- Friday, April 26, 2024
By: Shubham Ghosh
INDIA’S external affairs minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar on Friday (19) said that India and China are going through a “particularly bad patch” in their ties since Beijing has taken actions in violation of agreements for which it still doesn’t have a “credible explanation” and it is left to the Chinese leadership to answer where they want to take the bilateral relationship.
“I don’t think the Chinese have any doubt on where we stand on our relationship and what’s not gone right with it. I’ve been meeting my counterpart Wang Yi a number of times. As you would’ve experienced, I speak fairly clear, reasonably understandably (and) there is no lack of clarity so if they want to hear it, I am sure they would have heard it,” Jaishankar said in response to a question at a panel ‘Greater Power Competition: The Emerging World Order’ at the Bloomberg New Economic Forum in Singapore.
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“We are going through a particularly bad patch in our relationship because they have taken a set of actions in violation of agreements for which they still don’t have a credible explanation and that indicates some rethink about where they want to take our relationship, but that’s for them to answer,” Jaishankar said in an apparent reference to the clash between Indian and Chinese troops at eastern Ladakh border.
The eastern Ladakh border standoff between the Indian and Chinese militaries erupted on May 5, 2020, following a violent clash in the Pangong Lake areas and both sides gradually enhanced their military deployment. The tension escalated following a deadly clash in Galwan Valley on June 15.
As a result of a series of military and diplomatic talks, the two sides completed the disengagement process in the north and south banks of the Pangong lake in February and in the Gogra area in August. However, the last round of military talks on October 10 ended in a stalemate.
On Thursday (18), the two sides agreed to hold the 14th round of military talks at an early date to achieve the objective of complete disengagement in remaining friction points along the Line of Actual Control in eastern Ladakh.
