India to add 50,000 troops to protect China border

India will create a new army corps of 50,000 troops to protect its border with China, in the latest sign that New Delhi sees China as a more significant long-term military threat than Pakistan.

The creation of the so-called mountain strike corps, which would cost some $11bn over seven years, was approved by the cabinet committee on security, according to official sources quoted by the Press Trust of India. India has 1.3m active troops.

No announcement was made by the committee, which is chaired by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and includes the ministers of defence, home affairs, foreign affairs and finance. But Indian officials and defence analysts said the new corps had been approved in principle after years of discussion.

“The idea of getting an offensive capability vis a vis China on the land borders is something India has been toying with since 1962,” said Uday Bhaskar, an expert at the Society for Policy Studies, a New Delhi-based think-tank, referring to the China-India war of that year. “The political green signal has been given. Now the bunfight for funds will start.”

Palaniappan Chidambaram, finance minister, is struggling to cut the country’s budget deficit, and it is unclear how quickly the money will be made available for the new force.

“It’ll take years and years before they get up to speed on this,” said one official in New Delhi.

Rumel Dahiya, a retired brigadier who is deputy director-general of the Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses, agreed that financing the creation and running of the new corps would be an issue.

“As far as implementation is concerned, primarily it’s a function of the economy,” he said. “That’s a huge amount of money.”

Earlier this year, Indian ministers were shaken by a Chinese incursion 18km into what had previously been seen as Indian-controlled territory in Ladakh in Kashmir.

About 30 People’s Liberation Army soldiers camped on the Indian side of the “Line of Actual Control” along the disputed Himalayan border. They left after three weeks, shortly before a visit to India by Chinese Premier Li Keqiang. India had threatened to take “every possible step” to defend its interests.

The strike force will be focused on the eastern end of the frontier to guard Arunachal Pradesh, an Indian state claimed in its entirety by China. But analysts said this year’s border dispute in Kashmir to the west could have accelerated the cabinet committee’s decision.

“The recent incursion may have been a trigger . . . this might have been a tipping point,” said Mr Bhaskar.

Military analysts say the new corps would have to be equipped with light artillery and helicopters to deal with the mountainous terrain. India is militarily weaker than China, but the strike corps would theoretically allow it to mount counteroffensives and so give New Delhi a little more leverage in negotiations with Beijing.