India and China have reached an agreement on military disengagement along their disputed border, New Delhi said, a step toward reducing frictions between the nuclear-armed neighbors that comes as both countries\u2019 leaders arrive in Russia for a summit. <\/p>\n
India\u2019s foreign minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar on Monday said the agreement on military patrolling in certain areas brought the situation back to where it was in 2020 prior to a deadly border clash that year, thus completing the \u201cdisengagement process\u201d with China. <\/p>\n
Beijing later confirmed on Tuesday that the two sides had \u201creached a solution\u201d following \u201cclose communication on relevant issues of the China-India border through diplomatic and military channels.\u201d <\/p>\n
The announcement has been widely seen as setting the stage for potential talks between Chinese leader Xi Jinping and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who each headed Tuesday to Kazan in southwestern Russia for a summit of BRICS nations. <\/p>\n
Both foreign ministries declined to comment on whether the two leaders would hold formal one-on-one talks in Kazan. <\/p>\n
Neither side released full details of the agreement or details of how it would be carried out in the contentious, high-altitude region that has long been a source of friction between New Delhi and Beijing. <\/p>\n
Both India and China maintain a significant military presence along their 2,100-mile (3,379-kilometer) de facto border, known as the Line of Actual Control (LAC), which has never been clearly defined and has remained a source of friction since a bloody war between the two countries in 1962. <\/p>\n
The clash four years ago along the disputed border between Indian Ladakh and Chinese-controlled Aksai Chin brought the first known fatalities in more than four decades \u2013 with at least 20 Indian and four Chinese soldiers killed. <\/p>\n
In a rare face-to-face meeting at last year\u2019s BRICS summit in Johannesburg, Xi and Modi agreed to \u201cintensify efforts\u201d to deescalate tensions at the contested border.Chinese and Indian negotiators held the 31st round of border talks in late August. <\/p>\n
While an agreement on further disengagement on the border appears poised to be a significant step in what has been a sore point among other frictions in the China-India relationship, observers said more details were needed to understand the scope of the arrangement and what concessions may have been made. <\/p>\n
The violence in 2020 was followed by a process of disengagement and border talks, but friction points have remained, including areas where both sides previously patrolled but have since become so-called buffer zones. <\/p>\n
Within India, the situation had also raised questions over whether the Chinese People\u2019s Liberation Army (PLA) was using the buffer zones to further push back the areas within which Indian forces can patrol. India\u2019s Ministry of Defense has previously denied the loss of any territory during the standoff. <\/p>\n
Speaking about the new agreement at an event hosted by Indian broadcaster NDTV Monday, India\u2019s Minister of External Affairs described how after the 2020 clash the two sides had \u201cblocked\u201d each other in certain areas. <\/p>\n
\u201cWhat has happened is, we have reached an understanding which will allow the patrolling \u2026 the understanding, to my knowledge, is that we will be able to do the patrolling which we were doing in 2020,\u201d Jaishankar said. <\/p>\n
\u201cIt is a positive development. I would say it is a product of a very patient and very persevering diplomacy,\u201d he said, adding that the consequences of the agreement on the two nations\u2019 relationship had yet to be seen. <\/p>\n
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Lin Jian on Tuesday said Beijing \u201cpositively evaluates\u201d the \u201csolution\u201d reached and would \u201cwork with India to implement the above solution,\u201d without providing further details. Lin\u2019s comments were made during a regularly scheduled media briefing. <\/p>\n
It\u2019s not clear why the two sides did not release a joint statement on the issue, and observers say the governments need to release more details of the arrangement before it can be fully evaluated. <\/p>\n
Manoj Kewalramani, who heads Indo-Pacific studies at the Takshashila Institution research center in the Indian city of Bangalore, said a restoration of patrolling rights would be a \u201csignificant starting point\u201d for normalization. <\/p>\n
However, even with that restoration, there are other steps that would need to be taken in a long process along the disputed border. <\/p>\n
\u201cThere are many other issues of de-induction and de-mobilization of troops on both sides; infrastructure that has been built, etc. These issues will take time,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n<\/p>\n
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India and China have reached an agreement on military disengagement along their disputed border, New Delhi said, a step toward reducing frictions between the nuclear-armed neighbors that comes as both countries\u2019 leaders arrive in Russia for a summit. India\u2019s foreign minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar on Monday said the agreement on military patrolling in certain areas brought <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":8960,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-8959","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8959","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8959"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8959\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8960"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8959"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8959"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8959"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}