India, China arrive at Border Patrolling Pact Along LAC in Ladakh

The summit ends on 24th October but the Prime Minister on account of pressing commitments back home will return to New Delhi on 23rd October.

In what could be called a huge breakthrough, India and China have reached an agreement on resuming patrolling along the Line of Actual Control (LAC) in eastern Ladakh.

The announcement came ahead of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to Russia today for the 16th BRICS Summit. The patrolling had stopped since the 2020 Galwan clash.

“As a result of the discussions that have taken place over the last several weeks an agreement has been arrived at on patroling arrangements along the line of actual control in the India-China border area and this is leading to dis-engagement and eventually a resolution of the issues that had arisen in these areas in 2020,” said Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri in a press briefing.

Sharing the details, Misri said the BRICS Summit will be attended by the founding members as well as new members. The summit begins on 22nd October and there is a leaders-only dinner on the evening of the first day. “The main day of the summit is 23rd October and there are two main sessions a closed plenary in the morning followed by an open plenary in the afternoon devoted to the main theme of the summit. Leaders are also expected to adopt the Kazan declaration which will lay the path forward for BRICS.”

Asked about a potential bilateral meeting between PM Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping on the sidelines of the Summit in Kazan – scheduled to be held on October 22-23 – the Foreign Secretary said, “We are still working around the time and engagements.”

“The summit ends on 24th October but the Prime Minister on account of pressing commitments back home will return to New Delhi on 23rd October. On the sidelines of the summit, the Prime Minister is expected to have a few bilateral meetings.”

The Indian and Chinese militaries have been locked in a standoff since May 2020 and a full resolution has not yet been achieved even though the two sides have disengaged from several friction points. The ties plunged following a clash in the Galwan Valley that marked the most serious military conflict between the two sides in decades.

The Indian and Chinese militaries have been locked in an eyeball-to-eyeball stand-off since May 2020; New Delhi wants to restore the situation to pre-2020 status at the LAC.

The current agreement pertains to patrolling in Depsang and Demchok areas. Earlier, the militaries of the two countries had pulled back from four of six friction points in eastern Ladakh including Galwan Valley, the site of a violent clash in June 2020 which was the most serious military conflict between the two sides in decades.

Last month, External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar said that about 75 percent of the disengagement problems at the border with China had been resolved. Both countries also agreed to work with “urgency” and “redouble” efforts to ensure complete disengagement, the government said after National Security Adviser Ajit Doval met Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi on the sidelines of a meeting of the BRICS high-ranking officials responsible for security matters in St Petersburg in Russia last month.

At that meeting, Doval had conveyed to Wang that peace and tranquillity in border areas and respect for the Line of Actual Control (LAC) were essential for the return of normalcy in bilateral ties, the government said.

GALWAN CLASH

The Galwan incident of June 15, 2020, described as a physical clash that did not involve the use of firearms, resulted in India losing 20 soldiers, including a Colonel. Although China has acknowledged only four casualties, it is estimated that as many as 40 PLA personnel died in the clash.

The confrontation was the deadliest since the 1962 war and marked a significant deterioration in China-India ties, leading to profound shifts in the geopolitical and strategic calculus of both nations and with far-reaching implications on bilateral ties, regional stability and global geopolitics.

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