Just Saying | Savage horror of India-China border clash serves as a warning to avoid the unthinkable
- Yonden Lhatoo tries to make sense of what happened this week at a flash point along China’s disputed Himalayan border with India in the absence of a complete official account from either side
What really happened on Monday night in the Galwan Valley, a harsh, frozen and godforsaken part of the disputed Aksai Chin-Ladakh region in the western Himalayas?
All we know so far about the worst bloodletting between India and China in 60 years of border tensions is what we can glean from Indian media reports. They are mostly unverified, nationalistic, one-sided accounts citing anonymous sources, but will have to suffice in the absence of more official details about what went down in one of the most desolate places on the planet.
The showdown at 14,000 feet came after military commanders on the ground had agreed that both sides would pull their troops away from one flash point to create a buffer zone above the confluence of the Galwan and Shyok rivers.
All hell broke loose when an Indian colonel took a group of soldiers back to the scene to ensure the People’s Liberation Army was complying with its part of the deal. Both sides blamed each other for starting the high-altitude brawl that ensued and escalated into a massive free-for-all involving possibly hundreds of men, but only the Indians have provided the gory details.
Quoting army officers and the testimony of survivors, Indian media reports paint a picture of astonishing savagery and back-to-basics brutality on a battlefield of jagged, mountainous terrain with treacherous slopes and knife-edge ridges.
The hand-to-hand fighting lasted for up to eight hours, in pitch darkness, and while no shots were fired under an old treaty banning guns in this zone, the battle was fought with rocks and clubs. PLA soldiers were allegedly armed with rods and batons wrapped in barbed wire or studded with nails.
