The leaders of India and China have agreed to step up efforts for mutually pulling back frontline troops from the remaining face-off points along the Line of Actual Control (LAC) in eastern Ladakh in order to end the more-than-three-year-long military stand-off.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi and President Xi Jinping did not have a formal bilateral meeting on the sidelines of the 15th BRICS summit at Johannesburg in South Africa. They, however, had a ‘conversation’, Foreign Secretary Vinay Mohan Kwatra said after the end of the summit on Thursday. He quoted Modi conveying to Xi the concerns of New Delhi over “the unresolved issues along the LAC in the western sector of India-China border areas”.
The prime minister underlined during his conversation with the president of the neighbouring communist country that maintenance of peace and tranquillity in the border areas and observing and respecting the LAC were essential for the normalisation of the bilateral relationship. “Two leaders agreed to direct relevant officials to intensify efforts at expeditious disengagement and de-escalation”, Kwatra said, while briefing journalists about the prime minister’s participation in the BRICS summit.
This was the second time Modi and Xi had a conversation on the bilateral relations between New Delhi and Beijing after the aggressive moves by the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) to unilaterally change the status quo along the LAC in eastern Ladakh and the resistance and counter-deployment by the Indian Army in April-May 2020 had started a military stand-off in the Himalayas. The relations between the two nations hit a new low after the stand-off had reached a flashpoint with the violent clash between the soldiers of the Indian Army and the Chinese PLA in Galwan Valley on June 15, 2020.