Army, PLA top guns hold secret parleys

Ajay Banerjee

Tribune News Service

New Delhi, December 15

A couple of meetings have been conducted between the top leadership of the Indian Army and a delegation of People’s Liberation Army (PLA) of China led by senior General last week.

The meetings, conducted in New Delhi and Kolkata, and the visit have been kept under wraps, but sources confirmed to The Tribune that the Commander of the PLA’s western theatre, Gen Zhao Zongqi, and his delegation was in India for three days — December 8 to 10.

This was the second unpublicised high-level meeting after the annual defence dialogue (ADD) between India and China was conducted without even a word being spoken about it in public on November 8. Defence Secretary G Mohan Kumar and Sun Jianguo, deputy chief of the Joint Staff Department of China’s Central Military Commission, had met in Delhi. The latest round of meetings is the third engagement between the two neighbours in the past five weeks.

Indian Army Chief General Dalbir Singh Suhag had led a military delegation to China on a four-day (Nov 21-Nov 24) visit.

The Western theatre of PLA, carved out following a rejig in November last, covers Xinjiang and Tibet—it is tasked all along the entire 3,488 km un-demarcated Line of Actual Control (LAC) that is the de-facto boundary with India.

The Chinese delegation during its visit to Kolkata met Lt Gen Parveen Bakshi, the Eastern Army Commander and the seniormost commander after General Suhag. In Delhi, Vice Chief of Indian Army Lt Gen Bipin Rawat hosted a banquet for the Chinese delegation and also held talks.

The two sides exchanged views on military-to-military relations between the two countries, especially the cooperation between the PLA Western Theatre Command and the Indian military. The PLA Western theatre has some 4.5 lakh troops, tanks fighter jets, artillery regiments and India matches almost the same number all along the Himalayan divide running in an east-west axis.

The two sides agreed to jointly implement the important consensus reached by leaders of the two countries in May last year when a joint statement at Beijing, after a meeting between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping, had spoken about the need to “expand the exchanges between the border commanders, and establish border personnel meeting points at all sectors of the India-China border areas”.