New Delhi, Oct 21 (FN Agency) In a major breakthrough, India on Monday said it has arrived at an agreement with China on patrolling along the Line of Actual Control (LAC), which will enable Indian and Chinese soldiers to resume patrolling as they had been doing before the border face-off began in May 2020. Announcing the breakthrough, Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri said at a special briefing today: “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. “As a result of these discussions, agreement has been arrived at 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.
We will be taking the next steps on this.” The breakthrough comes ahead of a likely meeting between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping in Russia on the sidelines of the BRICS summit in Kazan. Speaking at the NDTV World Summit, External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar said that with the agreement, Indian and Chinese soldiers will be able to resume patrolling in the way they had been doing before the border face-off began in May 2020. “We reached an agreement on patrolling, and we have gone back to the 2020 position. With that we can say the disengagement with China has been completed. Details will come out in due course,” EAM said.
“There are areas which for various reasons after 2020, they blocked us, we blocked them. We have now reached an understanding which will allow patrolling as we had been doing till 2020,” the EAM said. He said the LAC breakthrough is a good development that happened due to “patient and persevering diplomacy”. “… At various points of time people almost gave up. We have always maintained on the one hand we obviously had to do counter deployment, and we have been negotiating since September 2020. It has been a very patient process, though more complicated than how it should have been,” he added. He said this mutual understanding on patrolling will help to regain the peace and tranquility of the pre-2020 in the border areas, and added: “Hopefully, we will be able to come back to that peace and tranquility.” The standoff in the Ladakh sector of the Sino-Indian border erupted in mid-2020, leading to a bitter clash between the forces of the two nations in June that year in Galwan area. Twenty Indian soldiers were killed in the clash.
“I think it is a good development; it is a positive development and I would say it is a product of very patient and very persevering diplomacy,” EAM said. EAM said that India will be able to carry out patrolling in Depsang and other areas. “So what has happened is that we reached an understanding which will allow the patrolling which you spoke about Depsang, that’s not the only place,” he said. “There are other places also. The understanding to my knowledge is that we will be able to do the patrolling which we were doing in 2020 (before the standoff),” he added. On July 4, EAM Jaishankar had held talks with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi on the sidelines of the SCO Summit in Astana and stressed on the need to redouble efforts to achieve complete disengagement from the remaining border areas in Eastern Ladakh and restore peace and tranquillity. The EAM had stressed on the three mutuals — mutual respect, mutual sensitivity and mutual interest – that would guide the bilateral ties. On September 12, National Security Advisor Ajit Doval had met Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi in Saint Petersburg, during which both sides agreed to work with urgency and redouble their efforts to realize complete disengagement in the remaining areas of the LAC. Doval and Wang had met on the sidelines of the Meeting of the BRICS National Security Advisers. NSA had conveyed that peace and tranquility in borders 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 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,” a statement had said.