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NEW DELHI: India and China will seek to withdraw from the brink of military conflict in a likely meeting between Foreign Minister S Jaishankar and its Chinese counterpart Wang Yi on SCO margins in Moscow Thursday. While the Chinese Foreign Ministry did not confirm the meeting at its press conference, despite being asked repeatedly about it, Chinese fonts here said to be expected, even if there was no “confirmed information”.
However, there was not much to inspire confidence about the overall situation. Chinese sources on Wednesday echoed PLA claims that Indian soldiers “provoked” the Chinese by crossing LAC in the Pangong Tso southern bank area and opening fire. Indian officials here did not risk guessing the outcome of Thursday’s meeting.
Jaishankar will also join Wang and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov for a lunch before the bilateral proposal with Wang.
The trilateral meeting was first announced by the Chinese Foreign Ministry and later confirmed by Indian and Russian diplomatic sources. While Russia had said this week that it will encourage any effort for dialogue between India and China, official sources said it was not about Moscow mediating in the eastern Ladakh border clash.
“RIC (Russia-India-China) foreign ministers, even in the past, have had separate meetings on the fringes of multilateral forums such as BRICS and SCO,” said a government source. While bilateral disputes cannot be raised on the SCO, diplomatic sources said that one of the Eurasian group’s goals is to promote “good neighborly ties” between member states and the platform can always be used to build mutual trust between them. As the host nation, Russia played the leading role in organizing the meeting.
The trilateral could help break the ice ahead of what will be the first in-person bilateral meeting between Jaishankar and Wang after the current military confrontation was reported in May. Jaishankar is likely to insist that China restore the pre-April status quo in LAC and an early and complete disengagement by implementing the understandings reached at the senior commanders’ meetings since June 6. The government has been trying to remind that the behavior of Chinese troops, which sparked another outbreak in the Pangong Tso South Bank area this week, will seriously damage bilateral relations.
However, before thinking in terms of a breakthrough, the two leaders will first have to address the situation that led, as the Indian military put it, to gunfire at LAC on Monday for the first time in 45 years. India has flatly denied claims that Indian soldiers crossed LAC.
The situation in Pangong appeared to have changed recently with Indian soldiers taking control of strategic peaks on the south bank. The PLA has bitterly protested what government sources have described as “readjustment” in the deployment of Indian troops in the area and Wang is likely to raise the same at the meeting.
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