We made progress: EAM Jaishankar on India-China talks on eastern Ladakh row

Roughly 75 per cent of the “disengagement problems” with China are sorted out but the bigger issue has been the increasing militarisation of the frontier, External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar said on Thursday on the lingering border row in eastern Ladakh. In an interactive session at a think-tank in this Swiss city, Jaishankar said the Galwan Valley clashes of June 2020 affected the “entirety” of India-China ties, asserting that one cannot have violence at the border and then say the rest of the relationship is insulated from it.

The external affairs minister said both sides have been engaged in negotiations for the last four years to find a solution to the outstanding issues. “Now those negotiations are going on. We made some progress. I would say roughly you can say about 75 per cent of the disengagement problems are sorted out,” he said at the Geneva Centre for Security Policy. “We still have some things to do,” Jaishankar, who is on a two-day visit to Switzerland, said. But there is a bigger issue that both of us have brought forces close up and in that sense there is a militarisation of the border, he said. “How does one deal with it? I think we have to deal with it. In the meanwhile, after the clash, it has affected the entirety of the relationship because you cannot have violence at the border and then say the rest of the relationship is insulated from it,” he said. The external affairs minister indicated that the relationship can improve if there is a resolution to the row. “We hope that if there is a solution to the disengagement and there is a return to peace, then we can look at other possibilities,” he said.

The Indian and Chinese militaries have been locked in a standoff since May 2020 and a full resolution of the border row has not yet been achieved though the two sides have disengaged from a number of friction points following a series of talks. The ties between the two countries nosedived significantly following the fierce clash in the Galwan Valley in June 2020. India has been maintaining that its ties with China cannot be normal unless there is peace in the border areas. Describing India-China relations as “complex”, Jaishankar said the ties were kind of normalised in the late 1980s and the basis for it was that there would be peace at the border.