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Sticking to the announced timeline, India and China have completed disengagement in Depsang and Demchok regions of eastern Ladakh and patrolling will begin soon, army sources said, adding that sweets will also be distributed on the occasion of Diwali will be exchanged with troops from the Chinese side. Thursday.
The Indian Army sources said on Wednesday that the verification process is underway and the modalities of patrolling will be decided by the ground commanders. Chinese Ambassador to India Xu Feihong told reporters in Kolkata hours later that the two countries had reached “important understandings”.
“There was a very important meeting between President Xi Jinping and Prime Minister Narendra Modi (on the sidelines of the BRICS summit in Russia last week). Now that the two leaders have made important agreements, they will guide the further development of relations. I hope that, guided by this consensus, our relations will run smoothly in the future and will not be limited or interrupted by specific disagreements between our two parties,” the ambassador said.
“As two neighboring countries, it is normal that we have some disagreements and the most important thing is how to address and resolve them. The meeting of the two leaders has given us a very good example of how to deal with these differences,” he said. added.
Satellite images
On October 21, India had announced that a patrol agreement had been reached for the two controversial areas of Depsang and Demchok and that troops would return to the positions that existed before the 2020 standoff between the two countries began. the dismantling of structures and the restoration of the land on which they stood to their original state.
Days after the deal was announced, NDTV had accessed the first satellite images showing structures being removed by the Chinese side.
An image of the Depsang Plain taken on October 11 showed four vehicles and two tents, and in another from October 25 the tents were gone and the vehicles could be seen driving away. The footage was of an area near the 'Y Junction' from which Indian soldiers could not travel east to India's patrol points, which mark the extent of the Line of Actual Control that India claims in these areas.
Another set of images showed semi-permanent Chinese structures being removed from Demchok.
Forward motion
The standoff began in May 2020 and the following month, a clash took place in Galwan in Ladakh, killing 20 Indian soldiers and also inflicting losses on the Chinese side, with the exact number remaining unconfirmed.
A troop build-up followed on both sides and talks began at the military level to resolve the standoff. In September 2022, Indian and Chinese troops withdrew from the controversial Gogra-Hot Springs area in Ladakh and returned to their pre-April 2020 position.
After the latest patrol agreement was announced by External Affairs Minister Vikram Misri on October 21, External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar had confirmed it at the NDTV World Summit.
“We have reached an agreement on patrols, and we have gone back to the 2020 position. With that we can say that the withdrawal from China has been completed… There are areas that they blocked after 2020 for various reasons, we We now have reached an agreement that allows patrols as we did until 2020,” he added.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi then met Chinese President Xi Jinping on the sidelines of the BRICS summit in Russia – their first bilateral since 2019 – on October 23, and the two leaders welcomed the agreement. “Our priority should be to ensure peace and stability along our border,” Prime Minister Modi told Mr Jinping.
