India-China detente?

With both India and China starting disengagement along the Line of Actual Control (LAC), there is hope that the ties between the two countries will go back to normal. The Army will now be able to resume normal patrolling to points it did before the 2020 standoff.

The disengagement signals the end of the four and a half years long military stand-off that occasionally had threatened to trigger a large-scale conflict between the Asian giants. Foreign Minister S Jaishankar has rightly credited efforts of the military and diplomacy for this success. He. however, had a word of caution, saying that establishing trust and mutual willingness between the two nations will be a gradual process. This underlines the complex dynamics at play in managing India-China relations.

After many rounds of military and diplomatic meetings over the past few years, the two countries finally agreed to restore the status quo along the LAC last week. The understanding was reached just in time for the BRICS meeting in Russia, paving the way for the summit between the prime minister Narendra Modi and Chinese president Xi Jinping. The two leaders welcomed the agreement and pledged to resume dialogue between their nations. They also agreed to set an “early date” for a meeting between their top officials to resolve the issues.

This is the way to go. India and China need each other and they will greatly benefit from mutual cooperation. The disengagement is good news not just for the two countries but for the global south. It has led to de-escalation of a fraught situation. India and China are also not just the global powers but also the world’s most populous nations, accounting between them the one-third of the world’s population.

A friendly relationship between them, deepening economic  access to each other’s vast markets will contribute to prosperity of  both the countries.  We can only hope that from hereon the relationship between the two neighbours stabilizes and Beijing does nothing along the LAC that again injects the uncertainty into the bilateral ties.