Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri will travel to Beijing on a two-day visit starting Sunday to discuss next steps in improving ties between the two nations. This comes after armies of India and China in October last year agreed to disengage from friction points at Line of Actual Control(LAC)in Eastern Ladakh.
High level talks between the two countries gathered momentum following the pact. It will be the second top level meeting in the last one and half months between the two neighbours. National Security Advisor(NSA)Ajit Doval travelled to Beijing and held talks with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang under the framework of Special Representatives(SR)dialogue on the boundary dispute.
“Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri will be visiting Beijing on January 26 and 27 for a meeting of the Foreign Secretary-Vice Minister mechanism between India and China,” Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) said on Thursday.
“The resumption of this bilateral mechanism flows from the agreement at the leadership level to discuss the next steps for India-China relations, including in the political, economic, and people-to-people domains,” it said in a brief statement.
The decision to revive the SR dialogue mechanism and other such formats was taken at a meeting between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping in Kazan on October 23.
In the nearly 50-minute meeting, Modi underscored the importance of properly handling differences and disputes and not allowing them to disturb peace and tranquillity in border areas.
The Modi-Xi meeting came two days after India and China firmed up a disengagement pact for Depsang and Demchok, the last two friction points in eastern Ladakh.
In the SR dialogue, India pressed for a fair, reasonable and mutually acceptable settlement of the overall boundary dispute between the two countries.
Doval and Wang also focused on “positive” direction for cross-border cooperation including resuming the Kailash Mansarovar Yatra, river data sharing and border trade.
Last week, External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar said the India-China relationship is trying to disentangle itself from the complications arising from the post-2020 border situation and more thought needs to be given to the longer-term evolution of the ties.
“At a time when most of its relationships are moving forward, India confronts a particular challenge in establishing an equilibrium with China. Much of that arises from the fact that both nations are on the rise,” he had said.
The external affairs minister noted that as immediate neighbours and the only two societies with over a billion people, India-China dynamic could never have been easy.
“But it has been further sharpened by a boundary dispute, by some baggage of history and by differing socio-political systems. Misreadings by past policy-makers, whether driven by idealism or absence of realpolitik, has actually helped neither cooperation nor competition with China,” he said.
“That has clearly changed in the last decade. Right now, the relationship is trying to disentangle itself from the complications arising from the post-2020 border situation,” he added.
These meetings came after the two nations arrived at an agreement to resume patrolling along the LAC “leading to disengagement”. The patrolling arrangement came four years after the Galwan Valley clash, signalling de-escalation in a region where both countries stationed tens of thousands of troops.
The disengagement agreement has facilitated the Indian military to resume patrolling up to the old stations in Depsang and Demchok -- the two major friction points that were left to be settled between the two nations.
The two sides also completed one round of patrolling in November and also agreed to carry out one coordinated patrol every week in the areas where tensions have persisted since 2020. India has maintained that its ties with China cannot be normal unless there is peace in the border areas.
