After disengagement, India and China await de-escalation, says S Jaishankar

Canberra: External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar on Tuesday said the agreement on disengagement of Indian and Chinese troops in eastern Ladakh will be implemented in the coming days “to everybody's satisfaction.”

Jaishankar was speaking at the inaugural session of a think tank here in conversation with Justin Bassi, the executive director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) when he was asked a question about the India-China relationship after the seeming breakthrough.

India on October 21 announced it had reached an agreement with China on patrolling along the Line of Actual Control (LAC) in eastern Ladakh, ending the over four-year-long military standoff between the two armies.

In Canberra on Tuesday, Jaishankar: “The immediate part which awaits us is what we call the de-escalation, which is the build up of forces along the Line of Actual Control (LAC).” Both the countries have bigger troop deployment than existed along the LAC before 2020, “so we have negotiations ahead of us,” the External Affairs Minister said.

The ties between the two Asian giants nosedived significantly following the fierce clash in the Galwan Valley in June 2020 that marked the most serious military conflict between the two sides in decades.

“What India and China negotiated on October 21 was the last set of what we call disengagement agreements, which essentially means that after the summer of 2020, Chinese and Indian troops have been deployed along the LAC in distances which were extremely concerning,” he said.

“The priority has been to find ways of separating the troops, which is why the word disengagement.”

He listed “having them (the two armies) go back to their normal operating basis as far as possible” and also resuming patrol “in the way in which it used to be done in 2020,” were the last set of agreement and said, the expectation is that the patrolling would resume there, which in fact, “is happening as we speak.”

The disengagement chapter is done, its implementation “will happen in the coming days to everybody's satisfaction.”

During this period (post 2020), India-China relationship was also “very profoundly affected,” because it has always been an assumption on India's side that peace and tranquillity in the border areas is a prerequisite for the development of bilateral ties, he mentioned.

He also drew attention to what was agreed between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and President Xi Jinping in their first bilateral meeting after five years, that the foreign minister and the National Security Advisor would meet their counterparts and find ways to normalise the relationship.

“And how do you establish an equilibrium between yourselves at in the border, border areas, which happens to be disputed as well, as well as establish a working relationship in on other issues,” he said and termed them as “a very complex set of issues” that require a “lot of thinking and management.”

Jaishankar also spoke about how India balances its position as a member of both the BRICS bloc, which he explained is non-west but not anti-west, and QUAD.

Highlighting the importance of the Indian diaspora, the Indian minister said the change in India-US relations can be almost completely correlated with the growth of the diaspora in the United States and asked Australia to learn from it.

The more the diaspora is made comfortable, the more they are seen as equal partners in Australia, the more they are likely to serve, actually, almost as the ballast of the growing relationship, Jaishankar added.