Joginder Jaswant Singh

New Delhi, Nov. 20: The first India-China joint army drill, delayed by more than two months, will be held in the third week of December, an Indian Army headquarters source said here today. But the dates for the drill, the composition of the troops and the final planning conference have not yet been fixed with the Chinese.

Ironically, the news that India and China will hold a joint army exercise comes almost exactly 45 years after the 1962 war. In November 1962, the Chinese Peoples’ Liberation Army handed the Indian military its worst drubbing, marching almost up to Tezpur in Assam before announcing a unilateral ceasefire and withdrawing.

But even the announcement that the drill is finally on was muted, though the defence ministry hyped it earlier this year when the then army chief, General Joginder Jaswant Singh, visited China.

Indian Army sources refused to link the disrupted schedule for the drill to diplomatic or political reasons. China had sent a demarche — a diplomatic inquiry — on the Malabar war games in the Bay of Bengal to all five participating nations, including India and the US. India and China last week scheduled an annual defence dialogue for early 2008.

Among the major reasons for the delay in the exercise, army sources had said last month, was an inability to establish compatible protocol. Groomed in the British tradition, the Indian Army top brass was unable to fix Indian ranks that correspond to Chinese ranks. For example, the Chinese have a senior colonel and a colonel general, two ranks that are absent in the officer cadre of the Indian Army.

The venue of the exercise, originally scheduled to be held in Chengdu, has also not been announced. One officer said it would be in the Yunnan province. The PLA’s Yunnan Military District, part of which includes Chengdu, is to the east of Myanmar and borders Laos and Vietnam.

Compared with the drills the Indian Army has been holding with the Americans over the past five years, the war game with the Chinese army would be fairly elementary. India is likely to send a company (about 110 troops) led by a major.

The Indian Navy has held search-and-rescue drills with the PLA navy. Yesterday, in Shillong, the head of the air force, Air Chief Marshal Fali Major, said the IAF was keen to engage the Chinese air force in drills.