The situation in the high-altitude area near Taksing, the last Indian village inhabited before the border with Tibet in Upper Subansiri, has remained largely under the radar for the past couple of weeks and has now become the most significant undeclared crisis on the Indo-China border since Galwan. Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge on Friday questioned Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah directly, whether the People's Liberation Army had increased its presence near Taksing or whether Indian troops have been denied regular access to the Shera-5, a designated patrolling point. After Galwan, now Arunachal Pradesh?” he wrote, referring to the reports as “disturbing” and urging for “immediate answers”. A day before, Rahul Gandhi had gone further stating that the government had stifled reporting on the event and Modi's statement in 2020 to China "not taking an inch" of Indian land has echoed through each of the Prime Minister's border flare-ups.

These details have come out as a result of a fact-finding process done by the People's Party of Arunachal over the last two weeks and are more detailed than the political rhetoric. An Indian withdrawal in 2023 after a clash between Indian forces and Chinese troops in Taksing effectively left Shera-5 an Indian patrolling point open to the Chinese, who have taken control of it, since that time. The committee spoke to residents and army personnel, who said that PLA soldiers later came back and took down the symbolic posts set up by the Indian troops and have not allowed access since. The panel also identified Nanga Pahar, the traditional grazing and hunting ground of the local Nah and Mara communities, as a territory that is slowly, but steadily, being absorbed, rather than a dramatic incursion. The Indian Army, in turn, had already rebutted an earlier memorandum from the Nah Welfare Society dated June, referring to the allegations made as baseless. The encroachment narrative has also been met with stiff opposition from the Chief Minister of Arunachal, Pema Khandu, who has taken the stand against it in public forums; meanwhile, his own state's development push, from the monastery opening in Tenzing Nageshwari to the plans for tourism circuit in Taksing, indicates how sparsely garrisoned and thinly connected this stretch of frontier remains.

But the difficulty with this episode is that it has now been admitted, diplomatically in the nicest possible terms, by the very same Ministry of External Affairs. In response to reporters this week, Spokesperson Randhir Jaiswal said he believed India viewed border issues with China as "most serious," a statement that was emphatic enough to leave no doubt of a violation but was subtle enough to be a tacit admission that something is indeed unresolved. The statement came after both sides reportedly had frank exchanges during their 36th meeting of Working Mechanism for Consultation and Coordination on border affairs on 6 August, which did not result in any public resolution. Through its own foreign ministry this week, the Chinese position was that conditions on the border are "generally stable," a telling absence of any reference to the particular news reports of PLA activity near Taksing. In isolation, it is reported in security circles that a similar incident occurred approximately two and a half kilometres away from the LAC in early August, during which Chinese soldiers set up tents.Within security circles, there is the suggestion that a similar incident took place about two and a half kilometres from the LAC in early August, after an earlier standoff which was resolved with the "usual pull-back" protocol.

The politics is what writes itself, but the incentives below that deserve a lot more attention than they're receiving. The question which R.K Singh, a retired Union minister who served for years in both the home and defence ministries, has been asking in this entire episode is arguably the most pointed: How many patrolling points has India given up since 2014, not once, but every day the government is not required to state? That question is important because it asks a different kind of question from the one that has been expressed about Arunachal that of a pattern question. It is a pattern question that the slow-motion border strategy relies on for cover. One withdrawal at a time, it's logical, logical, logical, but together, the overall picture shows a frontier where India's footprint is diminishing while its rhetoric remains maximal.

Underneath the security story is a money story which isn't always given its due. The defense budget for India for FY25-26 is approximately Rs 6.81 lakh crore ($78.4 billion), which represents a 9.53 percent rise India remains a distant fourth, trailing only the United States, China and Russia. The agency that is really in charge of keeping forward posts like Taksing up and running the Border Roads Organisation has a budget that is only about $850 million for the same year, a small fraction of what it will take India to match China's network of all-weather roads, airstrips and permanent logistics bases on the Tibetan plateau. The asymmetry of the defence spending is so large and so it becomes an asymmetry in the infrastructure if Beijing can send troops forward throughout the year, India historically has done so through portering in and out between April and October. But all this has not affected bilateral trade, and India's merchandise trade deficit with China remains almost $100 billion a year, giving Beijing some economic leverage as its soldiers battle it out on terra firma.

None of this is a "legal" land grab as the opposition suggests. But this does raise the question that the government's favoured approach - official silence and an earmarking of key infrastructure projects is proving harder to ignore by the day, let alone the week, with each passing day a documentary record from a state party's own fact finding committee, a retired minister who once headed these ministries, and signs of official silence in the MEA's latest guarded language.