DETENTE AT THE ROOF OF THE WORLD
The Indian Army circulated the first videos from the world’s highest all-arms military standoff on February 11. A squadron of dun-coloured Chinese Type 99 main battle tanks (MBTs) driving down the rolling hills of the Kailash Range in eastern Ladakh. This was matched by Indian T-72 tanks wheeling away from the location. Five days later, a torrent of images from the Indian Army showed PLA (People’s Liberation Army) earthmoving machines clawing at stone bunkers and fortifications and trudging back to their side of the Line of Actual Control (LAC). The images were proof that India and China had begun disengaging their troops from eastern Ladakh, as defence minister Rajnath Singh had informed Parliament on February 11. They showed just how dangerously close the two sides had come at the border—rival tanks just a few hundred metres away from each other in the first superhigh-altitude armoured face-off since the invention of the battle tank a century ago. The images also revealed the depth and complexity of the PLA’s largest border incursion in decades—tents, fortifications, bunkers and armoured vehicles—and debunked initial Indian government assessment last year that the incidents were nothing
