Next round of LAC row talks soon: Army chief
NEW DELHI: The next round of talks with the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) to cool tensions along the Line of Actual Control (LAC) in eastern Ladakh could take place in the second week of October, Indian Army chief General Manoj Mukund Naravane said on Saturday.
The situation on the contested LAC was under control and outstanding problems with the Chinese army could be resolved through talks, Naravane told reporters in Leh, Ladakh’s capital. The dialogue will be held at the level of brigade commanders, division commanders and corps commanders, he said.
Naravane was in Ladakh for a security review. His itinerary included visits to forward areas. The Indian and Chinese armies have been locked in a border standoff for almost 17 months. Both sides are negotiating to reduce tensions.
The two armies have so far carried out 12 rounds of talks to resolve the border row that erupted in May 2020. “The 13th round of talks will take place soon,” the Indian army chief said. “Things move forward with every round of talks and gradually problems can be resolved through talks.”
Outstanding problems at Hot Springs, or Patrolling Point-15, which is one of the flashpoints on the LAC, could be taken up during the 13th round of talks, officials familiar with the develtroops, opment said, asking not to be named.
“Engagement is always good for future course of action, and whenever there is a dialogue, the outcome will be embedded with a certain amount of reconciliation to move forward,” said former Northern Army Commander Lieutenant General BS Jaswal (retd).
The rival armies carried out the second round of disengagement in early August, when the two sides pulled back their forward deployed troops from Gogra, or Patrolling Point-17a, with the breakthrough coming after the 12th round of talks.
Earlier, India and China wrapped up the disengagement process in Pangong Tso area in mid-february, with their armies pulling back forward-deployed tanks, infantry combat vehicles and artillery guns from strategic heights where rival soldiers last year fired shots for the first time at LAC after 45 years.
The previous recorded incident when bullets were fired at the LAC was in October 1975, when PLA ambushed an Indian patrol in Arunachal Pradesh’s Tulung La sector and shot four soldiers dead.
Naravane said PLA has built a lot of infrastructure on the Chinese side of LAC to accommodate more troops and the Indian army was monitoring the developments and taking countermeasures, including the induction of modern weapons such as the K9 Vajra-t self-propelled guns, artillery guns.
Private defence firm Larsen & Toubro and South Korea’s Hanwha Techwin (HTW) have built the mobile guns in India. The guns were meant to be deployed in the plains, but the army has carried out some minor changes to deploy them in high-altitude areas.
The problems at Hot Springs and Depsang are yet to be resolved. To be sure, the problems at Depsang predate the current border standoff. Even after the disengagement from Pangong Tso and Gogra, the two sides still have 50,000 to 60,000 troops each in the Ladakh area.
A day before he left for the Ladakh visit on Friday, Naravane said in Delhi that developments along LAC in Ladakh added to challenges faced by the Indian military on the “active