The disengagement of the Indian and Chinese militaries along the Line of Actual Control in eastern Ladakh is the first step, which will be followed by de-escalation, said External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar on Sunday.

The subsequent step of de-escalation will not take place until India is sure that the same is happening on the Chinese side, the minister said at a press conference in Mumbai.

“The completion of disengagement is the first step,” said Jaishankar. “After this, we will talk about de-escalation, followed by how we can manage the patrolling at the border.”

Since mid-2020, the Indian and the Chinese militaries have been locked in a standoff at several locations in eastern Ladakh after India accused the Chinese military of incursions at several points along the disputed border. The tensions escalated in June 2020 when a violent face-off between Indian and Chinese soldiers took place in Ladakh’s Galwan Valley. It led to the deaths of 20 Indian soldiers.

Since the Galwan clashes, China and India have held several rounds of military and diplomatic talks to resolve the standoff. While military disengagement had been achieved in some of the locations in the past four years, sticking points remained.

On Sunday, Jaishankar said that it was expected that India would return to the patrolling status at Ladakh’s Depsang and Demchok that existed before the border tensions began in mid-2020.

On Friday, Beijing confirmed that the disengagement process had begun, saying that “Chinese and Indian frontier troops are engaged in relevant work, which is going smoothly at the moment”.

This came after Indian media quoted unidentified Indian Army officials as saying that disengagement had started on October 22.

On October 21, New Delhi announced that India and China had reached a patrolling arrangement along the Line of Actual Control, “leading to the disengagement” of the two countries’ militaries in eastern Ladakh.

The announcement came two days before Prime Minister Narendra Modi met Chinese President Xi Jinping in Russia. This was their first bilateral meeting since the military standoff between the two countries started in 2020.

The Ministry of External Affairs did not provide details about the agreement on patrolling. But Jaishankar had said on October 21 that the agreement would mean that “we have gone back to the 2020 position”.

A day later, Indian Army Chief General Upendra Dwivedi said that the country’s forces will disengage with the Chinese military in the region after the status quo of April 2020 is restored.

“As far as we are concerned, we want to go back to the status quo of April 2020,” Dwivedi had said. “Thereafter we will be looking at disengagement, de-escalation and normal management of the LAC...This has been our stand since April 2020.”

As Scroll reported on Friday, defence observers have pointed out that there was a contradiction in what the government and the Army said. The Army chief’s comments suggest that the agreement reached between India and China does not amount to a return to the status quo that existed in the region before 2020, they said.

Also read: Why the India-China agreement does not mean a return to status quo