'Had difficult time on northern borders': EAM Jaishankar on dispute with China in Ladakh

Amid an ongoing border dispute with China in eastern Ladakh, External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar on Saturday said that India has had an "exceptionally difficult" challenge along the northern borders in the last three years and the country responded to it very resolutely. He said India has been maintaining the kind of military deployment necessary for national security.

"It could even be what happens at our border. Again, you all know in the last three years, we have had an exceptionally difficult time in terms of the challenges on our northern borders," Jaishankar said while speaking at the FICCI. "Even though this happened in the middle of Covid, we responded very resolutely, very determinedly, and to date, we are still deployed in whatever manner is necessary for our national security."

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India has been locked in a border dispute with China in eastern Ladakh since April 2020. While disagreement over the border line is decades-old, China's unilateral move to advance into areas claimed by India triggered a fresh round of border skirmishes. Since then, both sides have been involved in multiple rounds of talks to disengage from friction points. Despite several rounds of talks, India and China have achieved limited success, with disengagement yet to be done with two crucial friction points.

Jaishankar, who is spearheading India's foreign policy, has maintained that New Delhi's relationship with Beijing has not been normal. "India-China relations are not normal and cannot be normal if peace and tranquillity in border areas are disturbed," he had said in May after a meeting of foreign ministers of the member nations of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) in Goa.

On Saturday, Jaishankar also talked about the Quad, an informal strategic forum comprising four nations, the US, India, Australia, and Japan. China has been opposed to this grouping ever since its formation. It claims that the alliance is a "tool for containing and besieging China to maintain US hegemony".

Without naming China, the EAM said: "If somebody else is uncomfortable, that's their problem...at the end of the day, we have to do what we have to do. however difficult and tough that is. It is about the confidence of being able to exercise choice after choice."

Talking about India's growth story, Jaishankar said there is no question that the "world looks at us as an exceptionally strong area of growth". "We have made big decisions but we are poised to make many more. We have nursed big ambitions, we have implemented much of what we promised but again there is still a lot we have to achieve," he said.