NEW DELHI: Eastern Ladakh continues to remain a major flashpoint between India and China, with rival troops locked in yet another face-off in the high-altitude area along the Line of Actual Control ( LAC ) on Saturday. Both sides have sent reinforcements to the area.

Sources said the stand-off began after a joint patrol of the Indian Army and Indo-Tibetan Border Police spotted the People’s Liberation Army building a watch-tower close to the mutually-accepted “border patrolling line” near Burtse, which is part of the Depsang plains in the northern part of eastern Ladakh, on Friday evening.

READ ALSO: India, China troops hold meet along border

Indian troops first warned the PLA soldiers to refrain from erecting the watch-tower, and then subsequently demolished the structures that had already been built . This led both sides to rush additional troops to the site, where the face-off was still in progress on Saturday evening with soldiers ranged against each other along the border patrolling line.

The Burtse area is one of the main disputed stretches of the un-demarcated LAC in Ladakh, where the norm from either side is to patrol to the border patrolling line and undertake the laid down de-escalation protocols if a troop stand-off takes place.

With both sides conducting aggressive patrolling to lay claim to disputed stretches amid “differing perceptions”, troop face-offs and "transgressions" are not unusual in the western (Ladakh), middle (Uttarakhand, Himachal) and eastern (Sikkim, Arunachal) sectors along the 4,057-km LAC.

READ ALSO: Chinese troops make incursion bids in Ladakh

But eastern Ladakh has witnessed many more incidents over the last few years. The Depsang Valley was also the site of the 21-day face-off between the two armies in April-May 2013, just before Chinese Premier Li Keqiang's visit to India then. After the prolonged stand-off, during which PLA troops had intruded 19-km into Indian territory, India had pushed for "greater predictability and stability'' in tackling such incidents through the inking of the bilateral border defence cooperation agreement (BDCA) in October 2013.

But it did not really help in any substantial manner. There was again a prolonged military standoff, with around 1,000 soldiers from each side in an eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation at Chumar and Demchok for over a fortnight in September last year, which too took place during the visit of Chinese President Xi Jinping to India. It had taken four flag meetings in eastern Ladakh for both sides to agree to "restore the status quo ante as it existed on September 1". Fortunately, no incident has spiralled out of control, with not a single shot being fired from either side over the last few decades.

Read this story in Hindi: लद्दाख: सेना ने ढहाया चीनी टावर, सीमा पर तनाव

