India will not allow any unilateral attempt by China to change the status quo or alter the Line of Actual Control (LAC), External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar said on Saturday, while asserting that through an enormous logistical effort, the country had countered the Chinese at the LAC in eastern Ladakh.
The statement comes on the back of two years since the Galwan clash, in which 20 Indian soldiers including the commanding officer got killed—the first deadly clash in the border area in four decades triggered massive deployments of troops and heavy weaponry by both armies in and around the area.
In the clash, an undisclosed number of PLA soldiers also got killed. Colonel B Santosh Babu, the commanding officer of the 16 Bihar Regiment, was posthumously awarded Maha Vir Chakra (MVC) for extraordinary courage and leadership, and five other soldiers were honoured with Vir Chakra (VrC) for their valour in the Galwan valley.
But, 'trust' was the biggest casualty between the two neighbours (in Galwan clash), which took decades to regain after the 1962 war, as per military planners.
Talking about the eastern Ladakh border row, Jaishankar said China, in violation of the 1993 and 1996 agreements not to mass troops on the Line of Actual Control (LAC), chose to do so, and added that its attempt was obviously to unilaterally change the LAC.
"Even though we were in the midst of COVID-19 at that time, through an enormous logistical effort, which I think sometimes has not been adequately recognised by people, by analysts, even in our politics in this country, we were actually able to counter them at the LAC," Jaishankar said at a town hall organised by CNN-News18.
Elaborating on the row, he said some people have a simplistic idea of the border and one does not typically deploy at the patrolling point and that troops are in depth areas.
