With about a week to go before Prime Minister Narendra Modi will be face-to-face with Chinese President Xi Jinping in South Africa for the BRICS leaders’ summit, India and China will hold their 19th round of military talks Monday as part of continuing efforts to ease the standoff along the Line of Actual Control in eastern Ladakh which is in its fourth year now, officials said Saturday.
The Indian delegation will be led by 14 Corps Commander Lt Gen Rashim Bali. The last round of talks was held on April 23 ahead of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) Defence Ministers’ meeting. Legacy friction points along the LAC in eastern Ladakh and ways to overcome the trust deficit between the two militaries were discussed.
Indeed, in 2017, when Indian and Chinese troops were in a border standoff at Doklam, the two sides had broken the two-and-half-month-old deadlock days before Modi and Xi were scheduled to meet for the BRICS summit in Xiamen (China).
Wang has negotiated past standoffs with India — from Chumar to Doklam, and has been the key interlocutor for India-China diplomatic ministerial level talks on the border standoff this time since 2020 as well.New Delhi had upped the ante in July when Doval told Wang that the situation along the LAC since 2020 had “eroded strategic trust and the public and political basis of the relationship”.