Ladakh: The Anatomy of a Surprise

We now know that the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) mounted a large operation starting early this year to shift the Line of Actual Control (LAC) between India and China in eastern Ladakh, across a front spanning hundreds of kilometers. In order to do so, the PLA moved artillery and armor, along with divisions worth of troops, into forward positions as a deterrent.

This led to the largest standoff between the Indian and Chinese armies in more than half a century. On the night of June 15, the two armies at one of the locations where the PLA had intruded, in the Galwan Valley, got into a major melee that left at least 20 Indian soldiers dead. As The Diplomat went to publication, the process of military disengagement had begun. It is not known, however, whether India will eventually have to live with a LAC shifted in its adversary’s favor.

The LAC is neither demarcated on the ground, nor do both countries agree on where it lies in terms of a common official map. In many ways, it is the perfect place for China to test its incremental land-grab strategy along the lines it had first perfected in the maritime space in the South and East China Seas.

Many Indian analysts have already noted the Indian intelligence failures at the tactical and operational levels in the run up to the current crisis. On the tactical side, as a former commander of the corps responsible for the defense of eastern Ladakh notes, Indian surveillance using drones as well as foot patrols proved to be inadequate as the PLA moved across the Indian perception of the LAC. Credible news reports, meanwhile, suggest that the Chinese incursions across the LAC happened near simultaneously.

The Research & Analysis Wing (R&AW) – India’s external intelligence service, responsible for monitoring external threats to India’s borders – either failed to detect the large-scale Chinese troop movements in the PLA bases across the LAC into forward positions or ignored it altogether. There is another possibility that a former Indian national security adviser, M. K. Narayanan, pointed out: The Ladakh crisis “is indicative of a weakness in interpretation and analysis of the intelligence available, as also an inability to provide a coherent assessment of China’s real intentions.”

Leaders in the Loop?

Students of intelligence are aware of the eponymous cycle, where signals are collected, analyzed, and presented to consumers, who then provide further guidance and feedback, perpetuating the loop. In other words, consumers of intelligence – policymakers – form a key node in the entire process. Their own prior beliefs and apprehensions about the adversary’s intent – or lack of it, as the case may be – shapes the “what” and “why” behind collection and analysis. 

It is becoming increasingly clear that China’s push into eastern Ladakh was shaped by the Narendra Modi government’s increasing forcefulness in trying to break India free from its geographical dilemma arising out of the disputed status of the erstwhile state of Jammu and Kashmir. That this push was going to result in a military crisis for India was clear to all but the most optimistic. One must ask why New Delhi failed to anticipate the obvious by first stating it.

The road to Ladakh began to be paved, metaphorically, two months after Modi was sworn in for another term. In August 2019, his government made good on a longstanding election promise of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP): ending the quasi-autonomous status of the state of Jammu and Kashmir secured through a special constitutional provision (Article 370 of the Indian Constitution). Boosted by its unchallenged political power, the Modi government also divided the state into two centrally controlled territories: Jammu and Kashmir, and Ladakh.

While it is easy to pin this decision on ideology alone, the fact of the matter is more complex, driven as it was by realpolitik in equal measure. Writing in between two senior positions in the Modi government, analyst Ashok Malik described New Delhi’s thinking, noting both the internal security considerations that followed from the raging insurgency in Kashmir, as well as larger geopolitical considerations. But there was a blunter message, which Indian Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar candidly conveyed in a November 2019 public lecture in New Delhi. He suggested that the constitutional and legislative rearrangement implied turning away from a “status quo that has now been overtaken by history.”

But the status quo, which was predicated on an uncomfortable peace with Pakistan, also involved China in two distinct ways. First, the newly-created union territory of Ladakh includes, at least notionally, the disputed Aksai Chin, which China considers to be part of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, a region that Beijing has become aggressively possessive about in recent years.

Second, if India militarily took control of Gilgit-Baltistan from Pakistan – a possibility that cannot be ruled out given Modi’s pronounced appetite for risk since 2016 – it would spell the end of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), the flagship project of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Note that Gilgit-Baltistan is the crucial geographical node that connects Xinjiang with land corridors from the Chinese-built Gwadar port in Pakistan. While Islamabad administers the region, India has claimed it as part of Kashmir since the country’s independence in 1947.

China did form part of the Indian strategic calculus shaping the August 2019 move, at least in one insider account. As Malik put it “…if India acts strategically in Ladakh and builds appropriate capacities, some of the Chinese investments and assumptions … could be at risk.” This was not empty rhetoric. According to a former spy chief from Modi’s first term, infrastructure construction along the India-China boundary was considerably accelerated under his watch.

The Indian government has also continued to remind Pakistan of the risk it can pose vis-à-vis Gilgit-Baltistan, beginning with a speech Modi gave in August 2016. In September 2019, Jaishankar bluntly noted that he expected India to have “physical jurisdiction” over Pakistan-administered Kashmir in the future.

Taken in conjunction with his public reminder of the past instances where India has intervened militarily in its periphery, or to consolidate territory, it is quite likely that these moves set off an alarm in Beijing, leading up to the current crisis in eastern Ladakh. One Chinese scholar affiliated with the Ministry of State Security’s think tank has suggested that it indeed did. At the very least, China used the August 2019 decisions around Kashmir as a pretext in order to move to thwart any ambitions New Delhi may have when it comes to regaining control over the part of Kashmir Pakistan has occupied since 1949.

It is important to keep in mind that any Indian military plan to take Pakistan-administered Kashmir back will necessarily involve the use of infrastructure in eastern Ladakh, which China, through the current standoffs in Galwan Valley and elsewhere, has sought to put at risk.

Xi’s domestic circumstances, arising out of the COVID-19 pandemic, should have also led to much greater strategic alertness in New Delhi. India should have noted that China, in moments of great domestic turmoil, has adopted an especially aggressive external stance in the past.

One of the drivers behind Mao Zedong’s decision to clash with the Soviet Union in 1969 was to mobilize the Chinese people following the disastrous Cultural Revolution he’d ordered earlier. This was not the only time domestic factors drove China’s military actions. As historian Xiaoming Zhang notes, Deng Xiaoping’s order for the PLA to invade Vietnam in 1979 was as much a part of a mobilization strategy aimed at consolidating his economic reform agenda as it was driven by geopolitical considerations.

To imagine that India was blind to this pattern would be incorrect. Indeed, as COVID-19 spread around the world, influential thinkers in New Delhi kept raising the possibility that that pandemic would weaken Xi, possibly leading to a power struggle within the Chinese Communist Party. 

In an article in late April, Jayadeva Ranade, a former head of R&AW’s China desk, noted that COVID-19 could imperil Xi’s “China Dream,” an ambitious plan to restore the country’s 19th century status as a great power. In private conversations, retired Indian diplomats and spies have repeatedly expressed their concern over Xi’s staying power, and the possibility of an economic as well as geopolitical hard landing for China in the near future.

What is baffling is that official New Delhi was unwilling to consider – and therefore, alert its intelligence services and the military for – a backlash on the India-China boundary, should any of these possibilities materialize. This is despite an extensive intellectual investment on its part in China in the recent years.

Especially since the Doklam standoff between the two countries in 2017, the Indian government has prioritized funding both classified as well as public research on China’s defense and foreign policy. In 2018, the foreign ministry announced the creation of an in-house think tank, the Centre for Contemporary China Studies (CCCS). Publicly, its staff consists of military officers, diplomats, as well as civilian scholars on contract. Anecdotally, CCCS also has a working relationship with India’s intelligence services, including R&AW. Other think tanks associated with the Indian military routinely publish research on China’s so-called salami-slicing posture in the western Pacific and grey-zone coercion.

Add to this the fact that the current commander responsible for managing the Indian Army in eastern Ladakh, Lieutenant General Harinder Singh, was formerly the director general of military intelligence – a position in which he showed a keen interest in China. In that capacity, he also regularly invited external scholars to present their research in the Army Headquarters around topics of mutual interest. (This writer was one of them.) Whatever the roots of the current crisis, a lack of awareness or interest among operational leaders of China’s overall strategic intent was not one of them.

Assuming the Best

So, what gives? 

What was the unfamiliar element that was confused with improbability, which led to the surprise of the current standoff? It certainly wasn’t because of inadequate intelligence warnings. According to one Indian journalist known for his coverage of the intelligence establishment, Singh was briefed by an Indian security official late last year who had warned that the August 2019 changes to the status of Jammu and Kashmir had annoyed the Chinese, and a consequent PLA reaction across the LAC could be expected.

Simply put, India was surprised because in the minds of Indian policymakers – the key node that should have driven the intelligence cycle since the warnings started dripping in last year – China was not viewed as an irredeemable, opportunistic adversary like Pakistan. Rather, it was a long-term challenge to be “managed,” to use a description from another public statement by Jaishankar.

Deposing in front of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on External Affairs in February 2018, Jaishankar (then India’s foreign secretary) noted: “I presume it is not in the fundamental interest of the government of China to have a conflict of any kind of any sort and on any issue [with India].” If this statement represented the Indian government’s beliefs at the highest echelon in the run-up to the Ladakh crisis, it is easy to see why alarms would have been ignored, despite being sounded.

It is important to note that the Indian foreign ministry is not the only institution that has been complacent in viewing China as an immediate military threat to India the way Pakistan is. As late as August 2018, the head of the foreign ministry’s CCCS – a retired Indian lieutenant general who became the Indian government’s public face during the current crisis – discounted the proposition that India’s relationship with China would continue to deteriorate indefinitely. Implicit in this view was a belief that Indian diplomacy would be capable of managing China before it materialized as a direct threat.

At the heart of this belief in the power of India’s diplomacy was Modi’s very personalized approach to foreign policy, evident in the two informal summits with Xi – the last one in October  2019. The Indian establishment assumed that these informal summits would first translate into concrete foreign policy gains for India, which would then trickle down to the local military level, at the disputed boundary. In January this year – right around the time the PLA was beginning to mobilize along the LAC – the Indian Army chief noted that after the Xi-Modi summits, differences on the boundary were not allowed to blow up, and instead were being managed at the level of local commanders.

The story of the Ladakh crisis – irrespective of how it ends eventually – is not of an intelligence failure in that India’s security establishment failed to collect enough signals around an impending threat, or even that Indian analysts were unaware of China’s larger strategic intent. It simply is one where New Delhi’s political leadership refused to believe that its efforts to placate Beijing would fail so miserably. In its obstinate belief in Modi’s power to persuade, India’s leadership failed to see the obvious materializing right before its eyes.