The world’s two most populous countries — and biggest emerging economies — have fought one war on land and are rapidly modernising their air, naval and nuclear forces in case of another.

Now India and China are taking their rivalry into orbit, with Delhi determined to catch up with Beijing in what is starting to look like an Asian version of the Cold War “space sace”.

General Deepak Kapoor, India’s Chief of Army Staff, has spoken publicly for the first time of his fears about China’s military space programme and the need for India to accelerate its own.

“The Chinese space programme is expanding at an exponentially rapid pace in both offensive and defensive content,” he told a conference attended by India’s military top brass this week. “The Indian Army’s agenda for exploitation of space will have to evolve dynamically. It should be our endeavour to optimise space applications for military purposes.”

Describing space as “the ultimate high ground”, he called for the establishment of an interservices space command to supervise surveillance, reconnaissance and rapid response.

It was a rare example of a top Indian official — military or civilian — speaking openly about India’s usually secret military space programme and about its strategic rivalry with China. India and China enjoyed close ties in the 1950s but fell out when Delhi gave refuge to the Dalai Lama, Tibet’s spiritual leader, in 1959. The two countries then fought a brief but bloody border war in 1962.

Now they are trying to forge a new economic partnership but have yet to resolve the border dispute and remain deeply suspicious about each other’s ambitions — notably in space.

Beijing’s space programme is already several years ahead of Delhi’s: China sent its first man into space in 2003, the third country to do so after the Soviet Union and the US. The Indian Space Research Organisation said last year that it aimed to send a manned mission to the Moon by 2020 — four years before China — but did not plan to send its first astronauts into orbit until 2014.

What really shocked India was China's shooting down of one of its own weather satellites in January last year — again placing it alongside Russia and the United States as the only countries capable of such a feat. By comparison, India does not yet have a single dedicated military satellite, relying instead on the dual-use telecommunications satellites for surveillance and reconnaissance.

Indian fears of being left behind grew even more acute in February this year when the US, also shocked by China’s test, shot down a satellite that it said posed a threat as it fell to Earth.

“The army chief has rightly identified China’s test as something that set a new template,” Kapil Kak, a former air vice-marshall and director of the Indian Centre for Air Power Studies, said. “There’s a lot of catch-up to do. India is lagging behind and has to move forward.”

One of the military’s priorities is to match the technology China used to shoot down its satellite with a ballistic missile about 860km (535 miles) above the Earth’s surface. Abdul Kalam, a former President of India and missile engineer, said in February that India already had the capability to “intercept and destroy any spatial object or debris in a radius of 200km”.

Testing such technology would undermine the Indian Government’s long-standing opposition to the “weaponisation of space”, which it says could spark a global arms race.

For India’s military, however, the race has already begun. “We may get sucked into the inevitable military race of space-based applications in warfare and protection of space assets,” Lieutenant-General H.S. Lidder, Chief of Integrated Defence Staff, told this week’s conference. “In a life-and-death situation, only space resources would provide advantage to any military force in the future.”

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