Jaishankar holds talks with Chinese counterpart Qin Gang

Benaulim (Goa), May 4 (PTI) External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar on Thursday held bilateral talks with visiting Chinese Foreign Minister Qin Gang with the border row along the Line of Actual Control (LAC) in eastern Ladakh believed to be in focus.

The talks took place in a beach resort in Benaulim on the sidelines of a meeting of the Council of Foreign Ministers of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO).

The three-year border row in eastern Ladakh will be a focus area of the talks, people familiar with the matter said ahead of the meeting.

The Jaishankar-Gang meeting was their second one in the last two months. The Chinese foreign minister visited India in March to attend a meeting of the G20 foreign ministers.

On the sidelines of the meeting, Jaishankar held talks with Qin during which he conveyed to his Chinese counterpart that the state of India-China relations is “abnormal” because of the lingering border row in eastern Ladakh.

Last week, Defence Minister Rajnath Singh told his Chinese counterpart Li Shangfu at a meeting that China’s violation of existing border agreements “eroded” the entire basis of ties between the two countries and that all issues relating to the frontier must be resolved in accordance with the existing pacts.

The meeting on April 27 took place in New Delhi on the sidelines of a conclave of the SCO defence ministers.

The ties between India and China nosedived significantly following the fierce clash in the Galwan Valley in June 2020 that marked the most serious military conflict between the two sides in decades.

The Indian and the Chinese troops are locked in a standoff in a few friction points along the LAC in eastern Ladakh for the last three years though they disengaged in several places following a series of military and diplomatic talks.

India has been maintaining that the relationship between the two countries should be based on “three mutuals” — mutual respect, mutual sensitivity and mutual interests.

The eastern Ladakh border standoff erupted on May 5, 2020, following a violent clash in the Pangong lake area.

As a result of a series of military and diplomatic talks, the two sides completed the disengagement process in 2021 on the north and south banks of the Pangong lake and in the Gogra area.