New Delhi, Sep 18 (IANS): As India and China Thursday expressed their resolve to sort out their border issues, experts welcomed the move and said it is high time the two nations accomplished this.
The experts also said that as long as the two nations did not resolve their border issues, incursions by Chinese troops in Ladakh like the one witnessed Thursday will continue.
"In 1996, India and China agreed that the LAC will be a line of peace... and that actually happened. In almost 20 years, LAC has been peaceful compared to Line of Control (LoC)," strategic analyst Commodore Uday Bhaskar (retd) told IANS.
"But at the same time, unless the border issue is resolved, any side can walk over in the other side's perceived territory... The Chinese version is that India is pushing over into their side," said Bhaskar.
He said the issue can be resolved only by politically and not by referring to the map.
"This issue can be resolved only by political settlement, not by referring to map. Both sides should revisit their national stand," he said. "There is no point in saying our stand of 1962 will not change, we need to revisit our positions of 1950s and 1960s and make the narratives more malleable."
Bhaskar also said the fact that stand-offs are occurring over the boundary means that "basically the arrangements are not working... they are less than adequate."
Well-known China expert Srikanth Kondapalli told IANS that though both sides have said they want the boundary dispute to be resolved soon, the fact that they did not announce the Special Representative during the talks was surprising.
He said Ajit Doval is the national security advisor but he has not been named the Special Representative as yet. Former NSA Shivshankar Menon was the Special Representative for the border talks from the Indian side.
Kondapalli also said that Modi’s reference that clarification was needed on the LAC was useful. “Once there is clarification about the LAC then it would lead to demarcation, and subsequently relaxation of military tensions.”
Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (IDSA) research assistant Avinash Godbole said not having an agreed border is making the situation difficult.
"The announcement made today is a major progress towards resolving border issue between India and China. Dialogue is the only way to resolve it," Godbole told IANS.
"While we are not aware what are the reasons behind Thursday's incursion by China, it can be some local issue, or strategic issue, but when there is not a decided boundary such things are taken casually," he said.
He added that meetings have been going on between India and China for resolving the issue.
"Every successive meeting is held only if there is some satisfactory development. There have been 17 meetings so far, but we don't know what the negotiations are," he said.
Bhaskar, meanwhile, added that it was intriguing why Pakistan was not mentioned at all.
"I am a bit intrigued, there has been no reference to Pakistan. India's concern is not just the border issue but also China's support to Pakistan which supports Pakistan's military which in turn supports terrorists," he added.