It was in the first week of May 2020 that news broke of ingress by China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) in multiple areas across the Line of Actual Control (LAC) in Ladakh. Three years later, some of those areas have witnessed disengagement — pulling troops apart by a few miles of buffer zones — while two of them, Depsang and Demchok, remain unresolved. Indian soldiers cannot touch 26 of the 65 patrolling points in Ladakh.
Neither diplomatic meetings nor talks between corps commanders have elicited any progress since September last year; regular meetings between Indian and Chinese Ministers, Foreign and Defence, have not yielded results either. Beijing has ignored Delhi’s talking points, even after they have been watered down so much that India no longer demands a return to the status quo of April 2020. Verbose non sequiturs in Indian statements can hardly cover up the government’s failure in handling the current China crisis.
