Face-Off with China Continues at Multiple Points Along Arunachal Border, Confirms ITBP Chief
Confrontations between Indian and Chinese troops are continuing at several locations along the Line of Actual Control (LAC) in Arunachal Pradesh, the chief of the Indo-Tibetan Border Police (ITBP) confirmed on Thursday, delivering the first official word on the scale of the tensions that have been building on the northeastern frontier since July.
"In the past few days, a situation arose where face-off happened at several locations in Arunachal and it still continues," ITBP Director-General Shatrujeet Kapur said, speaking at the force's annual felicitation ceremony in Rajasthan.
The remarks mark the most direct public acknowledgement yet from the Indian establishment about the state of the border in the eastern sector. For months, official statements have been measured and sparse even as reports of friction in the high Himalayan reaches of Arunachal Pradesh trickled in.
Kapur's comments, delivered at the Himveer Samman Samaroah — the annual honour ceremony for ITBP personnel held at the force's Central Training College in Alwar — leave no ambiguity: the confrontations are ongoing, spread across multiple points, and involve troops standing face to face in some of the harshest terrain on earth.
The ITBP, a paramilitary force raised specifically for mountain warfare, guards the long and often disputed frontier with China in the Himalayas. Alongside the Indian Army, its personnel man forward outposts and send long-range patrols deep into areas where the LAC is undemarcated and where Indian and Chinese perceptions of the boundary line do not coincide.
It is in these contested stretches that patrols of the two armies routinely come across one another — encounters that both sides manage through established protocols, but which can also flare into prolonged standoffs.
According to government sources quoted by The Hindu, one such standoff has been underway since late July at Asaphila, near Taksing in the Upper Subansiri district of Arunachal Pradesh. The sequence of events described by the sources follows a familiar but worrying pattern. Sometime in July, Indian and Chinese troops came face to face near Maja, a company-level operating base in the Taksing circle, during routine patrolling.
The confrontation was brief, and both sides withdrew. Days later, however, soldiers of the Chinese People's Liberation Army returned in larger numbers and pitched tents at an elevated position — reportedly six to seven kilometres within India's perception of the LAC, close to the Maja operating base.
India has since reinforced its own deployment in the area, sources said, underscoring how a single patrol encounter in a remote valley can set off a chain reaction of deployments on both sides.
The stand-off near Taksing has persisted despite a flurry of diplomatic engagement between New Delhi and Beijing. Chinese President Xi Jinping attended the 18th BRICS Summit hosted by India from September 11 to 13, a visit widely read as a signal of cautious stabilisation in the bilateral relationship. At the negotiating table, the two countries have held three high-level border dialogues since July.
The 36th meeting of the Working Mechanism for Consultation and Coordination on India-China Border Affairs (WMCC) took place on August 6. That was followed by the 25th round of talks between the Special Representatives on the Boundary Question on August 26 in Beijing, where India was represented by National Security Adviser Ajit Doval.
Then, on September 6, the two armies held their first-ever Corps Commander-level meeting in the Eastern Sector at the Vacha-Damai Border Personnel Meeting Point in Arunachal Pradesh — a significant development in itself, since such military-to-military talks have until now largely been conducted at the Chushul-Moldo meeting point in eastern Ladakh, particularly in the years since the deadly Galwan Valley clashes of June 2020.
That the Taksing standoff has endured through all of this diplomatic activity tells its own story. In the Himalayas, where ridgelines and valleys define both strategy and survival, ground realities shift slowly and rarely mirror the atmospherics of summitry.
Kapur's remarks on Thursday went well beyond the current confrontations. Speaking to the personnel he commands, the ITBP chief laid out a sweeping assessment of the force's readiness and where he believes future border warfare is headed — and it was a candid assessment. The weapons currently used by the ITBP are five decades old, he acknowledged, and modernisation is no longer a matter of choice.
China, he noted, has invested heavily in modernising its weapons and border infrastructure. "It may not be possible to face China through traditional methods," Kapur said, pointing to the widening asymmetry across the LAC.
Drones, he argued, are the future of warfare on the Himalayan frontier. "Drones are something through which even a small country can challenge a big country," the ITBP chief said, drawing lessons from conflicts around the world. "We saw how Ukraine has challenged a superpower like Russia. The war was supposed to be over in a few days, but 10,000 to 15,000 Russian soldiers are being killed, they are suffering. Look at Iran, how, without even a Navy, they, with the help of drones, challenged America."
The force is putting its money where its mouth is. Of the Rs 400 crore modernisation funds available to the ITBP, seventy per cent has been spent on drones, Kapur revealed. Every border-guarding battalion now has a drone platoon.
The force has begun training drone pilots and is building drones in-house rather than depending entirely on outside vendors. And out of a larger modernisation scheme of Rs 3,500 crore to Rs 4,000 crore, a full Rs 1,000 crore has been earmarked for drones and counter-drone systems.
Beyond firepower, the ITBP is rethinking how its men survive at the border. Kapur announced a decision to build as many underground shelters as overground structures along the China border over the next three years — a measure he described as central to the new style of mountain warfare. "Underground shelters are key to new warfare. Anything overground can be a target. In hot-war situations, underground shelters are a priority," he said.
Pilot projects are already underway across companies, with the goal of designing permanent defences that are genuinely livable in the mountains — with proper bathrooms, ventilation and drainage. Once the design is finalised through these pilots, every border outpost will carry an equal number of overground and underground structures within three years, he said.
Kapur also drew attention to the force's elite new strike element. The newly raised Shaurya commandos, he said, played an exemplary role in the recent confrontations along the Arunachal border. "ITBP was raised as a mountain guerrilla force and we were given border guarding duty along China in 2004," he said.
"We need not leave our original function, and a specialised high-altitude mountain fighting force is being set up, distinct than the army. We will soon have one full battalion of Shaurya commandos; high-altitude deployment is our strength."
The comment carries a historical echo. The ITBP was created in 1962 in the aftermath of the India-China war as a mountain-trained force, and its return to an offensive high-altitude commando role signals a deliberate sharpening of the instrument India keeps closest to the LAC.
For now, the immediate focus is on the continuing face-offs. The Army and the ITBP conduct long-range patrols in the forward areas, and with the patrol window in Arunachal running roughly from June to October before winter closes in, the coming weeks will test whether the current tensions ease or harden. Three rounds of talks have failed to dislodge the standoff at Taksing.
The DG's plain-spoken confirmation that the situation "still continues" suggests New Delhi is preparing for a long haul on the northeastern frontier — and preparing its border force for a very different kind of war than the ones it was equipped for fifty years ago.
(Reporting based on The Hindu and WION.)