NEW DELHI, Oct 21, 2024 (BSS/AFP) - India said Monday it had struck an 
agreement with neighbour China for military patrols in highly contested 
border zones, aiming to resolve issues that flared when their rival armies 
clashed in 2020.

The announcement comes a day before Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is 
expected to attend a BRICS summit in Russia, which Chinese President Xi 
Jinping is also due to attend.

China and India, the world's two most populous nations, are intense rivals 
and have regularly accused each other of trying to seize territory along 
their unofficial divide, known as the Line of Actual Control.

After the 2020 border skirmish, which killed at least 20 Indian and four 
Chinese soldiers, both sides pulled back tens of thousands of troops and 
agreed not to send patrols into a narrow dividing strip, known as the Line of 
Actual Control.

"Over the last several weeks Indian and Chinese diplomatic and military 
negotiators have been in close contact with each other," India's top foreign 
ministry bureaucrat Vikram Misri told reporters.

"And, as a result of these discussions, agreement has been arrived at on 
patrolling arrangements along the Line of Actual Control in the India-China 
border areas, leading to disengagement and eventually a resolution of the 
issues that had arisen in these areas in 2020."

India's external affairs minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar said disengagement 
with China was "complete" and that details would come out in "due course".

"The important thing is if we have reached an understanding, I think what it 
does is it creates a basis for peace and tranquillity along the border, which 
were there before 2020," he said at a conference hosted by Indian broadcaster 
NDTV.

"If there is no peace and tranquillity, how can other areas of bilateral ties 
improve?"

India is wary of its northern neighbour, and disputes over their 3,500-
kilometre (2,200-mile) frontier are a perennial source of tension.

China claims all of India's northeastern state of Arunachal Pradesh, 
considering it part of Tibet, and the two fought a border war in 1962.

The two countries also bitterly compete for wider strategic influence across 
South Asia.