Ties with China can normalise after border militarisation ends: Jaishankar

India has said that some 75 per cent of the "disengagement problems" with China are over but relations with Beijing can normalise only after the increasing militarisation on the disputed frontier ends.

There cannot be violence on the border and then say the rest of the relationship is insulated from it, external affairs minister S Jaishankar said on Thursday (September 12).

He was taking part in an interactive session at the Geneva Centre for Security Policy.

Talks on border row

Jaishankar said the Galwan Valley clashes of June 2020 affected the "entirety" of India-China ties.

He said negotiations were on between the two countries to find a solution to the lingering problem.

"Now those negotiations are going on. We made some progress. I would say roughly you can say about 75 per cent of the disengagement problems are sorted out," he said.

Militarisation on the border

But Jaishankar added that there was a bigger issue as both China and India have brought their militaries close up and, in that sense, there was a militarisation of the border.

"How does one deal with it? I think we have to deal with it. In the meanwhile, after the clash, it has affected the entirety of the relationship because you cannot have violence at the border and then say the rest of the relationship is insulated from it," he said.

The minister indicated that the bilateral relationship can improve if there was a resolution to the row.

Jaishankar calls it ‘complex’ relationship

"We hope that if there is a solution to the disengagement and there is a return to peace and tranquility, then we can look at other possibilities.”

The Indian and Chinese troops are locked in a standoff in certain friction points in eastern Ladakh even as the two sides completed disengagement from several areas following extensive diplomatic and military talks.

Describing India-China relations as "complex", Jaishankar said the ties were kind of normalised in the late 1980s on the assumption that there would be peace at the border.

Jaishankar blames China

"After things started to take a better turn in 1988, we had a series of agreements which stabilised the border," he said.

"What happened in 2020 was in violation of multiple agreements for some reasons which are still entirely not clear to us; we can speculate on it.

"The Chinese actually moved a very large number of troops to the Line of Actual Control at the border and naturally in response, we moved our troops up. It was very difficult for us because we were in the middle of a Covid lockdown at that time," he said.

Not legally delineated border

"Now we could see straight away that this was a very dangerous development because the presence of a large number of troops in these extreme heights and extreme cold in near proximity could lead to a mishap.

“And that's exactly what happened in June 2022," he said, referring to Galwan Valley clashes.

The minister said: "We have now been negotiating close to four years and the first step of that is what we called disengagement which is their troops go back to their normal operating bases and our troops go back to their normal operating bases and where required we have an arrangement about patrolling because both of us patrol regularly in that border as I said it is not a legally delineated border."

(With agency inputs)