India, China agree to ‘inject vitality’ to settle border dispute, maintain peace

Ajay Banerjee

Tribune News Service

New Delhi, December 18

The Special Representatives of India and China today reached a consensus on multiple points, including “injecting vitality” into the process of settling the long-pending boundary dispute between the two countries and maintaining peace and tranquillity in the border areas to promote bilateral relations.

The decisions were announced after the Special Representatives — National Security Adviser (NSA) Ajit Doval and Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi — met in Beijing. This was the 23rd round of Special Representative-level talks since 2003, the first since December 2019 and also the first since the friction along the Line of Actual Control in eastern Ladakh.

A statement issued by the Ministry of External Affairs said the Special Representatives reiterated the importance of maintaining the bilateral relationship while seeking a fair, reasonable and mutually acceptable framework for the settlement of the boundary question.

The duo agreed on the need for having stable, predictable and amicable India-China relations.

The two sides had agreed to resume the Special Representative-level talks when Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping met on the sidelines of the 16th BRICS summit at Kazan in Russia in October.

The Special Representatives were tasked with “meeting at an early date to oversee the management of peace and tranquillity in the border areas and to explore a fair, reasonable and mutually acceptable solution to the boundary question”.

At the talks today, Doval and Wang affirmed the implementation of the October disengagement agreement.

The MEA said “they emphasised the need for ensuring peaceful conditions on the ground so that the issues on the border do not hold back the normal development of the bilateral relations”.

The two sides spoke about “drawing on the learnings from the events of 2020”. The MEA said the discussion included “measures to maintain peace and tranquillity on the border and advance effective border management”.

Matters of cross-border cooperation like resumption of the Kailash Mansarovar yatra, data sharing on trans-border rivers and border trade were also discussed today. The NSA invited Wang to visit India for the next round of the Special Representative-level meeting.

In New Delhi, Chinese ambassador to India Xu Feihong posted on X that China and India “aim to respect each other’s core interests and major concerns, strengthen mutual trust through dialogue and communication, properly settle differences with sincerity and good faith, and bring bilateral relations back on the track of stable and healthy development as soon as possible”.