NEW DELHI: The Army wants to unleash a Sudarshan Chakra against the Chinese Army. No, the world’s third largest Army is not thinking of deploying mythological weapons to scare the largest one.

Instead, the first-ever Indian combat exercise to which the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has been invited is code-named Sudarshan Chakra Prahar. “It has been confirmed that a top PLA delegation will be coming to the Pokhran field firing range in Rajasthan to witness this exercise in mid-November,”said an officer.

The PLA delegation will be exposed to the Army’s top-notch T-90S main battle tanks and the upgraded T-72 tanks of an armoured division from one of three “strike corps’’. “They will also get a firepower demonstration,”he added.

An Indian Army team, led by a general commanding an armoured division, had incidentally witnessed an exercise of a “reinforced mechanised division”of the PLA in Henan province of China last year.

Though a reciprocal gesture, the upcoming exercise is yet another indicator of the upswing in Sino-Indian military ties in recent years, which remained marred for decades by the bitter 1962 conflict.

India, of course, still remains worried about the large-scale modernisation of the 2.5 million-strong PLA, which is more than double the Indian forces, apart from China’s extremely close defence ties with Pakistan.

China’s rapid development of military infrastructure in the Tibet Autonomous Region and other border areas is another source of concern. Moreover, the process to delineate the 4,057-km-long Line of Actual Control (LAC) between the two countries is still to show much progress.

Be that as it may, as the defence ministry itself puts it, Sino-Indian relations have “now acquired a strategic character”. The Army now dismisses PLA incursions across the unresolved LAC as nothing serious.

(source / full list of drills)