Himalayan tin hut is latest flashpoint in India's border dispute with China
Updated
A small observation hut on a remote Himalayan plateau has become the latest flashpoint in India's ongoing border dispute with China.
Earlier this month the Indian army built the hut to monitor Chinese soldiers across the disputed border in the Ladakh region.
The hut's construction in Chumar prompted the Chinese military to build a road on territory claimed by India, and demand the tin hut be dismantled.
India not only refused, but destroyed part of the new road and raised troop numbers in the area.
Less than a month earlier, India started building an irrigation canal in Demchok, in southeast Ladakh, as part of the government's rural jobs guarantee program.
Now, around 1,000 soldiers from each sides are facing off in Ladakh.
While no shots have been fired, the deployment is a sign India is not looking to back down against China as new prime minister Narendra Modi bids to bolster national security.
P Stobdan, a former Indian ambassador and a Ladakhi with deep knowledge of the competing claims in the region, said there had been a shift in New Delhi's thinking.
"The hut has become the bone of contention," he said.
"The Chinese have drawn a red line. They want it demolished before they will withdraw."
Last year China forced India to demolish another hut in Chumar in return for ending a face-off.
"This time the new government does not seem to be in a mood to budge," Mr Stobdan added.
Hu Zhiyong, a research fellow with the Institute of International Relations at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, told China's state-run Global Times that the Modi government's moves to build up infrastructure and equipment on the Indian side of the line of control signalled a shift in posture.
"The 'offensive' strategy aims to gain more leverage in the talks," Mr Hu told the fiercely nationalist newspaper.
No longer business as usual
In June, the Modi government began a series of bold actions on the border, where Indian officials said China had long been nibbling away at its territory.
It ordered faster construction of 72 strategic roads along the border to narrow the gap with China's vastly superior and intricate network of roads and tracks in the mountains.
It also rebuilt airfields, including a landing strip laid in 1962, the year the two countries fought a short war.
Over the past few months C-130 Hercules planes bought from the United States have been landing at the airfield, around 30km from Depsang, the site of a 21-day standoff last year when Chinese soldiers set up tents on India's side of the 1962 ceasefire line.
VK Singh, Mr Modi's minister for India's northeastern states, another area where the border is in dispute with China, said it was is no longer business as usual on the so-called Line of Actual Control (LAC) dividing the two countries.
Mr Modi and Chinese president Xi Jiping met in New Delhi last week to discuss the question of incursions along their 3,500-kilometre contested frontier.
Mr Modi told a joint news conference that peace and stability on the border was needed in order to facilitate the better economic ties that Beijing was calling for.
Incursions from both sides are common along the ceasefire line, because their armies cannot agree where it lies, making a final settlement a distant prospect.
"Sometimes (in the past), I think for political reasons or other reasons, we would have said OK, leave it. But that perpetuates the problem, it doesn't solve the problem," said Mr Singh, a former army chief handpicked to beef up civilian and military infrastructure in the northeast.
"You keep giving a concession, it only perpetuates the problem. So somewhere up the hierarchy someone has to say 'Let's hold on'," he said.
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