India – China Relations: Normality Ruled out without Agreement on Border Disputes
NEW DELHI, March 25: The external affairs minister S Jaishankar has ruled out normalisation of relations with China till the army of the two countries disengage. “There can be no normality in India-China ties unless the troops amassed at the Line of Actual Control (LAC) are withdrawn,” Jaishankar told his visiting Chinese counterpart Wang Yi in Delhi on Friday during talks that ended without any joint statement or agreement.
Wang, who arrived in Delhi on Thursday evening and met National Security Adviser Ajit Doval for an hour on Friday morning, held three-hour talks with Jaishankar before leaving for Kathmandu. Jaishankar told the media that their meeting had a “broad and substantive agenda” and the talks were “open and candid”. He said he had “conveyed our national sentiment” on the border issue and that “frictions and tensions that arise from China’s deployments since April 2020 cannot be reconciled with a normal relationship between two neighbours.”
“If you ask me, is our relationship normal today, my answer to you is no it is not, and it cannot be normal if the situation in the border areas is abnormal,” Jaishankar said referring to the LAC in eastern Ladakh, where around 1,00,000 Indian and Chinese soldiers remain deployed in forward areas after the People’s Liberation Army’s transgressions. “Surely, the presence of a large number of troops there, in contravention of agreements, is abnormal,” he said.
While 15 rounds of commander-level talks and eight rounds of a special Working Mechanism on Consultation and Coordination (WMCC) for border affairs yielded “considerable progress”, several friction areas remained, Jaishankar noted, but didn’t mention specifics, or if India had spoken of the need to return to the “status quo ante” as of April 2020.
China’s Foreign Ministry said Wang put forward a “three-point approach” in his talks with Doval, saying both sides needed to view ties with a “long-term vision”, see each other’s development as an opportunity, and cooperate on multilateral issues. On the second point, he proposed reviving the “China-India plus” initiative for joint projects in South Asia, an outcome of the Wuhan meeting between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and President Xi Jinping in 2018. He highlighted that China did not seek a “unipolar Asia” and “respects India’s traditional role in the region.”
Beijing quoted Wang as saying both sides “should put the border issue in its proper place in bilateral relations and not allow the boundary issue to define or affect the overall development of the bilateral relationship”, an apparent point of difference between the two sides. India has stressed that the focus was on the border, and relations had been “disturbed by Chinese actions since April 2020”.
Sources said Wang invited Doval to visit China for talks of Special Representatives on the boundary question, but Doval took the same stand as Jaishankar. He told Wang that he could visit only “after immediate issues are resolved successfully.” He noted that restoration of peace in border areas would create the “enabling environment” for progress in ties and was a “prerequisite for normalisation.”
The Modi government had earlier refused to hold bilateral talks on any issue other than the boundary. Friday’s talks were wide-ranging. They included trade and commerce, visas for thousands of Indian students awaiting to return to China, as well as other developments including Ukraine and Afghanistan. The Chinese statement said hydrological cooperation on trans-border-rivers also figured.
Jaishankar said the two sides discussed Ukraine and their “respective” approaches with “a common element” that both agreed on the need for an immediate ceasefire and return to diplomacy. His remarks suggested that the two positions weren’t entirely aligned. One point of difference has been China’s explicit blaming of the U.S. and NATO for the crisis. On Afghanistan, where Wang visited on Thursday, Jaishankar said China had not invited India to its conference on foreign ministers of neighbouring countries of Afghanistan to be hosted by Beijing.
Asked why Wang’s arrival in India had been cloaked in secrecy and only announced on Friday when the meetings began, he remarked that this was done at the request of the Chinese side. Observers in Beijing suggested that the trip to Kabul could have prompted the secrecy out of security concerns. The visits to Pakistan and Nepal were also not announced.
(Manas Dasgupta)
