Days after India and China reached an agreement on patrolling arrangements along the Line of Actual Control (LAC), leading to disengagement and a resolution of the eastern Ladakh military stand-off which began in April-May 2020, External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar on Saturday said that this breakthrough with the neighbouring country happened because the military was there in “very, very unimaginable conditions to defend the country.”
“If we have reached where we have today, there are two reasons for it. The first is a very determined effort on our part to stand our ground and make our point and this would only happen because the military was there in very, very unimaginable conditions to defend the country. The military did its part and diplomacy did its part,” Jaishankar said during an interaction with students from a university in Pune.
Addressing the gathering at Flame University, Pune, the External Affairs Minister asserted that the most pressing issue with China is disengagement and the second one is de-escalation.
“If I can roll that back a bit, since 2020, the situation at the border has been very disturbed, which has understandably had a very negative impact on the overall relationship with China. Since September 2020, we have been negotiating with the Chinese on how to find a solution. There are different aspects to the solution, but the most pressing issue is disengagement, as the troops are very close to each other, and the possibility of an incident is significant. So that is the first set of issues.”
“Then there is de-escalation. Then there is a larger issue of how you manage the border and how you negotiate the boundaries. Right now, whatever is happening in China is happening due to the first part which is disengagement. We were trying to negotiate patrolling issues at the India-China border,” he added.