The joint announcement of Foreign Minister S Jaishankar and his Chinese counterpart Wang Yi in Moscow on September 10 – helped by Russian ...
The joint announcement of Foreign Minister S Jaishankar and his Chinese counterpart Wang Yi in Moscow on September 10 – helped by Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov – is like a straw for drowning men to clutch. The three foreign ministers were there for the Russia, India and China meeting. In case we have forgotten, Russia-India-China is a trilateral geopolitical group formed to balance growing United States and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization unilateralism.
The operative part of the joint statement is that the military commander-level talks between India and China will continue. The talks are ongoing and do not preclude jockeying and jostling for better positions on the field to assert each sides Lines of Actual Control. The huge sigh of relief may be premature for talks do not mean a solution. Right now it only means a postponement of armed conflict.
We have two outstanding issues between India and China. The larger one is about large tracts of territory in Ladakh and Arunachal Pradesh. These two territorial disputes are not going to be resolved even in the foreseeable long term. Hence, Deng Xiaoping sagaciously suggested to Rajiv Gandhi in their 1988 meeting at Beijing that it is best left to history. A hundred...
