China-India border dispute: are both sides breaking the deadlock in the Himalayas?

Indian media reports quoting government sources said the two sides had agreed to withdraw troops, tanks and artillery from the Line of Actual Control

Chinese state-backed tabloid Global Times said the reports were ‘not accurate’ and meant to appease the public before Diwali

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An Indian Army soldier stands guard near the Line of Actual Control. Photo: AFP

Published: 10:31pm, 12 Nov 2020Updated: 7:04am, 13 Nov 2020

Six months into the high-altitude border stand-off between Chinese and Indian troops, a new disagreement has erupted between the two neighbours, only this time it’s over a purported resolution to the impasse.

Quoting senior sources in the government, the Indian media has been reporting since Wednesday that the two countries had agreed to break the deadlock and withdraw troops, tanks and artillery from the Line of Actual Control (LAC), the 3,488km undemarcated border between the two. The reports come just days after senior commanders from both militaries met for the eighth time since the stand-off began to resolve the border crisis.

On Thursday, however, the state-backed nationalist tabloid Global Times rebutted the reports, calling them “not accurate” and “not helpful for the two sides to reach their established goals”, quoting sources in the Chinese government.

The Global Times also said India’s “ideas about the LAC” were “unrealistic”, reflecting the deep divisions between New Delhi and Beijing around the current crisis. Its report quoted Qiao Feng, director of the research department at the National Strategy Institute at Tsinghua University, as saying that the information given to Indian media was “to pressure China as well as relieve the pressure on the Indians” ahead of the Hindu festival of Diwali on Saturday.

There was no official comment by China’s foreign ministry in its daily press briefing.

On Thursday, Russia’s deputy chief of mission in India, Roman Babushkin, said that Moscow was “naturally concerned” over the tensions between China and India, and he prodded the two countries to engage in “constructive dialogue” while warning that the tensions between the two could be “misused by other players”.

Indian news reports, quoting military and government sources, had said that the Indian Army was considering a “Chinese proposal” to resolve the tense troop stand-off through a temporary disengagement of soldiers, artillery and firepower from their forward positions on the northern and southern banks of Pangong Tso lake, in eastern Ladakh.