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Guwahati, May 18 -- It is over four weeks since the Chinese army intruded deep into the Depsang Plains of Ladakh, in the north-western sector of the India-China border, and the strategic community in India seems yet groping to make a sense of the aggression!
Utterances of the Indian government officials over the issue have been deliberately misleading and those of commentators largely speculative. The government's unyielding reluctance to share the facts with the country is at the root of wild speculations. Salman Khurshid, India's foreign minister first played down the aggression calling it a mere 'acne' and while recently in Beijing sought to further humor his host by not earnestly raising the issue with his Chinese counterpart. It is time some crucial facts be told to the countrymen and call the minister's bluff.
Until emergence of the Peoples Republic of China and the PLA's march into Tibet in 1950, there was little uncertainty regarding alignment of the India-China border in this sector. Although the British in their strategic maneuvers to promote China as a buffer between the imperial Russia that had absorbed the Central Asia by the 19th century and come dangerously close to the borders of the British empire had yielded some territory of Jammu & Kashmir north of the Karakoram Pass to China, the locus of Aksai Chin in India's Ladakh was never in doubt. Maharaja of Jammu and Kashmir governed this vast stretch of land and policed the trade routes crisscrossing it. Successive maps of the Chinese governments-imperial as well as republican,too showed Aksai Chin as part of India's Ladakh.
It was only in 1950s when the Peoples Liberation Army marched into Tibet and Tibetans resisted imposition and consolidation of the Chinese rule that China realized the strategic importance of Aksai Chin for movements of troops from Xinjiang to quell...