Demchok deal likely as India, China try to end LAC stand-off, eying Modi-Xi meet in Russia or Brazil

New Delhi: To set the stage for a meeting between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and President Xi Jinping either in Brazil or in Russia in the coming months, India and China are trying to completely resolve the four-and-a-half-year-long military stand-off along the Line of Actual Control in eastern Ladakh.

New Delhi and Beijing are close to an agreement for the mutual withdrawal of frontline troops from Demchok, one of the two remaining face-off points along the LAC.

The military commanders of the two sides may soon finalise the modalities of the disengagement at Demchok. It, however, may take a few more rounds of negotiations to end the stand-off at Depsang, where the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has deployed well inside the territory of India and has been blocking the Indian Army’s access to Patrolling Points 10, 11, 12, 12A, and 13, sources in New Delhi told DH.

With both Modi and Xi likely to attend the BRICS summit at Kazan in Russia from October 22 to 24, and the G20 summit at Rio de Janeiro in Brazil from November 18 to 19, Indian and Chinese diplomats are exploring the possibility of a meeting between the two leaders on the sideline of any of the two conclaves.

Modi and Xi did not have any formal bilateral meeting after the aggressive moves by the Chinese PLA to unilaterally change the status quo along the LAC in eastern Ladakh and the counter-deployment by the Indian Army in April-May 2020 had started the military stand-off between the two neighbouring nations in eastern Ladakh. The bilateral relations 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.

The two leaders, however, had held a brief discussion about the need to stabilise the relations during a dinner on the sidelines of the G20 summit at Bali in Indonesia in November 2022. They had also agreed to step up efforts to resolve the military stand-off along the LAC when they again had a brief interaction during the BRICS summit at Johannesburg in South Africa in August 2023.

New Delhi has been trying to impress upon Beijing that peace and tranquillity in the border areas and respect for the LAC were essential for the normalisation of the bilateral relations. Beijing, on the other hand, has been claiming that the mutual withdrawal of troops by the Chinese PLA and the Indian Army from Patrolling Point 15 (Gogra-Hotsprings area) in September 2022 marked the restoration of normalcy along the LAC in eastern Ladakh. India did not buckle under China’s pressure to accept the “new normal” in the Depsang and Demchok areas and move on to bring the ties back on track.

External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar and his counterpart Wang Yi recently had two back-to-back meetings in July – first in Astana on July 4 and then again in Vientiane on July 25. The diplomats of the two sides followed it up with two meetings within the framework of the bilateral Working Mechanism on Consultation and Coordination (WMCC) in New Delhi and Beijing on July 31 and August 29.

After the second WMCC meeting, China claimed to have “further narrowed differences” with India. New Delhi described its latest round of talks with Beijing as “frank, constructive, and forward-looking”.

Beijing also agreed to strictly abide by its “border-related agreements” with New Delhi, which had repeatedly alleged over the past few years that the violation of the 1993 and 1996 pacts by the Chinese PLA had necessitated countermeasure by the Indian Army and had led to the stand-off along the LAC in eastern Ladakh.

Though protracted negotiations led to the mutual withdrawal of troops by both the Indian Army and the Chinese PLA from some of the face-off points along the LAC, like Galwan Valley, the northern and southern banks of Pangong Tso, Gogra Post, and Hot Springs, the stand-off could not be resolved completely so far.