New Delhi: With recent Chinese incursions creating anxiety in India, National Security Adviser MK Narayanan has convened a high-level meeting of top officials on Thursday to formulate an appropriate response to what is widely seen as Beijing's hostile posturing.
The meeting, to be chaired by Narayanan, is likely to be attended by Cabinet Secretary KM Chandrasekhar, Defence Secretary Pradeep Kumar, Home Secretary GK Pillai and Foreign Secretary Nirupama Rao.
The chiefs of the three armed forces and the Intelligence Bureau are also expected to attend the meeting which will scrutinise the nature of Chinese incursions and its larger ramifications for bilateral relations.
The meeting comes after reports about a high-profile war game, involving 50,000 troops, launched by the Chinese army that is aimed at improving Beijing's ability to deploy troops in Tibet whenever reinforcements are required.
In response, the Indian Army has mobilised its troops to forward posts in Jammu and Kashmir and along the northeastern border with China in an exercise named Operation Alert, a senior defence official said on Wednesday.
Although the Government has publicly tried to downplay the incursions as routine incidents that occur due to differences in perception about the Line of Actual Control (LAC), there are anxieties that repeated incursions are meant to signal Beijing's hardening of stand on the border issue.
It's a way to put India on the defensive in the boundary negotiations, said a reliable source, who did not wish to be named.
The incursions also come at a time when Beijing has expressed its objection to the proposed visit of Tibetan exiled leader Dalai Lama to Tawang, in India's northeastern state of Arunachal Pradesh which is claimed in its entirety by Beijing.
There was a media report about two Indian soldiers getting injured in firing by Chinese troops in Sikkim recently. But the Indian Government denied it.
India and China have held 13 rounds of boundary negotiations which are led by Narayanan and Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Dai Bingguo to resolve the boundary dispute in accordance with political parameters and guiding principles finalised over three years ago. But there has been little progress in talks with both sides reiterating their stated positions.
What has worried the strategic establishment in India is the timing of recent Chinese incursions which follows a string of apparently hostile postures from Beijing over the last year.
China tried to block India's quest for global nuclear trade in the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) in September last year, a development that cast a shadow over bilateral ties for some time.
More recently, China tried to block a developmental loan for India at the Manila-based Asian Development Bank on grounds that a part of it was meant for Arunachal Pradesh.
Put together, these developments have revived the spectre of China being the principal security threat to India despite rapidly expanding trade and investment between the two countries.
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