India needs more troops on 'more alive' China border for the long haul, says S Jaishankar

New tunnels, bridges, airfields help sustain deployments along the Line of Actual Control, the external affairs minister says, citing gains since the 2020 Galwan clashes

India had strengthened its ability to deploy and sustain troops along the Line of Actual Control (LAC) since the deadly 2020 Galwan Valley clashes in eastern Ladakh, external affairs minister S Jaishankar said on Saturday. He said the frontier now required a larger, sustained troop presence, and pointed to new tunnels, bridges and airfields as part of New Delhi's infrastructure push.

Speaking at an interactive session at the HT Leadership Summit, Jaishankar said, "Just think about the last few years. How often do you now read - a new tunnel has been built, some new bridge has been built, another airfield has been commissioned. You're getting this news with greater and greater frequency."

"What has happened today is the border with China has become more alive in a way. It has required a much greater commitment of troops on a sustained basis."

"The fact is that the work we had already done allowed that kind of numbers to be deployed out there, and the work we continue to do will maintain those numbers," he said.

His remarks came as New Delhi and Beijing worked to normalise relations after a military standoff in eastern Ladakh strained ties for more than four years. The two countries began repairing ties after Prime Minister Narendra Modi met Chinese President Xi Jinping in the Russian city of Kazan in October 2024, following the end of the face-off.

Modi and Xi discussed ways to reduce the trade deficit, tackle challenges such as terrorism and ensure fair trade on multilateral platforms.

Jaishankar said India's ability to "deploy" troops along the frontier had seen "a very marked" improvement. He said border infrastructure had received greater attention and resources over the past decade.

"I would say when it comes to the border, I would honestly make this point, and I think there's a lot of data and evidence to back it up, which is that the border infrastructure was really neglected till about a decade ago. I mean, people spoke about it, people drew up plan," Jaishankar said.

"If you actually go on the ground and see year-by-year how many kilometres of roads, what was the tunnelling, what was the positioning, I think anybody, and certainly anybody associated with the armed forces dealing with that sector knows the truth," he noted.

"It's really been in the last decade that that kind of attention, resources, policy push has been given," Jaishankar added.

Asked about the economic gap between the two countries, Jaishankar traced it to China's push for industrialisation in the 1980s and India's record on reforms in the following decade.

"On the economic side, the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, this was the time the world was industrialising, developing countries were industrialising. Remember, when around the time when Rajiv Gandhi went to China in 1988, the Indian and Chinese economies were about the same size," he said.

"But the fact was that China, in the 1980s particularly, made a huge push towards modernisation and industrialisation. I'm sorry to say India in the 1980s simply missed the bus. Now in the 1990s, we did some corrections, reforms, but we did not carry through the reforms sector by sector and keep building and raising it," he said.

"I don't want you to think of it as a political point," Jaishankar said, listing the Modi government's efforts in manufacturing and industrialisation.

"The fact is, there were decades where we missed out; now we have to play catch up; you can't play catch up by following the same track. You have to do leap-frogging. We'll have to build up our particular strengths to deal with this asymmetry issue."

"In asymmetry, you don't go toe-to-toe on every issue. You pick the issues where you feel you have the ability to make a big change. That's really what we think we're doing right now," he said.