NEW DELHI: With the tiger no longer crouching, and in fact getting more capable of leaping out of the trenches now, the dragon obviously is breathing fire. China has been unnerved by India’s slow but steady improvement in border infrastructure for faster mobility of its troops and weapon systems in forward areas over the last few years.
India may still have a long way to go in matching China’s border infrastructure, leave alone the stark asymmetry in terms of military forces and capabilities, but is now increasingly challenging the dragon’s dominance in road and air connectivity in disputed high-altitude stretches along the 3,488-km Line of Actual Control (LAC) from Ladakh to Arunachal Pradesh. This has certainly irked China. One of the triggers for the ongoing troop confrontations in eastern Ladakh, for instance, is India’s completion of the 255-km Darbuk-Shyok-Daulat Beg Oldie (DBO) road last year and its fresh move to build some additional feeder link roads and bridges.
