Sea change: China has its sights on the Bay of Bengal

Pangong Lake is the most unlikely of places for a naval conflict between two of the world’s nuclear-powers, India and China, with a third, Pakistan, looking on with not a little interest.

Lying some 280 miles east of Islamabad, 360 miles north of New Delhi and 2,170 miles west of Beijing, Pangong Lake is in the remote northern Himalayas. In 1905, the explorer Ellsworth Huntington said that its beauty could ‘rival, or even excel, the most famous lakes of Italy or Switzerland’. It is a harsh world, frozen in winter, inhabited by a sparse indigenous population of hardy goat herders. And it’s situated in the southernmost spur of the Aksai Chin, a part of Ladakh (literally ‘the land of the high passes’) that, along with Jammu and Kashmir, form the disputed provinces now partitioned by India and Pakistan.

However, it is another Line of Control to the east that divides Indian-controlled Ladakh from the Aksai Chin: a 5,000 metre-high plateau the size of Switzerland, which is claimed by India but has been occupied by China since Mao Zedong’s armies annihilated those of Prime Minister Nehru in the 1962 Sino-Indian War.

Further Sino-Indian border clashes took place in 1967 and 1975. Then in 1999 the dynamics of Pangong Lake changed when China built a road along its side of the Line of Control and launched a flotilla of five-man speedboats. In the years since, numerous micro-incursions have been made by China. In May and June this year, scuffles between patrolling forces finally led to a violent confrontation in the Galwan Valley to the north of Pangong Lake in which 20 Indian soldiers, including their commander, were killed.