As tensions between India and China continue to escalate, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has accused Indian soldiers of “illegally crossing the LAC into the Shenpao mountain region near the south bank of Pangong Tso Lake” reports the Global Times.
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“These are serious military provocations.. of a very bad nature,” PLA’s Western Theater Command spokesperson Col Zhang Shuili said. There is no Indian response to the PLA statement as yet.
“During the operation, the Indian army blatantly fired threats to the patrol personnel of the Chinese border guards who had made representations, and the Chinese border guards were forced to take countermeasures to stabilize the situation,” the spokesman claimed.
He accused Indian troops of “outrageously firing shots on Chinese border patrols soldiers who were about to negotiate,” the Communist Party-run Global Times newspaper reported.
As per other reports, Chinese PLA troops had engaged in provocative action at least twice in the last two weeks in the south bank of Ladakh’s Pangong Lake. However, the Indian army was able to “prevent these attempts to unilaterally alter the status quo” at the LAC, the Foreign Ministry had said, emphasizing that there were no physical clashes between the two sides.
“The Indian side’s move seriously violated related agreements reached by both sides, stirred up tensions in the region, and would easily cause misunderstandings and misjudgments, which is a serious military provocation and is very vile in nature,” the statement said.
“We demand the Indian side to immediately stop dangerous moves, withdraw personnel who crossed the LAC at once, strictly control frontline troops, seriously investigate and punish the personnel who fired the provocative shot and ensure similar incidents won’t take place again.”
It added that the “PLA Western Theatre Command troops will firmly fulfill duties and missions and resolutely safeguard national territorial sovereignty.”
Earlier, Indian External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar said the situation at eastern Ladakh, where Indian and Chinese soldiers have been in an eyeball-to-eyeball conflict, was “very serious” and called for “deep conversations between the two sides at the political level”.
He was addressing the Express E-Adda event on Monday evening. “If you look at the 30 years, because it was peace and tranquillity at the border, it allowed relation to progress,” said Jaishankar when asked what he would tell the Chinese Foreign Minister if he met him on the sidelines of SCO’s Foreign Minister-level meeting in Moscow on September 10.
