By Kapil Patil
Recent border incursions prompt India to bolster its conventional deterrence.
India’s Cabinet Committee on Security has agreed to proceed with the creation of a new mountain strike corps of nearly 40,000 troops to be deployed along the disputed China border region by the end of 2016. The decision to set up the new corps has been long debated by India’s security planners and final approval came in the wake of the three-week long Depsung Valley confrontations with Chinese forces earlier this year. Over the last two decades, India has gradually increased its military presence along the Line of Actual Control (LAC) in response to aggressive Chinese patrolling in the disputed region.
The 4,100 km long LAC between the two countries is geographically divided into three sectors. The western sector in Ladakh, the central sector along the Uttarakhand-Tibet border, and the eastern sector in Sikkim and Arunachal Pradesh, where China claims 90,000 square kilometers of Indian-administered territory. Earlier in 2009, the Indian Army deployed two similar mountain divisions in the Arunachal Pradesh region to boost its defenses in the eastern sector. The new mountain strike corps, however, is expected to take the fight into Tibet and capture the Chinese territory there, should the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) invade Indian territory.
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