India, China resolved 75 percent of border disengagement issues: Jaishankar

India’s External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar yesterday said India and China have resolved nearly 75 percent of the border disengagement issues along the Himalayas.
He, however, said the “bigger issue” has been the increasing militarisation of the border, ANI reported.
Jaishankar was speaking at the Global Centre for Security Policy in Geneva.
He said negotiations between India and China to find a solution to the problem in eastern Ladakh are underway.
This was the first time Jaishankar quantified the progress in negotiations with China to resolve the disengagement of troops at the Himalayan border.
“We still have some things to do,” he said. “There is a bigger issue that both of us have brought forces close up and in that sense, there is a militarisation of the border”.
India and China have been in an eyeball-to-eyeball position in most areas along the border in eastern Ladakh for the last two years since the Galwan river valley faceoff that left 20 Indian troops and an unspecified number of Chinese soldiers dead.
The two countries have been in diplomatic, military and political-level negotiations on the issues since June 2020.
Away in St Petersburg, Russia, India’s National Security Adviser Ajit Doval met Wang Yi, member of the Communist Party of China (CPC), and the political bureau and director of the Office of the Central Foreign Affairs Commission.
He also met several BRICS security officials.
After the meeting, India’s external affairs ministry said in a statement yesterday that “both sides agreed to work with urgency and redouble their efforts to realise complete disengagement in the remaining areas” along the Himalayan border.
The Doval-Wang meeting “gave the two sides an opportunity to review the recent efforts towards finding an early resolution of the remaining issues along the Line of Actual Control (LAC) which will create conditions to stabilise and rebuild bilateral relations,” the statement said.
Doval conveyed that peace and tranquillity in border areas and respect for the unresolved border “are essential for normalcy in bilateral relations and both sides must fully abide by relevant bilateral agreements, protocols, and understandings reached in the past by the two governments.”
“The two sides agreed that the India-China bilateral relationship is significant not just for the two countries but also for the region and the world,” the Ministry of External Affairs said.