India and China have completed the disengagement exercise in the Depsang and Demchok regions of Eastern Ladakh. This is a welcome move as patrolling will begin soon, the Indian Army has said.
Further to mark the occasion of Deepawali, sweets would be exchanged with the troops from the Chinese side on Thursday, October 31.
Currently the verification process is on and the modalities of the patrolling are being worked out by the area commanders. In Kolkata, Chinese Ambassador, Xu Feihong told reporters that the two countries had reached an important agreement.
The Ambassador went on to say, “there was a very important meeting between President Xi Jinping and PM Narendra Modi. Now that the two leaders have reached important understandings, they will be the guidelines for the further development of relations between our two countries. I hope that, under the guidance of this consensus, our relations will be moving forward smoothly in the future and they will not be restricted or interrupted by specific disagreements between our two sides.”
He added that as two neighbouring countries, it is natural that we have some differences and the most important thing is that how the situation is handled. The meeting between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping has set a good example for us on how to handle these differences, Feihong added.
PM Modi and President Xi Jinping had met on the sidelines of the BRICS Summit in Russia last week.
On Tuesday an aerial verification was successfully completed over Depsang. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles were deployed to confirm that temporary installations had been removed and the planned withdrawal had taken place. A similar verification could however not be completed in Demchok due to bad weather conditions. However that would be completed today depending on the weather.
India had on October 21 announced that a patrolling agreement had been reached between the two countries at the contentious areas of Depsang and Demchok. India also said that the troops would return to the positions that existed between the stand-off in 2020.
The process included the dismantling of structures, and also the restoration of land on which they stood to their original condition.
The Indian and Chinese armies have pulled back their forward deployed troops and equipment from the two flashpoints. Temporary structures have also been dismantled at the sites that they had been built on during the stand-off.
With the disengagement completed, the Indian soldiers will resume their patrolling in areas that had been cut off during the presence of the People’s Liberation Army. There would however not be any creation of buffer zones following the disengagement at Depsang and Demchok.
It may be recalled and India and China had disengaged from Galwan, Pinging Tso, Gorge (PP-17A) and the Hotsprings (PP-15) areas and had also created buffer zones.
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