The senior military commanders of India and China will meet on Sunday to make another attempt to end the stalemate in the negotiations to resolve the stand-off along the Line of Actual Control (LAC) between the two nations in eastern Ladakh.
The forthcoming meet is going to be the 16th round of negotiations between the senior commanders of the Indian Army and the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) ever since the stand-off started in 2020. The Indian Army delegation will be led by Lt. Gen. Anindya Sengupta, the commander of its XIV Corps. The PLA's negotiators will be led by the commander of its South Xinjiang Military District, sources in New Delhi said on Wednesday.
The date for the forthcoming meeting between the senior military commanders has been set a week after External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar and Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi had a bilateral meeting on the sideline of a G20 conclave in Indonesia. Jaishankar stressed on early end to the stand-off and conveyed to Wang that the two sides needed to build on the success of working out mutual withdrawal of troops from some of the face-off points along the LAC and sustain the momentum to complete disengagement from all the remaining areas and restore peace and tranquillity in the border areas.
The stand-off started in April-May 2020 with China amassing a large number of troops along its LAC with India, flouting the key 1993 and 1996 bilateral agreements for maintaining peace and tranquillity in the border areas pending the resolution of the boundary dispute through dialogue. The India Army’s counter-deployment to resist aggressive moves by the PLA led to the stand-off. It reached a flashpoint on June 15, 2020, when the Indian Army lost 20 of its soldiers in a violent face-off with the PLA in Galwan Valley. The PLA much later admitted that it had also lost four of its soldiers in the clash.
The negotiations between the two sides had resulted in mutual withdrawal of troops by both sides from some of the face-off points along the LAC – from the Galwan Valley in June 2020, from both banks of Pangong Tso in February 2021 and from Gogra Post in August 2021.
The 15th round of negotiations between the military commanders of the two nations on March 11, however, failed to yield the much-expected deal for mutual withdrawal of troops from Hot Springs or Patrol Point 15 in eastern Ladakh. The diplomats of the two nations had a video conference on May 31 last, but could not make much headway, except agreeing to hold the 16th round of negotiations between the military commanders at an early date.
It, however, took the two sides more than six weeks and a meeting between Jaishankar and Wang to make progress and schedule the meeting.