New Delhi | 08-09-2020: Two days ahead of his trip to Moscow where he is likely to hold discussions on the border stand-off with China’s Foreign Minister and State Councillor Wang Yi, External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar Monday laid down the broad contours of the upcoming bilateral conversation by underlining that “the state of the border cannot be delinked from the state of the relationship.”
Acknowledging that the current situation along the Line of Actual Control was “very serious,” Jaishankar said that it called for “very, very deep conversations” between the two sides at a “political level”.
He was speaking at Express Adda moderated by C Raja Mohan, The Indian Express Contributing Editor and Director, Institute of South Asian Studies, National University of Singapore; and Associate Editor and Diplomatic Correspondent Shubhajit Roy.
Jaishankar is going to Moscow to attend the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation foreign ministers’ meeting between September 9 to 11, where he is likely to have his first in-person meeting with his Chinese counterpart since the standoff began early May.
He said that “if peace and tranquillity on the border is not a given, then it cannot be that the rest of the relationship continues on the same basis”.
“If you look at the last 30 years, because there was peace and tranquillity on the border — there were problems also…I am not disregarding that — that allowed the rest of the relationship to progress. As a result, China became (India’s) second largest trading partner…Clearly peace and tranquillity is the basis for the relationship.”
(IE)
