India’s historic agreement with China on patrolling along the Line of Actual Control (LAC) was attributed on Saturday by External Affairs Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar to the military and skillful diplomacy.
By October 29, the Indian and Chinese disengagement at Depsang and Demchok in Eastern Ladakh would be finished, having started on Friday. Both sides will start patrolling from October 30 to October 31.
The minister stated during a meeting with students in Pune that it is “still a bit early for normalization of relations which will naturally take time to rebuild a degree of trust and willingness to work together. The foreign minsters and national security advisors of the two nations will meet to determine how to proceed”, while recalling Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s bilateral meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Kazan, Russia, earlier this week.
He also stated, “If we have arrived at this point today, it is primarily due to our resolute efforts to maintain our position and establish our point. To protect the nation, the military was present (at LAC) under unthinkable circumstances. The military can now be deployed successfully because we have invested five times as much money per year aw we did ten years ago. It’s where it is because of the combination of these factors”.
Jaishankar claimed that the border situation had been extremely unstable since 2020, which “understandably negatively impacted the overall realationship”. He countinued, “India had been negotiating with the Chinese on how to find a solution on since September 2020. The most urgent one is disengagement because troops are extremely close to one another and there is a chance that something could happen. After that, there is a de-escalation due to the accumulation of troops on both sides. Managing the border and negotiating the boundary resolution is a bigger problem. All the current events are related to the first component, which is disengagement”.
After 2020, he said, India and China reached some agreements on how troops return to their bases, but a major one concerned patrolling. “For the past two years, we have been attempting to negotiate the blocking of patrolling. Therefore, on October 21, we came to an agreement that patrolling would resume in the Depsang and Demchok areas as it had previously, “Jaishankar counttinued.
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