India to Add Seven Border Police Battalions Across from China

Indian Information and Broadcasting Minister Anurag Thakur announced on Wednesday that India will add seven new battalions of border police along its boundaries with China, a sign of growing tension along a border that has already seen several violent clashes.

According to Thakur, the new battalions will be assigned to the Indo-Tibetan Border Police (ITBP), which is stationed along two thousand miles of forbidding territory that stretches from the Karakoram Pass in the north to Jelep Pass in the eastern Himalayas.

The most notorious clash along this frontier occurred in the Galwan Valley in June 2020, a brutal hand-to-hand battle that escalated until dozens of soldiers were dead on both sides. Indian border forces were augmented to record-high levels after the Galwan battle, including at least 50,000 fresh troops.

Smaller and less lethal brawls have been fought with fists, sticks, and rocks over the years, most recently in December 2022, when Chinese and Indian patrols came to blows in the Himalayan region of Arunachal Pradesh. No fatalities were reported in that case, but several troops were injured when they fell off the mountainside in the course of pummeling each other.

The Indo-China border, formally known as the Line of Actual Control (LAC), is prone to such skirmishes because it is not clearly marked. India and China always accuse each other of sparking each confrontation by trespassing.

“Sometimes we perceive some areas as ours, sometimes they do. These are skirmishes that keep happening, and they are not major. This was not major,” an Indian defense ministry source said of the December 9 clash.

Thakur said the seven new battalions of ITBP guards would be supported by 47 new border outposts and 12 staging camps. Funding for the ITBP expansion has already been approved by the Indian Cabinet, with an eye toward beginning deployment in 2025.

The ITBP notes that most of its outposts are “located at altitudes ranging from 9,000 feet to 18,800 feet, where temperatures drop to minus 45 degrees Celsius in extreme winters.” 

Training for the border police force includes “various disciplines including mountaineering and skiing apart from intensive tactical training.” In addition to enforcing border security, the ITBP performs rescue and disaster relief missions in the Himalayas. 

Indian Army chief Manoj Pandey said on Wednesday that reinforcements were needed because the ITBP is operating at nearly 100 percent deployment, a grueling tempo given the harsh terrain they patrol. 

Pandey said China has been steadily encroaching into Indian territory, depriving India of 26 of its 65 patrol points along the LAC. Once Indian border patrols have been unable to visit a certain area for a long time, China claims the land for its own, a tactic the Indian military refers to as “salami slicing.”

Pandey also noted China has been building up infrastructure on its side of the LAC, including helicopter pads, airfields, and a highway that will give the Chinese “the ability to not only move forces forward, but also switch forces from one sector to another.”