Meant disengagement when I said 75% dispute resolved: Jaishankar on India-China border standoff

External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar said he was referring to troop disengagement in eastern Ladakh when he spoke about achieving 75% progress on the more than four-year India-China border dispute.

"When I said 75% of it (border dispute) has been sorted out, it's only the disengagement. So, that's one part of the problem. So we have been able to sort out much of the disengagement in the friction points. But some of the patrolling issues need to be resolved. The next step will be de-escalation," he said at the Asia Society Policy Institute in New York on Tuesday.

Jaishankar said India has had a "difficult history" with China and that Beijing moved several troops to the Line of Actual Control (LAC) in 2020, despite New Delhi having "explicit agreements" with it.


"We have a difficult history with China. Despite the explicit agreements we had with China, we saw in the middle of Covid that the Chinese moved a large number of forces in violation of these agreements to the LAC. It was likely a mishap would happen and it did. So, there was a clash, and a number of troops died on either side. That, in a sense, overshadowed the relationship," he said.

Jaishankar's remarks come ahead of the scheduled BRICS Foreign Ministers meeting in New York. It is not yet certain if Prime Minister Narendra Modi will hold a standalone structured meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Kazan, Russia on the sidelines of the BRICS summit on October 22-23.

At the event, Jaishankar, however, stressed that ties between India and China are crucial to making Asia and the world multipolar.

Defending India's ties with Russia, the minister said, "It's not feasible to expect that big countries constrain their options and don't deal with other countries simply because someone else has a problem with them".