India, China to hold border mechanism meeting in Beijing

India and China are scheduled to hold a border mechanism meeting in Beijing this weekend to finalise the Border Defence Cooperation Agreement (BDCA), record forward movement on clarification of the 3,488 km Line of Actual Control (LAC) and device new procedures to handle future face-off between the two armies.

Updated on: Sep 25, 2013, 01:16:37 IST

Hindustan Times | By Shishir Gupta, New Delhi

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India and China are scheduled to hold a border mechanism meeting in Beijing this weekend to finalise the Border Defence Cooperation Agreement (BDCA), record forward movement on clarification of the 3,488 km Line of Actual Control (LAC) and device new procedures to handle future face-off between the two armies.

While the bilateral strategic economic dialogue is presently on in Beijing, the meeting of working mechanism for consultation and coordination on India-China border affairs takes place on September 29-30, 2013. At this meeting, joint secretary (east Asia) Gautam Bambawalla will hold talks with director general (boundary) Ouyang Yujing to close the BDCA agreement so that it is ready for signing during Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s trip to Beijing on October 23 next month.

It is understood that the agreement is close to finalisation, but India is looking for dilution in the Chinese draft that calls for a ban on new structures being constructed within 20 km of the LAC. The border mechanism meeting will designate officers who will handle the hotline between Indian Directorate General of Military Operations (DGMO) and Peoples’ Liberation Army headquarters. The agreement is designed to foster confidence between the two armies. Since the last July border mechanism meeting, Delhi is pushing Beijing to finalise on a mutually agreed boundary line to rule out any repeat of Depsang face-off this April. India wants to set in place new mechanisms to handle face-offs on LAC between the armies.

Beijing feels that Delhi has expanded the number of disputed areas in the eastern Ladakh sector. In 1990s, according to Beijing, there were two mutually accepted disputed areas — Trig Heights and Demchok — but the number went up to 12 after India and China showed western sector maps to each other at the 12th meeting of the expert group on June 17, 2002.

India says that growth of bilateral relations is rooted in peaceful border and that PLA activity in Depsang and Chumar sector in the past two years has been an area of concern. It is for this reason that it wants to have an agreed line so that there is no option for any disagreement in future.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Shishir Gupta
Shishir Gupta is Executive Editor at Hindustan Times and one of India's top journalists covering national security, strategic affairs, foreign policy and geopolitics. Over the past three decades, he has extensively reported on India's military, diplomatic and security landscape, covering every major conflict and national security challenge, from the 1999 Kargil War and the 2020 East Ladakh standoff to Operation Sindoor in 2025. He has also covered major terror attacks, including the IC-814 hijacking, the 26/11 Mumbai attacks and the 2025 Pahalgam terror strike, along with numerous Pakistan-backed terrorist incidents in the Kashmir Valley and across India. He has reported on national and state elections for more than three decades. A recognised authority on strategic affairs, Gupta has covered India's nuclear programme since the Pokhran-II (Shakti series) tests in May 1998 and has written extensively on global nuclear issues, Indian diplomacy and the country's expanding global outreach. He has also reported widely on international conflicts and terrorism, with a special focus on the Indian subcontinent. Gupta has interviewed Prime Minister Narendra Modi more than four times, including Modi's first interview with the print media after becoming Prime Minister in May 2014. His other interviews include three with the Dalai Lama, as well as conversations with Benjamin Netanyahu, Amit Shah, Yogi Adityanath, S. Jaishankar, Nirmala Sitharaman and Piyush Goyal. He is the author of Indian Mujahideen: The Enemy Within (Hachette, 2011) and Himalayan Face-off: Chinese Assertion and Indian Riposte (Hachette, 2014). He was awarded the Chevening-Wolfson Joint Scholarship at Wolfson College, University of Cambridge, UK, in 1998 and participated in the International Visitor Leadership Program (IVLP) of the US State Department in 2006. He received the Ben Gurion Prize from Israel in 2011 and the K. Subrahmanyam Prize for Strategic Studies in 2015 from the Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (MP-IDSA). Since 2024, he has hosted Point Blank, Hindustan Times' weekly YouTube show on global geopolitics.Read More

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