Bloomberg: India and China pledged to de-escalate tensions along their disputed Himalayan border after their foreign ministers met Thursday for the first time since May when the stand-off began.
Foreign minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar and his Chinese counterpart Wang Yi agreed that “the current situation in the border area is not in the interests of both sides,” they said in a joint statement after meeting on the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit in Moscow organized by Russia.
The nations “should abide by the existing border affairs agreements and regulations, maintain peace and tranquility in the border areas, and avoid any actions that may escalate the situation,” they said.
India and China have been increasing their troop strength along the 3,488-kilometer (2,167-mile) border known as the Line of Actual Control since May. The military standoff, in which gun shots were fired this week for the first time since 1975, remains unresolved despite multiple rounds of negotiations between military commanders and diplomats and two phone calls between Wang and Jaishankar.
The latest skirmishes came just days after Indian Defense Minister Rajnath Singh and his Chinese counterpart, General Wei Fenghe, agreed to ease tensions after “frank and in-depth discussions” in Moscow.
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It’s led to deteriorating economic ties, with India limiting Chinese investments, tightening scrutiny on visas and moving to keep Huawei Technologies Co. out of 5G networks. India last week banned 118 Chinese apps including Tencent Holdings Ltd.’s popular game PUBG Mobile Lite and payments service Alipay, following up on its June ban of several applications including ByteDance Ltd.’s viral short-video service TikTok.
Differences worsened after India, in its first offensive move since the conflict began, moved thousands of soldiers to mountain peaks to claim vantage points along the south bank of Pangong Tso — a glacial lake roughly the size of Singapore — to counter what it views as an intrusion by Chinese forces.
The decision to capture high ground that was previously unoccupied revived tensions that had cooled since June when 20 Indian soldiers and an unknown number of Chinese troops were killed in brutal hand-to-hand combat.
“The two foreign ministers agreed that as the situation eases, the two sides should speed up the completion of new mutual trust-building measures to maintain and enhance peace and tranquility in the border area,” they said in the joint statement.
China separately said it was “willing to support enhanced dialogue between the frontier troops on both sides to resolve specific issues.”- Bloomberg
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It’s quite possible, sensing the determination of the Indian leadership, China may come down from an aggressive posture to diplomacy .
Please understand this.
Real power is with dragon cpc head.
Dragon foreign minister or Defence minister just do lip service.
Any agreement made with these ministers are recipe for our disaster as the power is yielded by supreme authority.
These talks are nothing but a ploy to keep us distracted while the supremo gives orders to make more incursions and engagements.
Before giving any ideas on face saving remember haksars shimla draft after which Bhutto came screaming beta hua hain.