In India every issue is clouded by partisan politics. Take the instance of the India-China tussle in Ladakh’s Galwan Valley and Pangong Tso over a month now where there has been a massive build-up of Chinese troops who have allegedly crossed the Line of Actual Control (LAC) despite treaties to respect those boundaries. Interestingly, while the Indian Government remains tight-lipped about the matter and the people of India are fired up about this intrusion to the point of giving a call to boycott Chinese products, an open source intelligence (OSINT) network going by the nomenclature of ‘DetResFa’ which has today become one of the most sought after sources of information on the continuing border tensions is explaining the ground situation to us. DetResFa has captured satellite images of troops movement from both sides – India and China.
DetResFa informs that China did not have a free run over the area. In fact India’s retaliatory tactics took China by surprise. The Chinese known for their propaganda have been feeding their people with exaggerated accounts of the intrusion to Indian territory beyond the LAC .This is the normal ploy that countries adopt when there is internal strife. They feed their people propaganda about external threats. This, they hope, will unite disparate people haunted by the Covid-19 virus infection which first broke out in Wuhan, China and has now travelled the whole world and claimed millions of lives.
It would have been in order for the Defence Minister of India to brief the people with facts rather than retreat into a zone of silence. The information vacuum has been filled by open-source intelligence (OSINT) analysts, who have access to the latest commercial satellite imagery and who use their digital skills to provide vivid images of the high altitude battlefield and what is happening there. DetResFa has laid to rest speculations about the Chinese occupying large chunks of Indian territory. The Chinese have been building up forces for a while now but India seems to have been caught by surprise. In any case the Chinese have been engaged in infrastructure building along their side of the border for a long time. DetResFa says Chinese belligerence is also a result of its need to interfere in India’s internal affairs post the revocation of Article 370 and the changed status of Ladakh.
In both countries the conventional and social media are agog with largely jingoistic fervour. India has joined Trump in blaming China for not informing the world about Covid-19 and also the World Health Organisation (WHO) for aiding and abetting China in the spread of the deadly virus. China in turn is trying to caution India not to join forces with the US. Meanwhile the stand-off continues.
