Ladakh: China has been massively ramping up its military infrastructure, not just around the stand-off locations but along other stretches of the Line of Actual Control under the People’s Liberation Army’s Western Theatre Command.
The deployment and the renewed focus on infrastructure upgrade has prompted Indian officials to suspect that the rapid militarisation of the border may be also linked to continuing efforts by President Xi Jinping to drive sinicization of Tibet with Han domination over Buddhist Lhasa.
“We would ordinarily have expected the mobilisation and the focus of the infra upgrade to be limited to the stand-off points, mostly aimed at warding off any armed threat from India to occupied Aksai Chin. But this is not the case,” a top national security planner said. “There has been a clear effort to militarise the autonomous region through infrastructure upgrade”.
The official cited recent satellite imagery of the Tibet region that shows shelters to house fighter jets in an excavated hill at Gonggar airbase in Lhasa, massive storage facility at Golmud in Qinghai province, a new road between Xinjiang region’s Kanxiwar, used as forward deployment base during 1962 war, to the Hotan airbase and border upgrade at Nyangulu and Nyingchi across Arunachal Pradesh.
Nyangulu, 60 kilometres from the Arunachal border, was again used as a forward PLA camp in the 1962 war.
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