India, China accord on border patrols

Announcement comes as Modi, Xi attend BRICS summit

NEW DELHI/BEIJING:

India said on 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.

Taiwan Chinese authorities said they would carry out a live firing exercise in the Taiwan Strait on Tuesday. The Maritime Safety Administration (MSA) in the southeastern city of Pingtan announced on Monday that "gun firing" would take place in a limited area close to the Chinese mainland coast and about 105 kilometres (66 miles) from self-ruled Taiwan.

The MSA's statement specified that ships will be "prohibited" from entering the area of the live firing, delineated by GPS coordinates and encompassing about 150 square kilometres (58 square miles), for four hours from 9:00 am local time (0100 GMT). It did not say which Chinese force would be carrying out the live firing, or its objective. Pingtan is the closest point in mainland China to Taiwan.

Over the weekend, a US and a Canadian warship passed through the 180-kilometre (112-mile) Taiwan Strait, part of regular passages by Washington and its allies meant to reinforce its status as an international waterway -- and seen as a provocation by China.

Beijing sent a record number of military aircraft as well as warships and coast guard vessels to encircle Taiwan on October 14 in the fourth round of major drills in just over two years in the area.

Taiwan deployed "appropriate forces" and put outlying islands on heightened alert in response to the exercises, which Beijing said were a "stern warning to the separatist acts of 'Taiwan Independence' forces".