Jaishankar: 75% of disengagement problems with China sorted out

Hours after Jaishankar spoke in Geneva, National Security Advisor Ajit Doval met  Wang Yi, Member of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Political Bureau and Director of the Office of the Central Foreign Affairs Commission, on the sidelines of the meeting of BRICS NSAs in St Petersburg, Russia.

The Ministry of External Affairs, in a statement, said the meeting gave the two sides an opportunity to “review the recent efforts towards finding an early resolution of the remaining issues along the Line of Actual Control (LAC), which will create conditions to stabilise and rebuild bilateral relations”.

“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 said, reiterating Delhi’s position linking the border situation to the state of the bilateral ties.

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 is scheduled to take place from October 22 to 24 in Kazan, Russia, which is expected to be attended by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping among other leaders.

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.”

Earlier in the day, while speaking at the Global Centre for Security Policy in Geneva, Jaishankar said negotiations between the two sides to find a solution to the problem in eastern Ladakh are underway.

“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,” he said.

“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”.

“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 comments and Doval’s meeting with Wang come days after diplomatic-level talks between India and China on the border situation – the 31st meeting of the Working Mechanism for Consultation & Coordination on India-China Border Affairs (WMCC) was held on August 29 in Beijing.

Signalling some progress in diplomatic negotiations to resolve the standoff between Indian and Chinese troops that began in May 2020 along the LAC in eastern Ladakh, 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 Ministry of External Affairs, 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 described 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.

“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,” he said.

“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 straightaway 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, referring to the Galwan clashes in which 20 Indian Army personnel, including a Colonel, and at least four Chinese soldiers were killed.

He said the issue for India was that why China disturbed the peace and tranquillity and 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 been ongoing for more than four years now and two sides have each deployed around 50,000-60,000 troops along the LAC in eastern Ladakh.

Friction points such as Galwan Valley, north and south banks of Pangong Tso and the Gogra-Hot Springs area, have seen some resolution since the beginning of the standoff with the creation of buffer zones along the LAC.

The remaining friction points along the LAC in eastern Ladakh primarily include legacy ones such as Depsang Plains and Demchok. The last formal disengagement along the LAC took place in September 2022 when both sides pulled back troops to disengage from Patrolling Point-15 in the Gogra-Hot Springs area.