Bid to keep a lid on China-India rivalry amid anger

Indians burned portraits of President Xi Jinping yesterday as families started cremating the remains of some of the 20 soldiers killed in brutal hand-to-hand fighting with Chinese troops in a disputed mountainous border region.

And troops remained on alert in the Galwan Valley in the Ladakh region of the western Himalayas three days after the clashes in which India claimed China also suffered casualties in a mass brawl that saw spiked clubs and rocks used.

Indian Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar said he had spoken to opposite number Wang Yi and the two sides had agreed not to take any steps to escalate matters further along the contested frontier.

Extremist nationalist groups in India have stepped up calls for a boycott of Chinese goods and a cancellation of contracts with Chinese firms.

Scores of people shouted "Victory to Mother India" as the body of Colonel B Santosh Babu, the most senior Indian officer killed in the clash, was taken on a flower-bedecked military truck to his hometown of Suryapet.

People in the northern city of Kanpur held a mock funeral of Xi and burned his portrait while in Cuttack in the east an effigy of Xi and a Chinese flag were torched.