India and China have made a significant step to settle a protracted boundary dispute by agreeing to initiate the process of delimitation and ultimately demarcation of the boundary between the two countries. This was gained in the 24th round of the Special Representative talks between the National Security advisors of India and the Chinese Foreign ministers, who visited New Delhi on Tuesday.
The bilateral agreement has been to work on a phased, piecemeal manner with the least controversial sectors of the boundary. The initial stage will be the formation of a technical expert group under the Working Mechanism of Consultation and Coordination on India-China Border Affairs (WMCC) to be headed by a joint secretary (Ministry of External Affairs). The group will flag areas that have less friction. Upon identification, there will be delimitation of such pieces of land, and then the actual demarcation of the boundary will be done physically using border pillars.
The strategy is known as an early-harvest approach, which is to establish trust between the two Asian powers by first solving the less difficult points before tackling the more difficult ones. Notably, both of them have also worked toward military disengagement along the Eastern Sector after the fighting of May 2020. Although unsolved, buffer zone issues, India and China have settled into a non-offensive posture along the Line of Actual Control (LAC), with both armies repositioning tanks, artillery, and rockets to drastically minimize the threats of confrontation.
The fact that the development implies a firm desire to restore relations with the status quo prevailing before 2020, when the relations were quite stable. The move comes after a scheduled meeting between the Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the Chinese President Xi Jinping in October 2024, and the two heads will do the same in the SCO Summit in Tianjin on August 31. There are descriptions that the two sides will lead to normalization.
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