(TibetanReview.net, Nov15’26) – India’s External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar has said Nov 14 that the country’s border with Chinese ruled Tibet has become “more alive” and needs sustained troop deployment. He has also highlighted infrastructure upgrades since 2020 and discussed India’s adverse economic gap with China, urging the country to leapfrog development and strengthen industrialisation.
Taking part in an interactive session at the Hindustan Times Leadership Summit in New Delhi, Jaishankar has said India had also bolstered its military capabilities along the Line of Actual Control (LAC) – the de facto but ill-defined border between the two countries – since the deadly clashes in Eastern Ladakh’s Galwan Valley in mid-2020.
His remarks came amid ongoing efforts by New Delhi and Beijing to normalise relations, which came under severe strain following those clashes, noted the PTI news agency Nov 14. The clashes led to casualties on both the sides.
“Just think about the last few years. How often do you now read — a new tunnel has been built, some new bridge has been built, another airfield has been commissioned. You’re getting this news with greater and greater frequency,” he has said.
“What has happened today is the border with China has become more alive in a way. It has required a much greater commitment of troops on a sustained basis.
“The fact is that the work we had already done allowed that kind of numbers to be deployed out there, and the work we continue to do will maintain those numbers,” he has said.
Referring to India’s past lack of attentiveness to developing its Tibet-border areas, Jaishankar has said: “I would say when it comes to the border, I would honestly make this point, and I think there’s a lot of data and evidence to back it up, which is that the border infrastructure was really neglected till about a decade ago. I mean, people spoke about it, people drew up plan.”
“If you actually go on the ground and see year-by-year how many kilometres of roads, what was the tunnelling, what was the positioning, I think anybody, and certainly anybody associated with the armed forces dealing with that sector knows the truth,” Jaishankar has pointed out.
“It’s really been in the last decade that that kind of attention, resources, policy push has been given.” As a result, India’s capability to “deploy” its troops along the border has improved “very markedly,” he has added.
Also addressing the economic asymmetry between the two countries, Jaishankar has said that when prime minister Rajiv Gandhi went to China in 1988, the Indian and Chinese economies were about the same size.
“But the fact was that China, in the 1980s particularly, made a huge push towards modernisation and industrialisation. I’m sorry to say India in the 1980s simply missed the bus. Now in the 1990s, we did some corrections, reforms, but we did not carry through the reforms sector by sector and keep building and raising it.”
“The fact is, there were decades where we missed out; now we have to play catch up; you can’t play catch up by following the same track. You have to do leap-frogging. We’ll have to build up our particular strengths to deal with this asymmetry issue, he has added.