The Ministry of Home Affairs is considering a move to make the Indo-Tibetan Border Police the primary force manning the Line of Actual Control with China. This will take away the Army from its frontline positions and replace it with ITBP troops. And in a potential flashpoint, they would be exposed to possible unequal scenarios vis-a-vis China’s People’s Liberation Army, therefore, potentially further complicating India’s boundary equation with China.
If the measure to give the primary role to the ITBP gets finalised by the government, it is likely to worsen the situation from an already unequal scenario. And the ostensible reason behind the proposed move is even more inexplicable – ‘to avoid future conflicts between Indian Army and China’s People’s Liberation Army’. This defies military logic, tactical knowledge of the terrain, and the tense situation that has been playing out since April 2020.
Undemarcated Boundaries
While border management is the responsibility of the MHA, the Ministry of Defence (MoD) gets drawn in as well when the matter in concern is undemarcated boundaries. And a large part of India’s cartography involves borders that are still not internationally accepted. Managing these disputed zones is where the Army gets drawn in but without the full command and control of all national assets to ensure the sanctity of India’s boundaries. Egos, turf wars, and the perennial issue of bureaucratic empire-building remain at the forefront instead of a cohesive national operational plan managing these boundaries.
Since boundary delineation disputes ultimately involve the Army, the most effective command and control mechanism would be to have all other national assets, military, police, or other civilian troops under the coordination of the senior-most local commander. This ensures efficient use of the workforce and eschews duplication and wastage of national resources.
Assam Rifles Also Involved
The MHA-MoD turf war has been an ongoing affair, especially involving the Assam Rifles and now the ITBP as well. As India’s oldest counter-insurgency force, the Assam Rifles has been fought over by both ministries for decades. Even as the MHA is the budgeting ministry for the Assam Rifles and provides police-like nomenclature for its ranks, operational control rests with the MoD. A serving Lieutenant General functions as a Director General supported by various Army officers donning police ranks. The MHA has wanted to wrest complete control of the paramilitary force from the MoD and appoint its own personnel to run it. But the operational scenario of the Northeast has ensured better sense prevails.
The report of the Group of Ministers (GOM) on National Security after the Kargil conflict, identified the various problems of border management. It recommended that, to enforce the accountability, the principle of “One Border One Force” may be adopted while considering deployment of forces at the border.”
In 2002, based on the GOM report, the Assam Rifles were nominated as the border-guarding force for the India-Myanmar border, a role which the force had performed effectively for many years. The recommendations of the GOM have been implemented along all our borders with neighbouring countries except the most sensitive and important border with China, where the Army and ITBP continue to man the 3488 km long sensitive and disputed borders.
Dual command and control structure leads to conflicting directions and guidelines emanating from the two controlling ministries, ie, MHA and MoD and intermediary HQs. The government, instead of synergising border management, is creating additional issues of coordination by proposing to merge Assam Rifles with ITBP.
Remote Command
It is the Army that maintains the overall control of the LAC from India’s side, monitoring patrols and manning key points to keep a check on Chinese movements, and it has been this arrangement since the 1962 Indo-China War as is the wont in all such undemarcated boundary scenarios. The ITBP was raised in October 1962 to monitor the border with Tibet and has been at the frontline of deployment but not under the command and coordination with local military formations. The ITBP patrolling programme, for example, although shared with the Army, was always drawn out in the North Block, New Delhi. Such remote distance command and control is not a workable situation, especially given the undemarcated nature of the boundary and the likelihood of clashes with Chinese troops. For effective boundary management, there needs to be a local commander responsible for all national assets deployed.
Duplication of Resources
The pattern of LAC management has been anything but efficient with two ministries barely coordinating with each other in terms of budgeting and logistics for specialised equipment to expenditure on daily provisions.
While this duplicates purchases without enhancing the economy of scale, it also makes a mess of logistics management. At the scale of deployment now required in Ladakh, particularly, duplication of equipment means extra logistical burdens.
Managing all that specialised equipment drawn from multiple sources requires that much more effort at store-keeping. Alternatively, single command and control ensure that scarce national resources are not wasted on duplicated efforts and avoid wastage on account of maintenance costs.
There have been numerous calls by domain experts to develop enhanced Army-ITBP command and coordination, but they always face the spectre of MHA intransigence. So much so that even though both require similar high-altitude equipment, there is no common purchasing mechanism.
Army’s Objections
For long, the army, backed by the MoD, has taken to strongly reiterating its decade-long demand for the ITBP to be placed under its “operational control” for “better and coordinated border management” along the 4,057-km Line of Actual Control (LAC) with China.
On the strength of the Naresh Chandra taskforce on national security, the Army says “Single-point command and control has become critical after the Chinese intrusion.”
But the MHA has already dismissed the move, holding the army will not get control over the ITBP come what may. The MHA officials stress that the ITBP showed alacrity in reporting the 19-km deep intrusion by the Chinese soldiers in Depsang Bulge to all authorities concerned on 15 April 2020.
The army, however, contends there are “glaring deficiencies” in the “deployment and patrolling patterns” of the ITBP, which is also “not optimally-equipped in weaponry” and has “limitations” in reacting to operational contingencies.
Comments
Should the MHA succeed in pushing its case for the ITBP to take the lead role along the LAC, it would require a lot more workforce. Besides lacking the structure and organisational capabilities to tackle conflict situations, the ITBP doesn’t have the troop strength for an enhanced role either. Raising more ITBP battalions then poses a question: Why are budgetary constraints imposed only on armed forces recruitment with a short-term Agniveer formula and not on a Central Armed Police Force (CAPF)? India obviously seems to think that the CAPF is more important for its security than the armed forces that have always pulled its chestnuts out of the fires.
The belief among bureaucrats and police advisors appears to be that the Chinese seek peace and tranquillity along the LAC as also that replacing the army with the ITBP will avoid future clashes. The government continues to fail to comprehend that the Chinese can never be trusted. Adversaries respect strength not peace overtures, as Doklam, Kargil and Ladakh proved. Additional deployment of troops along the LAC, repositioning a strike corps from the plains, as also speeding up the raising of the mountain strike corps sent the message that India means business.
The Chinese philosophy of salami slicing is here to stay. The ramifications of making the ITBP responsible for the undemarcated border are immense. In the case of the Chinese, their border guards (Peoples Armed Police along the LAC) are under the PLA, while in our case, the ITBP remains under the MHA. Thus the ITBP would be challenging the PLA, not their Chinese counterparts. The ITBP neither has the strength nor is it equipped, trained and motivated to fulfil this task. If additional ITBP battalions are raised, then it is even more absurd. This would happen at the cost of the army facing manpower cuts and schemes like Agnipath to cut down expenditure.
Battles between ministries for power and control of forces and borders must stop. The MOD must be responsible for security of un-demarcated areas and the MHA along demarcated borders. Troops deployed along un-demarcated borders must be under the commander responsible for the region.
