Galwan clashes left India’s relationship with China ‘profoundly disturbed’: Jaishankar

External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar. (File)

The June clashes between India and China in Ladakh’s Galwan Valley had a very deep public and political impact and left the relationship between the two countries “profoundly disturbed”, External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar said on Friday.

Speaking at a virtual event hosted by the Asia Society, Jaishankar said there are multiple agreements between the two countries, starting from 1993, which limited the military forces that came to the border areas, how to manage the border, how border troops behave when they approach each other.

“So, from the conceptual level down to the behavioural level, there was an entire sort of framework out there. What we saw this year was a departure from this entire series of agreements. The massing of large amount of Chinese forces on the border was clearly contrary to all of this,” news agency PTI quoted Jaishankar as saying.

“And when you had friction point which was large number of troops at different points very close to each other, then something tragic like what happened on 15th of June happened,” he said.

“To underline the enormity of that, it was the first military casualty we had after 1975. So what it has done is, it has obviously had a very deep public impact, very major political impact and it has left the relationship profoundly disturbed,” he added.

India and China are locked in a military standoff in eastern Ladakh for over five months. On the intervening night of June 15-16, a violent encounter with the Chinese at the Line of Actual Control (LAC) in Galwan resulted in the death of 20 Indian soldiers and an unspecified number of Chinese casualties.

“What happened this year of course was a very sharp departure. Now it’s not just a sharp departure from the conversation, it’s a sharp departure over a course of relationship over 30 years,” Jaishankar said.

In response to a question on what did the Chinese actually do on the border and why they did it, he said: “I haven’t frankly got any reasonable explanation that I can tell myself from them on this matter.”

On Thursday, the foreign affairs minister said that India and China are engaged in talks to resolve the border standoff and what is going on is “something confidential” between the two sides.

Asked about the outcome of the ongoing talks during an online conclave, Jaishankar gave a cryptic response that the “discussions are going on and it is a work in progress”.

At the same time, he said there has been a troop build-up along the LAC and in many ways it has no precedence in the recent past.

He said relations between India and China improved following the signing of a series of agreements since 1993 on maintaining peace and tranquillity along the border. “For the last 30 years, we have built a relationship predicated on peace and tranquility along the border,” he said.

Jaishankar said that if peace and tranquility is not ensured and the agreements signed are not honoured, then that is the “primary cause of disruption”.

(Inputs from PTI)

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