Earlier this week, India announced it had reached an agreement with China on patrolling along the LAC in eastern Ladakh, in a major breakthrough in ending the over four-year-long military standoff.Since 2020, the situation on the border has been very disturbed which understandably negatively impacted the overall relationship.Since September 2020, India had been negotiating with the Chinese on how to find a solution, he said.The EAM said there were different aspects of this solution.The pressing one is disengagement because troops are very very close to each other and the possibility of something happening existed. Then there is de-escalation because of troop buildup on both sides, he added.”Then there is a larger issue of how you manage the border and negotiate the boundary settlement.Right now everything that’s going is concerning the first part which is disengagement,” he said.He said India and China came to an understanding at some places after 2020 on how troops return to their bases but a significant segment was related to patrolling, the external affairs minister pointed out.”There was blocking of patrolling and that is what we had been trying to negotiate for the last two years. So what happened on October 21 was that in those particular areas Depsang and Demchok we reached an understanding that patrolling would resume how it used to be before,” Jaishankar added.
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