All eyes on Modi-Xi meet for next steps on LAC standoff

The first formal meeting between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping in five years will be closely watched for the next steps towards ending a border standoff that has taken bilateral ties to their lowest point in six decades.
Modi and Xi are set to meet on the margins of the Brics Summit in the Russian city of Kazan on Wednesday afternoon, foreign secretary Vikram Misri said on Tuesday. The development followed India’s announcement that it had reached an agreement with China on patrolling arrangements along the Line of Actual Control (LAC) and Beijing’s assertion that it will work with New Delhi to implement the understanding.
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Barring brief encounters on the sidelines of the Brics Summit in Johannesburg in August 2023 and the G20 Summit in Bali in November 2022, Modi and Xi last held a structured meeting at their informal summit in the southern Indian city of Mamalllapuram in October 2019, months before the start of the border standoff.
That informal summit was the second such meeting between the two leaders under a new mechanism that was started following the 2017 border face-off between Indian and Chinese troops on Bhutan’s Doklam plateau. Modi and Xi had held their first informal summit in the Chinese city of Wuhan in April 2018.
The informal summits were conceived as relatively less structured engagements where the two leaders could directly take up contentious issues such as the long-standing border dispute. The mechanism collapsed in the wake of the border standoff in Ladakh sector of the LAC, which began in April-May 2020.
Both India and China are yet to provide details of the agreement on patrolling on the LAC, which Misri said was concluded early on Monday morning. The contours of the understanding and the next steps towards resolving the ongoing standoff in Ladakh could emerge following the Modi-Xi meeting in Kazan, people familiar with matter said on condition of anonymity.
Misri said at a media briefing on Tuesday that the agreement will result in patrolling and grazing activities in the “pending areas under discussion” will “revert to the situation as it obtained in 2020”.
The pending areas or “friction points” are Depsang and Demchok, where Chinese troops have blocked access to traditional patrolling points for Indian forces and barred local residents from access grazing areas for their livestock.
Disengagement agreements reached previously with China were “not reopened” with the new agreement, which focused only on issues that “remained outstanding in the last couple of years”, Misri said.
Another important issue, Misri said, is averting further face-offs and clashes between troops and India expects that the new arrangements will prevent the recurrence of skirmishes on the LAC.
“We will have to make continuous efforts that the mechanics of the agreement will be such that such clashes can be stopped,” he said, adding that the two sides will initially focus on disengagement before taking up de-escalation and de-induction of forces at the “appropriate time”.