Chief of army staff, General Manoj Mukund Naravane
LIEUTENANT GENERAL YOGESH JOSHI, the chief of the Indian Army’s Northern Command, received a phone call at 8.15 pm on 31 August 2020. The information he received alarmed him. Four Chinese tanks, supported by infantry, had begun moving up a steep mountain track towards Rechin La in eastern Ladakh. Joshi reported the movement to the chief of army staff, General Manoj Mukund Naravane, who immediately grasped the severity of the situation. The tanks were within a few hundred metres of Indian positions on the Kailash Range, the strategic high ground that Indian forces had seized, hours earlier, in a dangerous race with China’s People’s Liberation Army. In this terrain on the disputed Line of Actual Control—the de facto border between the two countries—every metre of elevation translates to strategic dominance. The Indian soldiers fired an illuminating round, a kind of warning shot. It had no effect. The Chinese kept advancing. Naravane began making frantic calls to the leaders of India...
