LAC). The talks have deadlocked, though, on the territory around the Gate of Hell.
Official sources say that the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has been insisting Indian troops pull back to Burtsé, well west of where India believes the LAC runs. The no-patrol zones elsewhere involved relatively small areas where India could afford to make asymmetrical territorial concessions. The Depsang plains, though, run to over 900 square kilometres and a unilateral concession by India could provoke domestic furore.
Leaders of both militaries know that the Depsang issue needs political intervention. A meeting between Chinese President Xi Jinping and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the G20 Summit early next month could provide the momentum needed to break the deadlock.
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A blood-soaked line
For a decade now, the PLA has repeatedly asserted its claims west of the LAC and cut off India’s access to the positions it had patrolled since the late 1970s. In 2013, a platoon of PLA troops blockaded a position named Bottleneck, through which Indian patrols headed east had to proceed. In 2015, another PLA intrusion came even further west, up to Burtsé itself. The PLA has even built roads west of the LAC, to block Indian patrols.
The dispute over Depsang dates back to 1962, when India launched what came to be known as the Forward Policy. That summer, faced with deadlocked border negotiations, then PM Jawaharlal Nehru had ordered Indian troops to assert the country’s territorial claims.
India’s official 1962 war history records that four posts numbered one to four were set up north of the Chip-Chap River, each with a platoon of troops or 20-30 men. Similar positions were set up south of the Chip-Chap, numbered five-10. Four more posts, numbered 11-14, guarded the southward arc to Galwan.
From logistically dependent airdrops and helicopter runs to Daulat Beg Oldi, the outposts were lightly equipped since there was no road linking Ladakh to the rest of India. Except for Post One, no position had mortar. Supplies had to be man-packed through the glacial cold, and the frozen soil made creating defences against artillery near-impossible.
Like elsewhere on the LAC, the PLA responded to Indian presence by building up massive numbers of troops. The posts were surrounded and cut-off weeks before the fighting began. The PLA’s build-up was aided by the fact it had a road running up to a caravan-route campsite at Qizil Jilga, close to Post Four.
The two sides, Indian military accounts state, began to regularly collide as each responded to the presence of the other. The PLA opened fire on a patrol of the 14 Jammu and Kashmir Militia on 21 July, some 8 kilometres from Daulat Beg Oldi. Troops of the First Battalion of the 8 Gorkha Rifles were attacked the same day. Indian soldiers were ambushed on 26 August, and there was a skirmish near the Galwan River on 2 September.
Forty-eight hours after the PLA finally attacked in strength on 19 October 1962, the soldiers on the posts from Post 1-14 were compelled to fall back by overwhelming numbers and relentless artillery bombardment, the war history states. The 114 Brigade headquarters ordered battalion headquarters at Daulat Beg Oldi to retreat to the Saser La Pass and dig in to guard the route to Leh.
Led by Major Sardul Singh Randhawa of the 14 Jammu and Kashmir Militia, later awarded a Maha Vir Chakra, the soldiers were severely tested during their retreat. The sick and wounded had to be carried after the weight of the unit’s jeeps and trucks cracked an iced-over riverbed and had to be abandoned.
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The Indian pushback
For reasons which continue to be debated by military historians, the PLA did not move east into Daulat Beg Oldi, even though its path was clear. The former military commander PJS Sandhu has argued that the PLA had orders not to transgress their so-called claim line of 1960, the border China had proposed in diplomatic negotiations. However, the scholar Manoj Joshi notes that PLA troops did move east of their claim line in areas like Depsang, capitalising on Indian withdrawal.
Either way, on November 1962, China began withdrawing to what it said were “positions 20 kilometres behind the Line of Actual Control which existed between China and India on 7 November, 1959.”
There is little doubt that India’s Forward Policy was based on dangerously flawed assumptions. “The Chinese would like to come right up to their claim of 1960 wherever we ourselves were not in occupation,” the Intelligence Bureau wrote in 1961, historian Srinath Raghavan has recorded. “But where even a dozen men of ours are present, the Chinese have kept away.”
Even though the Western Command voiced concerns over the Forward Policy, Army headquarters disagreed: “The Chinese will not attack any of our positions even if they are relatively weaker than theirs,” the chief of general staff told the defence ministry on the eve of war.
From the late-1970s, though, former PM Indira Gandhi’s increasingly-confident government ordered troops to resume patrolling up to the limits established during the Forward Policy. These patrol points lay several kilometres west of the LAC, as India perceived it. In the Depsang sector, the Indian patrols did not seem to have been met with resistance.
However, the dispute over where the LAC was simmered on, despite a Chinese agreement in 2005 to clarify the issue. Today, China again exercises de-facto control over the territory it occupied in this sector in 1962.
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The Depsang dilemma
Xi’s use of border intrusions to assert Chinese power runs true to a long pattern of coercive signalling. There was a six-kilometre-deep intrusion into Himachal Pradesh two months after former Chinese President Jiang Zemin’s visit in December 1997. Even as ex-Indian PM Atal Bihari Vajpayee visited Beijing in 2003, a PLA patrol intruded into the Asaphi La area of Arunachal Pradesh. Another intrusion into Asaphi La occurred during Premier Wen Jaibao’s visit to India in 2005.
Modi had, early in his tenure, shown the willingness to pay the political costs of a border settlement with China. Even as President Xi Jinping prepared to make his maiden visit to India in 2014, though, PLA troops crossed the LAC at Chumar. The reasons for rebuffing Modi’s peace bid remain unclear.
Ever since the 2013 face-off in Depsang, Indian strategists have been puzzled over China’s true objectives—a task not made easy by the latter’s silence and opacity.
The Depsang intrusion, some defence analysts say, was a signal of PLA anger over new Indian border infrastructure, like the Daulat Beg Oldi-Shyok road. Localised irritants, others contend, like the construction of a tin shed at Chumar by Indian troops, could arguably have sparked the conflict. Larger geopolitical issues, like India’s deepening ties with the United States, may have also played a role.
Less important than the reasons, though, have been consequences. The massive troop deployment by both militaries is fraught with dangers. As Sandhu has noted, political leaders often err in underestimating the risks of eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation. The Galwan crisis illustrated just how wrong things could go.
The lowering of aggressive polemic in both Beijing and New Delhi shows politicians in both countries realise that the crisis of the Gates of Hell serves no strategic purpose for either country. Whether they have the will to end the impasse, though, remains to be seen.
The author is National Security Editor, ThePrint. He tweets @praveenswami. Views are personal.
(Edited by Zoya Bhatti)