India and China have reached an agreement on the “patrolling arrangements” and the resolution of the military stand-off at the Line of Actual Control (LAC), the government announced on Monday, in a breakthrough that officials told The Hindu include the remaining friction points of Demchok and Depsang.
The announcement by Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri came during a media briefing on Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to Russia for the BRICS summit on Tuesday. Chinese President Xi Jinping is also scheduled to attend the event.
“Over the last several weeks, Indian and Chinese diplomatic and military negotiators have been in close contact with each other in a variety of forums, and as a result of these discussions, agreement has been arrived at on patrolling arrangements along the Line of Actual Control in the India-China border areas, leading to disengagement and a resolution of the issues that had arisen in these areas in 2020,” Mr. Misri said, adding that the two sides would now take the “next steps” on this.
A few hours later, External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar confirmed the importance of the agreement on patrolling, which had come to a stop in 2020, after which the two sides accepted “buffer zones” in some areas of dispute that denied the militaries their normal patrolling routes.
While the External Affairs Ministry did not give further details of the agreement, and whether the “buffer zones” would continue to exist for patrolling purposes, Mr. Misri said the two sides had “reached an agreement on the issues that were being discussed”.
“With that we have gone back to where the situation was in 2020. With that we can say the disengagement process with China has been completed,” Mr. Jaishankar said in an interview to television channel NDTV.
In the past, the government has said that disengagement would only constitute the beginning and that normalcy at the LAC would only follow after “deinduction and demobilisation” of troops that China had amassed at the LAC, leading to counter-deployments by India.
The timing of the announcement, just a day before the BRICS summit, indicates that a meeting between Mr. Modi and Mr. Xi, which has been speculated about, is now more likely to take place.
Although the two leaders met as many as 18 times between 2014 and 2020, they have spoken publicly only twice — on the sidelines of the G-20 summit in Indonesia in 2022 and the BRICS summit in South Africa in 2023 — since the clashes in the Galwan Valley where 20 Indian soldiers were killed.
Significantly, the Chinese government did not announce or comment on the border agreement on Monday. Asked about a possible meeting between Mr. Modi and Mr. Xi in Kazan, the venue of the BRICS summit, Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson Lin Jian said they would inform “if anything comes up”.
Mr. Misri did not confirm a meeting between the leaders either, but said the government was discussing a number of bilateral meetings in Kazan.
“[BRICS] is a multilateral event, though, of course, there is always a provision for bilateral meetings on the sidelines. We are currently looking into the overall programme of the Prime Minister. There are a number of requests for bilateral meetings, and we will update you on the bilaterals as they evolve, as soon as feasible,” the Foreign Secretary said, not denying that a meeting with the Chinese leader was among those.
Mr. Misri, who was previously India’s Ambassador to China and likely a key part of the recent negotiations, did not give further details of the agreement between two sides.
He referred to the recent meetings that led to the breakthrough, including two meetings between Mr. Jaishankar and Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi in June-July, two meetings of the WMCC mechanism of diplomatic and military officials in July-August, followed by a meeting in September between National Security Adviser Ajit Doval and Mr. Wang, who is also the Special Representative on border talks.
These were followed by intense negotiations by military commanders and External Affairs Ministry officials in the past few weeks. With Mr. Modi and Mr. Xi’s travel to Russia for the BRICS summit confirmed, a deadline is understood to have emerged for the negotiations to conclude with a definitive result.
Published - October 21, 2024 04:10 pm IST