India has ended a four-year border standoff with China by reaching an agreement with China allowing it to resume border patrols. This was stated by Indian Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, Bloomberg reports, Day.Az reports with reference to Lenta.ru.
“This creates the basis for peace and tranquility in the border areas, which should be and was there before 2020,” the foreign minister said. He noted that the “process of decoupling from China” is almost complete.
The announcement came a day before Chinese President Xi Jinping and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi are scheduled to attend the BRICS summit in Russia, paving the way for a possible bilateral meeting between the two leaders, the agency noted.
Relations between Beijing and New Delhi have been frozen since June 2020, when 20 Indian Army soldiers died allegedly in stone-and-iron-stick fights with Chinese soldiers on the disputed India-China border. Some Indian soldiers jumped into the Galwan River from a great height to escape and were injured in the process. The parties accused each other of crossing the border line and violating agreements.
Currently, the two most populous countries in the world – India and China – are separated by a conventional line called the “McMahon Line” (named after the Foreign Secretary of British India, who proposed this border in 1914). India and the government of the Dalai Lama (the de facto head of Tibet) recognized the existing border, but China did not, as stated in an official diplomatic note in 1959.
In the same year, India announced that the Chinese side had seized part of the state of Arunachal Pradesh; in 1962, a bilateral armed conflict broke out, as a result of which about 38 thousand square kilometers belonging to India in the Ladakh and Aksai Chin regions came under Chinese control.
After this, repeated attempts were made to solve the problem: two Sino-Indian agreements – from 1993 and 1996 – were unsuccessful. Two sections of the border territory remain disputed: in the north-eastern part of Kashmir and in the north of Arunachal Pradesh. There is an unmarked border of 3,488 kilometers between the two countries.