“Both sides agreed to work with urgency and redouble their efforts to realise complete disengagement in the remaining areas. NSA conveyed that peace and tranquillity in border areas and respect for LAC are essential for normalcy in bilateral relations. Both sides must fully abide by relevant bilateral agreements, protocols, and understandings reached in the past by the two Governments,” the MEA further added, restating Delhi's stance that the status of the bilateral ties is correlated with the border issue. The “urgency” and agreement to “redouble their efforts” to realise “complete disengagement in the remaining areas” signal a desire to expedite the disengagement process.

The BRICS leaders' summit scheduled to be held from October 22 to 24 in Kazan, Russia, is expected to be attended by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping.  The MEA said the “two sides agreed that the India-China bilateral relationship is significant not just for the two countries but also for the region and the world. The two sides also exchanged views on the global and regional situation.”

While speaking earlier in the day to the Global Centre for Security Policy, Geneva, Jaishankar said that negotiations between the two sides to find a solution in eastern Ladakh are underway. He added, “Now those negotiations are going on. We made some progress. I would say roughly you can say about 75 percent of the disengagement problems are sorted out.”

“We still have some things to do,” he said, adding that “there is a bigger issue that both of us have brought forces close up and in that sense, there is a militarisation of the border,” he further added. “How does one deal with it? I think we have to deal with it. In the meanwhile, after the clash, it has affected the entirety of the relationship because you cannot have violence at the border and then say the rest of the relationship is insulated from it,” he said.

“We hope that if there is a solution to the disengagement and there is a return to peace and tranquillity, then we can look at other possibilities,” he said.

Jaishankar's remarks and Doval’s meeting with Wang come close on the heels of diplomatic discussions between India and China over the border situation where the 31st meeting of the Working Mechanism for Consultation & Coordination (WMCC) was held on August 29 in Beijing. Indicating some development in the diplomatic talks to resolve the standoff between Chinese and Indian troops along the Ladakh-Arunachal Pradesh border that began in May 2020, India had said that the two sides had a “frank, constructive and forward-looking” exchange of views in Beijing on the situation along the LAC to “narrow down the differences” and “find early resolution of the outstanding issues”. The two sides, according to the MEA, also agreed on “intensified contact through diplomatic and military channels”.

The expression “narrow down the differences” had been used for the first time in the bilateral talks on the border standoff and, in diplomatic parlance, indicated progress in the negotiations. Jaishankar, who called out India-China relations as “complex”, said the ties were kind of normalised in the late 1980s and the basis for it was that there would be peace at the border. He said, “The basis obviously for a good relationship, I would say even for a normal relationship, was that there would be peace and tranquillity in the border. After things started to take a better turn in 1988, we had a series of agreements which stabilised the border.”

“What happened in 2020 was in violation of multiple agreements for some reasons which are still entirely not clear to us; we can speculate on it.”

“The Chinese actually moved a very large number of troops to the Line of Actual Control at the border and naturally in response, we moved our troops up. It was very difficult for us because we were in the middle of a Covid lockdown at that time,” he said.

“Now we could see straight away that this was a very dangerous development because the presence of a large number of troops in these extreme heights and extreme cold in near proximity could lead to a mishap. And that’s exactly what happened in June 2022,” he said, signalling towards the Galwan clashes in which 20 Indian Army personnel, along with a Colonel. The clash also marked the killing of 4 Chinese soldiers as well.

He stated that the issue for India was why China brought disturbance to the peace and tranquillity, why they moved those troops, and how to deal with this very close-up situation. “We have now been negotiating close to four years and the first step of that is what we called disengagement which is their troops go back to their normal operating bases and our troops go back to their normal operating bases and, where required, we have an arrangement about patrolling because both of us patrol regularly in that border, as I said it is not a legally delineated border.”

The border standoff has continued for over four years with both sides deploying close to 50,000-60,000 troops along the Line of Actual Control (LAC) in eastern Ladakh. There has been partial resolution of friction points such as the Galwan Valley, the north and south banks of Pangong Tso, and the Gogra-Hot Springs area by establishing buffer zones along the LAC. The remaining friction points along the LAC in eastern Ladakh primarily consist of legacy ones i.e., Depsang Plains and Demchok. When both sides withdrew their forces from Patrolling Point-15 in the Gogra-Hot Springs region in September 2022, it marked the end of the formal disengagement along the LAC.

Image Source: News on AIR