Indian jawans briefly detained by Chinese forces in Ladakh last week: Reports

"The situation became very volatile last Wednesday when a scuffle between Indian jawans and the Chinese resulted in detention of some of our jawans but later they were released," a senior bureaucrat told NDTV.

According to him, in the scuffle, weapons of ITBP jawans were also snatched and later handed back.

"It was a massive build up but now things have calmed down a bit. But it's not over yet," a senior officer told NDTV.

After a continuous face-off with the Chinese soldiers along the LAC in Ladakh and Sikkim, which included fist fighting, stone-pelting and direct confrontations in the first two weeks of May, India last week broke its silence over Chinese allegations that suggested that it has it had bult "illegal" defence facilities across the LAC in Chinese territory.

"Any suggestion that Indian troops had undertaken activity across the LAC in the Western Sector or the Sikkim sector is not accurate. Indian troops are fully familiar with the alignment of the Line of Actual Control in the India-China border areas and abide by it scrupulously," the government had said in a statement.

There are disagreements between India and China over the exact location of the LAC in several areas. While India claims that the LAC is 3,488 km long, the Chinese think it is around 2,000 km long.

Both the Indian Army and the Chinese Army try and dominate each other by patrolling the areas up to the points each perceives the LAC, often leading to conflicting situations such as those reported in Naku La in Sikkim earlier this month.