Jaishankar hails military, diplomacy for India-China LAC patrolling agreement

External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar on Saturday credited the breakthrough agreement with China on patrolling along the Line of Actual Control (LAC) to the military that worked in “very unimaginable” conditions and deft diplomacy.

Responding to a question during an interaction with students in Pune, Jaishankar said it was still a bit early for the relations to normalise, adding that it would naturally take time to rebuild a degree of trust and willingness to work together.

He said when Prime Minister Narendra Modi met President Xi Jinping at Kazan in Russia for the BRICS summit, it was decided that the foreign ministers and National Security Advisors of the two countries would meet and see how to move forward.

“If today we have reached where we have...one is because of the very determined effort on our part to stand our ground and make our point. The military was there (at LAC) in very unimaginable conditions to defend the country, and the military did its part and diplomacy did its part,” Jaishankar said.

Over the decade, India improved its infrastructure. Part of the problem was that in the earlier years, the border infrastructure was really neglected, he added.

“Today we have put in five times more resources annually than there used to be a decade ago, which is showing results and enabling the military to actually be effectively deployed. The combination of these (factors) has led to where it is,” he said.

Earlier this week, India announced that it had reached an agreement with China on patrolling along the LAC in eastern Ladakh, in a major breakthrough in ending the over four-year-long military standoff.

Since 2020, the situation on the border has been very disturbed which understandably negatively impacted the overall relationship. Since September 2020, India had been negotiating with the Chinese on how to find a solution, he said.

The EAM said there were different aspects of this solution. The pressing one was disengagement because troops were very close to each other and the possibility of something happening existed. Then there was de-escalation because of troop buildup on both sides, he added.

“Then there is a larger issue of how you manage the border and negotiate the boundary settlement. Right now everything that's going is concerning the first part which is disengagement,” he said.

He said India and China came to an understanding at some places after 2020 on how troops return to their bases but a significant segment was related to patrolling, the External Affairs Minister said.

“There was blocking of patrolling and that is what we had been trying to negotiate for the last two years. So what happened on October 21 was that in those particular areas, Depsang and Demchok, we reached an understanding that patrolling would resume how it used to be before,” Jaishankar added.