Textual analysis and learning to read between the lines part two. The conclusion of the 2020 Indian border conflict and resulting mutual withdraw from the contested territory and it's transformation into a no-man's zone where neither party will patrol is a good case study in how
to sift truth from fiction. It requires two things, an inquisitive mind and a broad base of knowledge from which to evaluate the potential probability of events based on past priors. The actual casualty exchange ratio, which is altogether not particularly important in the grand
scheme of things is unsurprisingly the most hotly debated topic nonetheless. Most people will default to priors and basic biases in evaluating the situation quickly and won't actually look into it with any specific details. The Indians admit to 20 casualties, the Chinese admit 4
Are they both true? Are they both false? Or is one true and the other false? The basic assumption that is highly probable is that both numbers serve as a minimum number of realistic casualties are there are names, faces, and ranks associated with all of the dead individuals.
With that established, let's take a closer look at the casualties themselves starting with the Chinese. Whether or not the Chinese casualty figures are complete cannot be independently corroborated and the PLA does have an incentive to minimize them. If you are biased against
the Chinese position, then it is natural to just assume that they are lieing and skip everything else. If you are looking for more confirmation, you will look to glean evidence that isn't obviously stated. One of the first instances is from the propaganda itself. The recently
released video showed a clip of a ceremony in Tibet at an airfield where the bodies were ceremonially unloaded. There were four coffins. A skeptical observer can assert that this is post-hoc fiction, but a more astute observer would notice the grass and uniforms. The grass was
far too verdant for Tibet winters and more critically, all the soldiers were wearing summer dress uniforms. In other words, the footage was recorded sometime last summer and not anytime recently. If the PLA had decided on an official count of 4 casualties, they did it long before
they decided on making any information public. Likewise the number of Indian casualties can basically be recognized as accurate by the number of gallantry citations awarded as well. Skipping some soldier's awards would have been a scandal in the ranks and the information sieve
that is the Indian media would inevitably be leaked for one political purpose or another. Analyzing Indian data presents a different challenge than analyzing Chinese data by virtue of it's ubiquity. In essence, you aren't trying to find grains of truth from official cant, but
dismissing a torrent of lies one by one until you find something approximating the truth. Unlike in previous India-Pak skirmishes where lies and misinformation flew with abandon on both sides, the India-China information war was one sided in that China wasn't even fighting one.
Chinese media released no account of it's own of suspected Indian casualties, no stories of valor, nothing except India started it and should pull back to their original positions. Honestly it was pretty boring. Indian media on the other hand was rife with colorful bakwas of all
stripes. Even here though, it is possible to look at the metadata of the situation as it were and get to something approximating the truth. The indian casualties numbers basically came in piecemeal. In the immediate aftermath of the incident, there were only 2 reported dead, then
a few more, it would only be a few days later until the full picture came in and the official death toll of 20 was announced. The slow drip of casualty figures is evidence of either an incomplete ground picture where the higher ranks of the Indian army and government wasn't quite
sure how many casualties it had on it's hand or wasn't quite sure how damaging the casualties would be politically so sought to delay. The next interesting bit of information was that the Chinese had at least 10 Indian prisoners. This wasn't immediately reported and was never
even acknowledged by the Chinese side, it wasn't almost a week later that the Indian army basically fessed up that they were negotiating for the release of prisoners. Unlike Pakistan, China wasn't interesting in parading the prisoners on live TV to humiliate the Indian military
as had happened to the pilot shot down over Balakot. Another important detail that slowly dripped out in the immediate aftermath after the incident was that many of the Indian casualties weren't clubbed to death by the Chinese, rather they had died of hypothermia and exposure.
Adding all these details together paints a fairly basic picture of what happened during the skirmish. The Indian's had lost the skirmish, resulting in bunch of people taken prisoner including a colonel, and had taken casualties during the retreat where the wounded were not given
given proper medical care or had simply gotten lost in the mountains in the dark and died. There really isn't any other tactical conclusion that can be drawn given the data available. The latter stories of Indian heroism, of Bihari's wringing the necks of PLA soldiers in the dark
are basically emotional cover for the simple extrapolation of the details contained in the entirely Indian narrative of events since the PLA and by extension the Chinese media had said absolutely nothing. This leads on to all of the Indian claims of Chinese casualties. The first
is that enemy accounts of casualties are always inflated. In every single war and battle fought in the history of human kind, there isn't a single instance of an opposing army inflating the casualties of the enemy. It has never not happened even in the modern era even with combat
photography. The only question is the degree of inflation whether it is 2x or 20x. The second issue is that there isn't a single Indian claim of actual Chinese casualties, rather a series of claims of questional believability. Depending on which anonymous source the media cited,
the Indian army had managed to either kill the entire PLA general staff circle 1950 or the entire 108 stars of destiny in the Water Margin. The more serious claims will back it with the ever reliable "American intelligence sources" report or circle cite foreign news services that
quoted Indian media verbatim from the start. With all that is said and the rivers of digital ink that has flown on the subject. The most realistic accounts of the actual casualty exchange is probably the official one by virtue of elimination of lower probability events.
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