Disengagement in Eastern Ladakh: India-China send out right signals, but there is still a long way to go

India and China achieved quite a milestone when they decided to compete for disengagement in the Depsang and Demchok areas of East Ladakh. The process would be completed by Deepawali.

India and China would stop blocking each other at the bottleneck point in the Depsang Bulge. With this agreement China will be able to patrol beyond the bottleneck area while India would be able to do so upto points 1 to 13A. The Indian Army will also be able to patrol from Charding Pass junction of Charting and Mingling Nullah.

The PLA patrols on the other hand will come up from the Indus River to Charding-Ningling Nulla junction.

While the process has just begun the complete de-escalation will take a long time. The Indian and Chinese representatives have been asked to chart out the route to a complete de-escalation along the Line of Actual Control.

This would be tough task as it would also require a lot of work on the ground and plenty of clearances by the political leadership. It would also need a clearance from the Indian Army and the PLA commanders on the ground. This is because the terrain on the Indian side is high mountains and is glaciated in the Eastern sector. At the end of it, it would be the militaries which will chalk out the roadmap towards de-escalation and also the relocation of the forces that have been deployed forwardly.

Further, India will have to virtually airlift the equipment as the area is bordered by two 5,000 meter passes in the East Ladakh area. The Chinese side on the other side is flat Tibetan plateau.

The important thing ahead would be that the de-escalation should be based on mutual and equal security. The 2020 escalation at Galwan Valley had created a massive trust deficit and this would be hard to remove on either sides. This would mean that the ongoing de-escalation and disengagement has to be accident free and neither sides can afford a 2020 like situation. China and India will need to be mutually sensitive to each other’s concerns and this for now should not be a problem since the patrolling agreement has the approval of the leaders of both sides.

The patrolling is set to resume from 28-29 October and both sides have agreed to avoid confrontations. Further both sides will also have consider de-escalating their respective air forces. Both India and China have placed figures on standby along with tanks, rocket regiments, long-range missiles and artillery.

For now the agreement for the de-escalation is only for the Demchok and Depsang areas. In the Depsang area, the Chinese posts which had blocked Indian access to the five patrolling points on the Line of Actual Control, including the one at the critical Y Junction have been removed. On the other hand, Chinese structures at Demchok have been dismantled.

External Affairs Minister, Dr. S Jaishankar said that this is the first step towards ending hostilities along the LAC. The next step would be towards de-escalation, he said while adding that it will not place until India is sure that the Chinese are doing the same. He further hoped that the 2020 status along the Line of Actual Control would be restored.

In a major breakthrough, India and China had this month said that two nations had reached an agreement on patrolling and disengagement in Depsang and Demchok. This ended to a large extend a four year old long standoff between the two countries. While the situation along the Line of Actual Control has been very tense, there were no incidents or accidents that took place post the Galwan Valley clash in which India lost 20 of its soldiers, while an unspecified number of soldiers on the Chinese side perished.

Following the breakthrough agreement on de-escalation and disengagement, Indian Prime Minister, Narendra Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping met on the sidelines of the BRICS Summit in Russia’s Kazan. During the first bi-lateral between the two leaders that was held since 2019, PM Modi stressed on the importance of maintaining peace at the borders. He said that this should be the top priority.