NEW DEHLI : India’s foreign minister, Subrahmanyam Jaishankar on Monday said that the situation along the border with China in Ladakh was “very serous” and called for “deep conversations between the two sides at the political level”.
The ties between the world’s two most populous nations are tense since April where the troops have been in an eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation in the disputed region.
“If you look at the 30 years, because it was peace and tranquillity at the border, it allowed relation to progress,” said Jaishankar while addressing an event.
India and China need to find an “accommodation”, he said.
Jaishankar is scheduled to meet his Chinese counterpart in Moscow on September 10 on the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation’s Foreign Minister-level meeting.
‘Indian troops fired warning shots’
China accused Indian troops of violating a bilateral agreement and firing warning shots in the air during a confrontation with Chinese personnel on the disputed border on Monday.
Chinese border guards took “countermeasures” to stabilise the situation, Zhang Shuili, spokesman for the military’s western command theatre, said in a statement published by the military’s official news website early on Tuesday.
The statement did not make clear what those measures were or whether Chinese troops also fired warning shots.
Both sides have observed a long-held protocol to avoid using firearms on the sensitive, high altitude frontier running through the western Himalayas, though this agreement has not prevented casualties.
Twenty Indian soldiers were killed in hand-to-hand fighting in a clash in June, an incident that led to China and India deploying additional forces along the frontier.
“We request the Indian side to immediately stop dangerous actions…and strictly investigate and punish personnel who fired shots to ensure that similar incidents do not occur again,” Zhang said in the statement.
The Indian embassy in Beijing did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment outside of business hours.
