75% of India's 'disengagement problems' in eastern Ladakh resolved: Jaishankar

NEW DELHI: Describing India's ties with China as complex, foreign minister S Jaishankar said roughly 75% of India's "disengagement problems" in eastern Ladakh were resolved and India could look at "other possibilities" if the disengagement process was fully completed and peace and tranquility restored on the border.

Jaishankar, however, said the two countries were faced with a bigger issue of militarisation of border that has affected the entirety of their ties because "you can't have violence at the border and then say the rest of the relationship is insulated from it".

Foreign minister Jaishankar has said in the past that the standoff in eastern Ladakh, which started in May 2020, was about forward deployment, and not land grab.

"We made some progress in the ongoing negotiations. I would say roughly you can say about 75% of the disengagement problems are sorted out," he said, speaking at the Geneva Centre for Security Policy in Switzerland. "We hope that if there is a solution to the disengagement and there is a return to peace and tranquility, then we can look at other possibilities," he added.

Ties between the two countries are yet to normalise in the absence of disengagement at a couple of remaining friction points along the Line of Actual Control (LAC).

The minister also said what happened in 2020 was a violation of multiple agreements for reasons which were still not entirely clear to India. "We can only speculate about it. The Chinese actually moved a very large number of troops to the LAC at the border and naturally in response, we moved our troops up. It was very difficult for us because we were in the middle of a Covid lockdown at that time," he said, describing the development as dangerous.

"Now, we could see straightaway that this was a very dangerous development because the presence of a large number of troops in these extreme heights and extreme cold in near proximity could lead to a mishap. And that's exactly what happened in June 2022," he said, referring to the Galwan Valley clashes. Jaishankar said the issue for India was why China disturbed peace and tranquility and why it moved those troops and how to deal with this very "close-up situation".

"We have now been negotiating close to four years and the first step of that is what we called disengagement which is their troops go back to their normal operating bases and our troops go back to their normal operating bases and where required we have an arrangement about patrolling because both of us patrol regularly in that border, as I said it is not a legally delineated border," he said.

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