China’s foreign minister Wang Yi reaching Moscow to discuss total disengagement in Ladakh with Jaishankar

The much awaited meeting of foreign ministers is expected to record a forward movement towards complete disengagement and de-escalation of People’s Liberation Army.

Updated on: Sep 7, 2020, 15:45:26 IST

Hindustan Times, New Delhi | By Shishir Gupta

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With Chinese State Councillor and foreign minister Wang Yi confirming his arrival in Moscow on Wednesday evening, the bilateral meeting with Indian External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar to discuss ways and means to resolve the present Ladakh standoff is confirmed on September 10. The two leaders are meeting on the sidelines of Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) ministerial hosted by Russian Federation. The time of the meeting is being finalised.

During the meeting, foreign minister S Jaishankar will remind his Chinese counterpart Wang Yi to implement the past bilateral agreements in letter and spirit including keeping minimum forces along the 3488 km LAC.

While EAM Jaishankar will arrive in Moscow on Tuesday evening with desk officers of China division, Foreign minister Wang will reach the next day to discuss the border escalation in Ladakh. The much awaited meeting of foreign ministers is expected to record a forward movement towards complete disengagement and de-escalation of People’s Liberation Army (PLA) with the Indian side insistent upon China to follow bilateral agreements and protocols since 1993.

Although Indian Defence Minister Rajnath Singh met his Chinese counterpart Gen Wei Fenghe on the same platform on September 5, but the talks did not yield any result with both sides merely stating their formal positions. The meeting took place after Indian Army troops pre-empted a PLA aggression on south of Pangong Tso on August 29-30 and occupied the Rezang La ridgeline without either yielding to Chinese show of military strength or allowing them to cross the Indian perception of Line of Actual Control (LAC).

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During the meeting, foreign minister Jaishankar will remind his Chinese counterpart to implement the past bilateral agreements in letter and spirit including keeping minimum forces along the 3488km LAC. He will also demand that PLA forces restore status quo ante at Gogra-Hot Springs, Finger 4 relief feature on the north bank of Pangong Tso.

Since the Indian pre-emption on August 29-30, the Xi Jinping regime has been asking the Indian Army to withdraw from their new positions south of Pangong Tso. It is understood that the Chinese Communist Government’s move to deflect domestic discontent by invoking nationalism in Ladakh and South China Sea has not worked. According to China watchers, the PLA aggression in Ladakh will continue till such time CCP General Secretary XI is able to control the internal dissent whether it be on count of language as in Inner Mongolia, floods, economy or coronavirus which initiated from Wuhan.

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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