India is witnessing “trailers of future conflicts” along its “unsettled and active borders” and on cyberspace, army chief M.M. Naravane said on Thursday without naming China or Pakistan.

“We are already witnessing trailers of future conflicts. These are being enacted daily on the information battlefield, in the networks and cyberspace. They are also being played along our unsettled and active borders,” General Naravane told an online seminar from Delhi.

“It’s for us now to visualise the battlefield contours of tomorrow, based on these trailers. If you look around, you will realise that the sci-fi of yesterday is the reality of today. We too have to leapfrog to the future, skipping many stages, to an entirely new configuration,” he added.

General Naravane’s comments came a day after Congress leader Rahul Gandhi had said that India faced a huge security risk because of the Narendra Modi government’s strategic blunder of bringing China and Pakistan together. The foreign minister had contested Rahul’s version on Wednesday night. On Thursday, the army chief made no reference to Rahul’s remarks.

India’s security agencies too have been indicating a collusive threat from Pakistan and China, saying Beijing had intensified the training of Pakistani troops in PoK and was helping Islamabad with missile systems amid the border standoff with India in Ladakh. India has a combined border length of 7,000km with the two countries.

On Thursday, Naravane said: “Our adversaries shall continue with their efforts to achieve their strategic aims... short of conflict by the use of grey zone activities in the political, military and economic domains, and do so in a collusive manner.”

“From an Indian perspective, we face unique, substantial and multi-domain challenges. Disputed borders with nuclear neighbours, coupled with a state-sponsored proxy war, stretch our security apparatus and resources.”

Naravane stressed “the diversity of security threats in all domains (that) has brought the spotlight towards non-contact and grey zone warfare”.

“We need to augment capabilities in both non-contact and contact modes of warfare,” he said.

Naravane alleged that “some nations are challenging the globally accepted norms and the rules-based order”. This, he said, has manifested itself in various forms that include aggression and opportunistic actions to change the status quo while keeping the threshold below all-out war.

The army chief did not name any country but such words are usually chosen to make an oblique reference to China.

India and China have been locked in a standoff at multiple places in eastern Ladakh since April-May 2020, with Chinese troops allegedly occupying close to 1,000sqkm of India-claimed territory and Beijing looking to create a new status quo on the borders.

Naravane said the army was focusing on restructuring, rebalancing and reorienting its forces. “We are further consolidating our operational experiences to these changes and this shall remain a work in progress.”