New Delhi: India said it ended a four-year border stalemate with China, a significant step toward easing tensions and paving the way for a possible meeting between the leaders of both nuclear-armed countries at a BRICS summit this week.
Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, India’s minister of external affairs, said an agreement was reached on Monday to allow border patrolling operations in both countries to resume. That means the “disengagement process with China you can say is completed,” and the border situation returns to what it was in 2020, he said at an event in New Delhi.
Relations between China and India have been frozen since June 2020 when clashes between soldiers along the Himalayan border left at least 20 Indian and an unknown number of Chinese dead.
China’s Foreign Ministry didn’t immediately respond to a request for further information.
The announcement came a day before Chinese President Xi Jinping and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi are scheduled to attend the BRICS summit in Russia, setting the stage for a possible bilateral meeting between the two leaders.
Modi and Xi last met on the sidelines of the BRICS summit in Johannesburg in 2023, although haven’t held formal bilateral talks since the Group of 20 leaders’ meeting in Bali in 2022.
Follow-up meetings
Jaishankar said there will be follow-up meetings to plan the next steps.
“It creates a basis for peace and tranquility in the border areas, which should be and was there before 2020,” he said on Monday.
“That was our major concern because we always said that if you disturb peace and tranquility how do expect the rest of the relationship to go forward.”
There had been incremental progress in resolving the border crisis since the 2020 clashes, though momentum picked up this year following meetings between the foreign ministers of the two countries in July.
Earlier Monday, India’s Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri said a series of discussions had taken place over several weeks to reach the deal.
The two nations share a 3,488-kilometer (2,167 miles) unmarked border between them.
Both sides moved fighter jets, artillery guns and missiles closer to the border as tensions rose, while thousands of troops were also deployed.
The border patrol agreement would be the first step toward moving soldiers away and allowing normal patrolling operations to take place.
Following the 2020 clashes, India imposed strict rules on Chinese businesses seeking to invest in the country, banned hundreds of Chinese apps and slowed visa approvals.
