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Top military commanders of India and China have held a second round of talks amid rising tensions at their contested border.
Commanders from both sides met on the Chinese side of the Line of Actual Control in the disputed Aksai Chin-Ladakh border area on Monday, Reuters reported citing an Indian government source.
The first meeting, attended by lower ranking officers, was held last Thursday, in the wake of deadly clashes that had occurred on Monday.
Twenty Indian soldiers were killed in the fighting in the Galwan Valley, a precipitous and rocky border area that lies between China’s Tibet and India’s Ladakh regions last week. There were no confirmed reports of Chinese casualties. Each side blamed the other for the incident.
That was the first such deadly fighting on the disputed border since 1967.
The governments of the two nuclear armed powers are now seeking to avoid any escalation that could risk further conflict between them.
The Indian Foreign Ministry accused Beijing of having “pre-meditated and planned” the fighting.
China, however, said Indian troops had violated a military agreement, and attacked its troops in the Galwan valley in Ladakh.
Renewed tensions have fanned anti-Chinese sentiment in the capital New Delhi, with an Indian confederation of companies demanding a boycott of Chinese products.
Members of the Confederation of All India Traders (CAIT) set alight a pile of Chinese goods at a New Delhi market.
China is India’s second-biggest trading partner, with bilateral trade worth $87 billion in the fiscal year ending March 2019.
This has prompted the Chinese media to call on Indians “to cool down.”
China’s official newspaper, the Global Times said that the country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) “is 5 times that of India, military spending 3 times.”
The two Asian powerhouses have been in a long-time dispute over the Line of Actual Control frontier that divides their long joint border. They have also fought a brief war back in 1962.
