My first duty to Indians is to secure the border, says EAM Jaishankar

Normalcy in ties with China will only be achieved based on traditional deployment of troops, External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar said

Normalcy in bilateral ties with China will only be achieved based on the traditional deployment of troops and that will be the prerequisite for the relationship going forward with Beijing, External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar said on Wednesday.

"My first duty to Indians is to secure the border. I can never compromise on that," Jaishankar said while responding to a question on the current state of India's relations with China during his interaction with the Indian diaspora here in the Malaysian capital.

He said every country wants "good relations with its neighbours. Who doesn't? But every relationship has to be founded on some basis."

"We're still negotiating with the Chinese. I talk to my counterpart. We meet from time to time. Our military commanders negotiate with each other. But we are very clear that we had an agreement. There is a Line of Actual Control. We have a tradition of not bringing troops to that line. Both of us have bases some distance away, which is our traditional deployment place. And we want that normalcy," he said.

"So that normalcy that returns to where we are in terms of the troop deployment will be the basis for the relationship going forward. And we've been very, very honest with the Chinese about it," Jaishankar said.

He said that in the case of China, the relationship has been difficult for a variety of reasons, including the fact that the two sides have a boundary dispute.

"But despite the boundary dispute over the many years, we actually built up a substantial relationship because we agreed that while we will negotiate the boundary dispute, both of us will agree that we will not bring soldiers in large numbers to the boundary. And we will never have a situation where there'll be violence and bloodshed on the contrary," he said.

So this understanding which started in the late 1980s, actually was reflected in several agreements. And those agreements gave the relationship stability based on which in other areas, the relationship went forward, he said.

"Now, unfortunately, for reasons which are still not clear to us, these agreements were broken in 2020. And we actually had violence and bloodshed on the border," Jaishankar said.

Ties between India and China nose-dived significantly following the deadly clash in the Galwan Valley in June 2020 that marked the most serious military conflict between the two sides in more than four decades.