New Delhi: The recent controversy surrounding former Indian Army Chief General M. M. Naravane’s memoir, has reopened uncomfortable questions about the circumstances that led to the People’s Liberation Army’s ingress into eastern Ladakh in May 2020.While Naravane’s Four Stars of Destiny has triggered debate over civil-military relations and how candid retired military commanders can be about events under their command, its larger consequence is that it revives scrutiny of the sequence of events leading up to the crisis.Speculation within security and strategic circles over how the PLA entered India-claimed territory never entirely disappeared, but it was muted in the immediate aftermath of the confrontation. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s June 19, 2020 statement in Parliament on the Ladakh standoff – delivered amid incomplete and contested information – added to the uncertainty and drew comparisons with a well-known formulation by former US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.At a Pentagon briefing in 2002, when questioned about evidence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, Rumsfeld offered his now-legendary formulation: “There are known knowns – things we know we know. There are known unknowns – things we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns – things we do not know we don’t know.”That framework captured the fog that soon enveloped public understanding of developments along Ladakh’s Line of Actual Control (LAC), particularly around Galwan, Depsang and surrounding areas. Official messaging became further entangled as differing accounts emerged from New Delhi and from India’s diplomatic channels in Beijing regarding the precise ground situation and territorial control.Incomplete factsAmid this uncertainty, a parade of retired military officers took to nightly television debates, many long removed from operational service along the 3,488-km disputed and un-demarcated frontier. Presented as authoritative voices, they often generated more heat than clarity, producing emphatic but conflicting interpretations of events. The result was less illumination than noise: confident assertions layered over incomplete facts.Commercial satellite imagery, expected to serve as neutral evidence, did not settle matters either. Different television news broadcasters interpreted identical images to support sharply divergent narratives – withdrawal in one telling, consolidation in another, and even tactical advantage in a third. Visual data became another battlefield of interpretation rather than a source of situational resolution.Seen in the context of the India-China standoff in Ladakh, Rumsfeld’s doctrine of evidence was not theoretical – it was playing out in real time. Claims about ground positions, withdrawals and territorial control were repeatedly made even when verifiable proof was partial, delayed or contested. During the 2003-04 Iraq crisis, Rumsfeld had warned that the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence – a caution against premature certainty built on incomplete data. He stressed that this was not wordplay but a practical warning about decision-making under uncertainty – a warning the Ladakh information narrative repeatedly seemed to ignore.IntelligenceMeanwhile, there is little credible evidence to suggest that no intelligence existed about unusual PLA activity before the 2020 ingress, as Gen. Naravane reportedly seems to suggest in his unpublished book, partially excerpted in the February 2026 issue of Caravan magazine.. The more plausible – and more troubling – interpretation is that available intelligence, both human and electronic, was either fragmented or sparse or worse, ambiguously interpreted.On the electronic and technical intelligence side, the PLA’s large-scale movement was not something that could be entirely invisible. Satellite imagery and signals intelligence would almost certainly have detected increased logistics activity, troop concentrations in depth areas, and changes in posture in Tibet.Modern PLA operations are heavily dependent on road, rail, and communications infrastructure, and such preparatory moves typically leave signatures. Indeed, post-crisis analyses by independent researchers suggested that PLA infrastructure upgrades and forward deployments had been underway for months, even years, before April-May 2020.Human intelligence (HUMINT) presents a more complex picture. Penetrating the PLA at meaningful levels – especially in sensitive Western Theatre Command formations – is exceptionally difficult. Unlike some other adversaries, the PLA operates within a tightly controlled political ecosystem, limiting leakage.That said, HUMINT does not only mean spies inside headquarters; it also includes border populations, open-source military discourse, and diplomatic feelers. Some Chinese academic and military writings before 2020 too had openly questioned India’s actions in Ladakh and warned of “countermeasures.” Whether these were flagged as actionable warnings or dismissed as rhetorical chest-thumping remains an open question and one that Gen. Naravane is believed not to have adequately addressed in detail.In short, the PLA ingress was likely not “overlooked” in a literal sense, but it may have been underestimated, normalised, or strategically discounted. According to senior security officials, the multiple agencies involved in monitoring the LAC on the ground, in the air and via satellites appear to have “feebly watched” the PLA intrusion across the LAC unfold before them.The three broad surveillance and intelligence gathering layers then employed along the LAC included joint patrols by the army’s Ladakh Scouts and Indo-Tibetan Border Police (ITBP) personnel, imagery and signals intelligence supplied by Israeli drones, operated by the army and the Indian Air Force and the third most formidable tier: dedicated military satellites.The latter two capabilities are dispersed between the National Technical Research Organisation, created in 2004, and the tri-service Directorate of Signals Intelligence that operates under the Ministry of Defence (MoD) and the Research and Analysts Wing, India’s external information gathering agency.The first level of HUMINT was relayed to select ITBP and army formations, whilst imagery from the other two is disseminated to the Defence Image Processing and Analysis Centre (DIPAC) and the Directorate of Signals Intelligence, both in Delhi. This, in turn, was further dispersed to various intelligence agencies, but particularly to the army’s Directorate of Military Operations and the analogous Directorate of Military Intelligence (DMI), whose primary task is to provide timely, relevant, accurate, and synchronised intelligence support to back the forces’ tactical, operational and strategic-level requirements.Doubtlessly, these well-established channels of imagery and profusion of assorted related information must have been relayed to the appropriate networks and up the command-and-control chain, where, no doubt, they were required to be duly absorbed and processed.Analysts alongside argue that there is no way the satellite imagery would not have revealed the massive PLA exercise on the Tibetan plateau close to the LAC January 2020 onwards, that also included howitzers, Type-15 light tanks and assorted multiple rocket launchers, all of which failed to return to base once the manoeuvres had been completed.Instead, they moved ominously close to the LAC, eventually forcing the Indian army, after May 2020, into a ‘mirror deployment’ in Ladakh by mobilising at least three reserve divisions from the plains and airlifting T90S main battle tanks, M777 light-weight howitzers, missile batteries and flying in Apache attack helicopters, all at great cost.‘Weakness in interpretation’At the time, former National Security Adviser M.K. Narayanan had amplified these lapses in The Hindu newspaper by declaring that the PLA build-up at various points along the LAC did not require any great intelligence effort, as there was little attempt at concealment by the Chinese. Nevertheless, India, he stated, possessed high-quality imagery and signals intelligence capability that makes it possible to track PLA movements. But intelligence can be faulted, Narayanan writes with regard to inadequate appreciation of what the build-up meant and what it portended for India.This aspect he declared was ‘indicative of a weakness in interpretation and analysis of the intelligence available’, and the inability to provide a ‘coherent assessment’ of China’s real intentions. The overall human resource capacity for interpretation and analysis of satellite imagery, however, had not kept pace with the advances in technological competence, he lamented.“Intelligence assessment of China’s intentions clearly fell short of what was required,” the former NSA had declared in an indictment of India’s intelligence community of which he was once an integral part as Director of the Intelligence Bureau for three years till 1990, and later as National Security Adviser (NSA) for five years, till 2010.National Security Advisor Ajit Doval during India-EU engagements at Hyderabad House, in New Delhi, Tuesday, Jan. 27, 2026. Photo: PTI.In the former NSA’s list of agencies responsible for intelligence assessment and analysts concerning China, are the National Security Council Secretariat (at present headed by NSA Ajit Doval) and the R&AW. The latter agency, Narayanan averred, lacked “domain expertise and an inadequacy of China specialists,” all of which might have been a factor for the intelligence lapses with regard to the PLA ingress along the LAC.Senior military sources, meanwhile, conceded that the PLA’s brazen ingress of the LAC and corresponding force build-up along it had been ‘emboldened’ by the absence of routine Indian army summer deployments to the region, March 2020 onwards, due to the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic. They maintained that, for long, the Indian deployments were a deterrence to any overt PLA adventurism along the LAC, but this had calamitously slipped up in the 2020 summer months, April onwards.Consequently, the near absence of additional Indian troops in eastern Ladakh, combined with the fatal error in assessing PLA intent, had proven hugely expensive for India in blood and treasure. Twenty soldiers, including a colonel-level officer, had died following a clash with PLA personnel on the night of June 15-16, 2020, in the Galwan region, the first such encounter between the two armies in 45 years. Alongside, enormous resources were expended to deploy troops to Ladakh, and even scarcer funding was further vacuumed up with the winter deployment of an additional 20,000 troops along the LAC soon after.It’s worth recalling that years earlier in Kargil, it took Gujjar herdsmen to raise the alarm in April 1999 over the Pakistan Army’s intrusion across a 160km frontage in the region, up to a depth of 8-10km. This triggered 11 weeks of bitter mountain fighting in which the daring and ferocity of Indian jawans and young officers successfully salvaged territory occupied by the Pakistan Army. Eventually, over 500 Indian soldiers had died, and twice that number were injured, many permanently maimed.Three days after the conflict ended, then prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s National Democratic Alliance administration instituted the Kargil Review Committee (KRC) on July 29, 1999, headed by civil servant and strategic analyst K. Subrahmanyam – and father of external affairs minister S. Jaishankar – to ‘examine the sequence of events and make recommendations for the future’.The committee vindicated both tasks, but as the May 2020 events in Ladakh demonstrated, the earlier institutional lessons proved short-lived in practice. Structural warnings were acknowledged, corrective measures initiated, yet strategic complacency resurfaced under pressure. As the adage suggests, a single lapse may be dismissed as an error, but repetition reveals a (costly) pattern.In conclusion, the 2020-2024 Ladakh crisis is not a closed story but an incomplete one. Gen. Naravane’s Four Stars of Destiny has reopened the debate, but not settled it; the core questions remain: who knew, how early, and what followed. Strategic surprises can occur; refusing to closely examine them – even by the Parliament’s Standing Committee on Defence is an even bigger shortcoming.Without an honest institutional review like the Kargil Review Committee, the government’s supposed resolution of the May 2020 LAC crisis amounts to little more than an arbitrary declaration that the matter has been dealt with satisfactorily. And though the LAC may appear settled for now, the underlying questions surrounding remain unresolved – and holding up the Army Chief’s memoir only adds to the opacity.And, though the LAC may appear settled for now, key questions relating to the events leading to the military standoff remain unresolved – and withholding the Army Chief’s memoir only adds to the opacity.