Rejig in Army unlikely to mar Wuhan spirit

Sandeep Dikshit

Tribune News Service

New Delhi, July 21

The Indian Army’s plan to position two integrated battle groups (IBGs) facing China may appear to have come at an awkward moment as External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar is likely to visit Beijing next month.

But in this case, the Army is configuring its deployment pattern and strategy without adding to its manpower. In other words, the existing human resources and military hardware is being readjusted without any addition.

While India has displayed flexibility in agreeing to reset ties with China and toning down rhetoric on the military aspect of its maritime cooperation with the US and Japan, its plan to add teeth to its existing deployment will proceed apace.

Jaishankar is visiting China to firm up details for a second “informal” meeting between PM Narendra Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping, reportedly at Varanasi in early October. An informal meeting of top leaders is rare in diplomatic annals and is intended to clear layers of misunderstandings by face-to-face interaction without aides. The first informal meeting, held over two days in Wuhan, was followed by the Modi government scrapping Manmohan Singh government’s plans to raise a China-specific Mountain Strike Corps with fresh recruitments. The ostensible reason was a financial crunch but observers had detected an attempt at de-escalation since the move involved raisings involving 90,000 troops, which would have piqued China.

At that time too, officials had indicated that the revised approach will be to make the best use of the available resources instead of pouring additional investments to beef up the border, which would have vitiated the Wuhan spirit of taking out hostility from the Sino-Indian matrix. The Wuhan ‘spirit’ followed the prolonged Doklam confrontation.