The violent face-off between the Indian and Chinese troops on the Line of Actual Control (LAC) in June had left the relationship “profoundly disturbed”, External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar said on Friday. Jaishankar, speaking at a virtual event hosted by the Asia Society, said that India has built the relationship with China over the course of last 30 years “and a basis for building that relationship has been peace and tranquillity along the Line of Actual Control”.
There is a standoff between two troops along the LAC in eastern Ladakh after the Galwan Valley face-off on 15 June in which 20 Indian Army personnel were killed in action. The Chinese People’s Liberation Army also suffered an unspecified number of casualties.
Jaishankar said there are multiple agreements, starting from 1993, which created the framework for that peace and tranquillity, which limited the military forces that came to the border areas, how to manage the border, how border troops behave when they approach each other. “So, from the conceptual level down to the behavioural level, there was an entire sort of framework out there. Now, what we saw this year was a departure from this entire series of agreements. The massing of large amount of Chinese forces on the border was clearly contrary to all of this. And when you had friction point which was large number of troops at different points very close to each other, then something tragic like what happened on 15th of June happened,” he said.
“To underline the enormity of that, it was the first military casualty we had after 1975. So, what it has done is, it has obviously had a very deep public impact, very major political impact and it has left the relationship profoundly disturbed,” Jaishankar said.
Jaishankar said that public attitude in India regarding China has been more affected by LAC tensions than the Covid-19 pandemic. “I think, frankly, public attitude has been more affected by what is happening at the border. We have a certain history and a mindset out here, so we took Covid-19 as a challenge rather than get into a blame game on this. We did not go down that path,” he said while answering a query on how has Covid-19 affected the popular attitude in India towards China.
In response to a question on what did the Chinese actually do on the border and why they did it, Jaishankar said: “I haven’t frankly got any reasonable explanation that I can tell myself from them on this matter. There are today a very large number of troops with weapons concentrated on that segment of the border and that is obviously a very critical security challenge that we face.”
In the special Asia Society Policy Institute (ASPI) event, Jaishankar was in conversation with ASPI president Kevin Rudd, a former Australian Prime Minister. The two also spoke about Jaishankar’s new book The India Way: Strategies for an Uncertain World.