India, China reach agreement on patrolling along LAC in Ladakh

New Delhi: India on Monday announced it has reached an agreement with China on patrolling along the Line of Actual Control (LAC) in eastern Ladakh, in a major breakthrough in ending the over four-year-long military standoff ahead of a likely meeting between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping in Russia this week.

Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri said the agreement was finalised following negotiations by the two sides over the last several weeks and that it will lead to a resolution of the issues that had arisen in 2020.

External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar said Indian and Chinese soldiers will be able to resume patrolling in the way they had been doing before the border face-off began and the disengagement process with China has been completed. Prime Minister Modi and President Xi are likely to hold a bilateral meeting on the sidelines of the BRICS Summit in the Russian city of Kazan either Tuesday or Wednesday. It is understood that the agreement will facilitate patrolling in Depsang and Demchok areas as there were major unresolved issues in these two areas.

"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," the Foreign Secretary said at a media briefing. "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," he said. "We will be taking the next steps on this," Misri added. In an interactive session at the NDTV Summit, Jaishankar described finalisation of the agreement as a "good development". "We reached an agreement on patrolling and with that the disengagement that we have gone back to where the situation was in 2020 and we can say with that the disengagement process with China has been completed," he said. "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," the minister said. To a question, Jaishankar indicated 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,” the EAM 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 (prior to the standoff),” he said.

The External Affairs Minister said both sides have been holding negotiations to end the standoff since September 2020. “On the one hand we had to obviously do the counter deployments, but side-by-side, we have been negotiating. “We have been negotiating since September of 2020 when I met my Chinese counterpart Wang Yi in Moscow,” he said.

“It has been a very patient process,” Jaishankar said, adding maybe it was more complicated “than it could have and should have been”. He said there was peace and tranquility along the LAC before 2020 and “hopefully we will be able to come back to that”.

“That was our major concern because we always said that if you disturb the peace and tranquility, how do you expect the rest of the relationship to go forward,” he said.