External affairs minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar on Saturday credited the military and deft diplomacy for India’s breakthrough agreement with China on patrolling along the Line of Actual Control (LAC).
During an interaction with students in Pune, the minister said it is “ still a bit early for normalisation of relations which will naturally take time to rebuild a degree of trust and willingness to work together.”
Recalling Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s bilateral meeting with Chinese president Xi Jinping in Russia’s Kazan earlier this week, Jaishankar said it was decided that the foreign ministers and National Security Advisors of the two countries would meet and see how to move forward.
“If today we have reached where we have…One is because of the very determined effort on our part to stand our ground and make our point. The military was there (at LAC) in very very unimaginable conditions to defend the country, and the military did its part and diplomacy did its part,” PTI quoted Jaishankar.
“Today we have put in five times more resources annually than there used to be a decade ago which is showing results and enabling the military to actually be effectively deployed. The combination of these (factors) has led to where it is,” the minister added.
‘Border situation was very disturbed since 2020’: Jaishankar
Jaishankar said that since 2020, the border situation had been very disturbed which “understandably negatively impacted the overall relationship.” “Since September 2020, India had been negotiating with the Chinese on how to find a solution,” he added.
Jaishankar further said,”The pressing one is disengagement because troops are very very close to each other and the possibility of something happening existed. Then there is de-escalation because of troop buildup on both sides.”
“Then there is a larger issue of how you manage the border and negotiate the boundary settlement. Right now everything that’s going is concerning the first part which is disengagement.”
He said India and China came to an understanding at some places after 2020 on how troops return to their bases but a significant segment was related to patrolling.
“There was blocking of patrolling and that is what we had been trying to negotiate for the last two years. So what happened on October 21 was that in those particular areas Depsang and Demchok we reached an understanding that patrolling would resume how it used to be before,” Jaishankar added.