New Delhi:
Defense Minister Rajnath Singh will meet his Chinese counterpart Dong Jun. This will be the first ministerial-level meeting after the disengagement of the two armies in eastern Ladakh last month and India resuming patrolling in the Depsang area last week. Sources gave this information to NDTV on Friday.
Dong, a former navy commander, was appointed in December last year. Rajnath Singh will meet Dong on the sidelines of the two-day 10-nation ASEAN summit in Laos starting on November 20.
The defense ministers of the two countries will meet for the first time after April 2023. In April 2023, China’s Li Shangfu came to Delhi for the Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit. This meeting is being seen as an important measure for both sides to establish trust in each other.
Delhi and Beijing are rebuilding broken bridges after the violence in Galwan and Pangong lake areas in May and June 2020. 20 Indian soldiers were killed in the military standoff between the two countries. Both sides had also increased military deployment.
Relations started improving after Modi-Xi Jinping meeting
According to information received by NDTV, this is the second meeting in a series of high-level meetings after the meeting of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and President Xi Jinping in Russia last month. Each of these meetings will be seen as another step towards deepening India-China relations.
It is not clear at this time what the next steps will be or whether there will be subsequent high-level meetings between defense ministers or similar. Will both sides allow troops to return to pre-2020 status quo? However, both the armies exchanged sweets during Diwali many years later.
An important point here is the scale of military construction in the last four years. The Chinese did a lot of work on bridges, new bases and infrastructure to speed up the deployment of troops and equipment. The size of some of these bases was also not taken into account. Senior Indian military sources, who last month analyzed satellite imagery of a new base on the northern bank of Pangong Lake, said it is “different from any other” on the Chinese side of the Line of Actual Control (LAC).
Chinese army retreated after the agreement
The Chinese base is located 15 kilometers east of the new bridge built on the high altitude Pangong Lake. It was created by Beijing to increase pressure in those areas near the LAC which were earlier empty. In July, NDTV had reported about fortified sites in the north. There was also talk of the presence of a surface-to-air missile battery. However, after the agreement, China started retreating.
A few days after the agreement, NDTV received satellite images which showed the withdrawal of troops in Depsang and Demchok areas. 10 days before this, India had said that it had completed patrolling up to one point in Depsang.
Last month, after several rounds of military and government level talks, both the countries announced the patrolling agreement. Under this, both the countries have returned to the situation before April 2020. External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar confirmed the agreement in an exclusive interview with NDTV and a day later, Army Chief General Upendra Dwivedi said the Indian Army was “trying to trust” China again.
But perhaps the biggest sign of normalization of India-China relations came when Prime Minister Modi met President Xi Jinping at the BRICS summit in Russia last month.
The withdrawal of troops and patrolling in Depsang and Demchok follows similar actions on the northern and southern banks of Pangong Lake in 2021 and in the disputed Gogra-Hot Springs area in September a year later. In every case, both sides have gone back to the situation before April 2020.
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