User:MBlaze Lightning/2022 Yangste clash
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Yangste clash of 9 December 2022 occurred nocturnally between the troops of the Indian Army and the People's Liberation Army (PLA) along the mutually contested Line of Actual Control (LAC) in the Yangste region of Tawang in the border state of India's Arunachal Pradesh. The clashes ensued after the two armies confronted each other with nail-studded clubs and other melee weapons near positions on a 5,182 m (17,001 ft) high mounting peak on the ridgeline along the LAC, southeast of the revered Buddhist site of Chumi Gyatse Falls, resulting in several casualties on both sides. The border incident marked the most serious clash between the two armies along the undemarcated border, since the Galwan Valley clash in June 2020, which had led to the deaths of 20 Indian soldiers and an unknown number of dead on the Chinese side.
2022 Yangste clash | |||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Part of the Sino-Indian border dispute | |||||||
A map of the Yangste region in Tawang showing the alignment of the LAC (marked with violet) in the vicinity of the Chumi Gyatse Falls. The clash occurred near an Indian army outpost on its Bom 6 peak on the ridgeline southeast of Chumi Gyaltse. | |||||||
| |||||||
Casualties and losses | |||||||
34 injured | 40 injured (per Indian media reports) |
India avowed that the incident was a Chinese enterprise, whose troops equipped with spiked clubs with protruding nails and other melee weapons nocturnally advanced upon its vantage military outpost manned by a small detachment of about 50 frontline troops on the Bom 6 peak with a force of over 300 soldiers with a view to capturing the high ground and alter the boundary in the area, thereby precipitating a brawl with the Indian troops, who were soon augmented by the arrival of reinforcements from the heights in the vicinity; and that in the ensuing clashes the Chinese were overwhelmed and beaten back. The Indian version of the chain of events was contested by the PLA, which imputed the transgression to the Indian troops at a time when its troops were performing customary patrol duty on its side of the border in the area.
Yangste, besides the larger Arunachal Pradesh region, had been the site of several such clashes in the period leading up to the latest incident. It had been recognised as one of the twelve contested border regions by the two countries in 1995. The border region is part of the Tawang district of Arunachal Pradesh, which is an important centre of Tibetan Buddhism, and has been claimed by China as part of its larger claim on Arunachal Pradesh, which it avers to be a part of south Tibet.