China’s border threat: we’ll ‘annihilate’ Indian troops

China has warned Indian troops face ‘annihilation’ if they continue their provocations along the tense Himalayan border.

Indian reinforcements approach Leh, on a highway bordering China. Picture: Getty Images

China has warned Indian troops face “annihilation” if they continue their provocations along the tense Himalayan border, and that the two countries are now closer to all-out conflict than at any time since they last fought a war in 1962.

The threats, made by Chinese Communist Party mouthpiece the Global Times, come as both militaries accused the other of breaking a 45-year “no fire” agreement during a confrontation on the 3488km Line of ­Actual Control this week.

China has accused India of firing warning shots on Monday night over the border on the southern bank of Ladakh’s Pangong Lake amid rising tensions over Indian troops’ recent occupation of two strategic heights, which it says are on its side of the unmarked border, but which overlook key Chinese formations.

“This was the first time since 1975 that the peace on the border between the two countries was ­interrupted by gunfire,” China foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said.

A spokesman for the People’s Liberation Army’s Western Theatre Command called the ­actions “serious military provocations of a terrible nature” and said PLA troops took “counter-measures”.

But New Delhi says it was PLA troops who “fired a few rounds in the air to intimidate Indian soldiers” after the group approached one of the strategic heights armed with crude weapons similar to those used in a deadly clash in June in the nearby Galwan ­Valley.

Pictures published by Indian media on Wednesday appeared to show several dozen PLA troops armed with makeshift bayonets comprising machetes attached to spears.

A statement later released by India’s External Affairs Ministry said: “China continues to undertake provocative activities to ­escalate. At no stage has the ­Indian Army transgressed across the LAC or resorted to use of any aggressive means, including ­firing.”

Until this week Indian and Chinese troops are said to have abided by a series of border protocols forbidding the use of firearms, first agreed upon after four Indian soldiers were killed in the eastern Himalayas in 1975.

Monday’s cross-border firing has raised the temperature ­between two militaries that have repeatedly clashed along the border since May, when New Delhi accused PLA troops of crossing the boundary in at least three places and occupying territory long-claimed by India.

India and China’s foreign ministers, S Jaishankar and Wang Yi, are due to meet on the sidelines of a meeting of the eight-nation Shanghai Co-operation Organisation in Moscow this week.

But hopes for a breakthrough in the border crisis appear slim after a meeting last Friday between the two countries’ defence ministers failed to make progress in resolving a conflict that seriously escalated when 20 Indian soldiers were killed in hand-to-hand clashes with PLA troops in June. China has not revealed its casualties.

Further clashes occurred late last month between PLA troops and an elite Indian special frontier force comprising high-altitude soldiers from India’s exiled Tibetan community.

That has since sparked ­increasingly bellicose statements from the Global Times, whose editor-in-chief, Hu Xijin, wrote on Tuesday that “the situation today is very close to that before the outbreak of the 1962 war”.

“If the Indian army fires the first shot at the PLA, the consequence must be the annihilation of the Indian army on the spot. If Indian troops dare to escalate the conflict, more Indian troops will be wiped out,” he said, adding China felt “contempt” for the ­Indian army’s combat capability.