Offensive Defence | India’s robust policy against adversaries

Beijing has been left red-faced after last week’s confrontation between the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) troops and Indian soldiers at the Pangong Tso in eastern Ladakh. On the night of August 29-30, Chinese forces intruded into the Indian side of the Line of Actual Control (LAC) and tried to occupy strategic heights near the southern bank of the Pangong Tso overlooking Indian military positions in the Chushul area.

Alert Indian troops not only pushed them back — preventing an encore of what happened three months ago when the PLA forces stealthily occupied vantage points on the lake’s north bank — but also deployed on the dominating high ground within hours. From all accounts, the commander of the Chinese troops ordered a hasty retreat when physical conflict seemed imminent — a move which reportedly earned him the displeasure of the PLA’s Western Theatre Command chief.

The Chinese leadership brazenly uses tactics short of armed conflict to grab land on the Indian side of the LAC at every opportunity so it can unilaterally change the status quo on the border. The five rounds of military commander level talks between the two sides, from mid-June till early August to restore border peace have evidently not yielded anything as the PLA’s so-called ‘salami slicing’ of Indian territory goes on.

Unfortunately for India, Beijing is playing this treacherous Chinese checkers at a time when the Indian Army has been forced to postpone its annual military exercises in Ladakh because of the pandemic. (Indian troops usually use these drills to get acclimatised to the area before winter sets in.)

In the latest face-off, however, what is remarkable is the Indian Army’s use of the Special Frontier Force (SFF) to thwart and pre-empt the Chinese intrusion.

Each service of the Indian Armed Forces has a special forces component: the army’s Parachute Regiment — Parachute (Airborne) and Parachute (Special Forces); the Marine Commandos (MARCOS) of the navy, and the air force’s Garud Commando Force (Garuds).

However, the SFF is markedly different, and although army units with the SFF elements are called Vikas battalions, they are not actually part of the Indian Army. They are a secretive paramilitary special force comprising mostly Tibetans, operating under the Cabinet Secretariat, and reporting directly to the Prime Minister’s Office. The SFF commandos are specially trained in reconnaissance, direct action, unconventional warfare and covert operations, and excel in guerrilla tactics and mountain warfare. High altitude operations especially come naturally to them.

These units were created during the India-China war of 1962 when, at the behest of the Intelligence Bureau, New Delhi raised a 5,000-strong unit of Tibetans living in exile in India to tackle Chinese aggression along the LAC. The SFF works closely with India’s external intelligence agency, the Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW) which initially trained them with the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The CIA, though, opted out of the SFF training programme in the Seventies when Washington began to mend fences with China.

Considering that New Delhi never let the SFF operate near the LAC before, its deployment now in eastern Ladakh signals a new and robust policy of offensive defence. Military doctrine is changing in armies around the world and special operations forces such as the US Army's Delta Force and the US Navy's SEALs have become indispensable crisis response tools for the militaries of many countries.

Units such as the British Special Air Service, for instance, specialise in counterterrorism, hostage rescue, and special reconnaissance, while others like Britain’s Special Boat Service are part of naval task forces. Russia’s Spetsnaz special forces, Israel’s Sayeret Matkal, Australia’s Special Air Service Regiment, the French Le Commando Hubert, South Africa’s Special Forces Brigade, and the New Zealand Special Air Service top the list of elite commando units of the world.

Curiously, the PLA itself started focusing on special operations forces only in the late Eighties when a ‘rapid reaction unit’ was set up in Guangzhou, southern China. However, their rigorous training notwithstanding, the Chinese troops lack actual combat experience, and have yet to prove their mettle in undertaking unorthodox security tasks. This is unlike the battle-hardened SFF, which has seen action right from its inception — be it in Bangladesh in 1971, Operation Blue Star in Amritsar’s Golden Temple in 1984, or the 1999 Kargil War.

These ‘irregular’ troops with their unique skills lend invaluable support to the efforts of conventional military units like infantry battalions. As the Pangong Tso incident showed, India’s military planners are rightly turning to these elite units to reorient the armed forces into a new deterrence posture towards adversaries.

Prakash Chandra is former editor of the Indian Defence Review. He writes on aerospace and strategic affairs. Views are personal.