Stoking tensions with Japan, Vietnam and the Philippines over islands in the South and East China seas has not prevented an increasingly assertive China from opening yet another front by staging a military incursion across the disputed, forbidding Himalayan frontier.

On the night of April 15, a People's Liberation Army (PLA) platoon stealthily intruded near the China-India-Pakistan tri-junction, established a camp 19 kilometers inside Indian-controlled territory, and presented India's government with the potential loss of a strategically vital, 750-square-km, high-altitude plateau.

A stunned India, already reeling under a crippling domestic political crisis, has groped for an effective response to China's land grab — the largest and most strategic real estate China has seized since it began pursuing a more muscular policy toward its neighbors. Whether China intends to stay put by building permanent structures for its troops on the plateau's icy heights, or plans to withdraw after having extracted humiliating military concessions from India, remains an open — and in some ways a moot — question.