Days after India announced it had agreed to a patrolling arrangement with China, NDTV has accessed the first satellite images of the disengagement taking place on the ground in Depsang and Demchok in eastern Ladakh.
The agreement was announced on Monday and a satellite image taken from the Depsang plains on October 11 shows four vehicles and two tents.
Another photo taken on Friday shows tents removed and vehicles moving away. The land on which the tents stood has also been restored.
High-resolution images provided by Maxar.
Depsang’s photos are from near ‘Y Junction’, from where Indian troops were previously stopped from moving towards India’s patrolling points in the east. Patrol points, or PPs, mark the boundary of the Line of Actual Control which India claims in these areas.
In a similar satellite image of Demchok on 9 October, semi-permanent Chinese structures can be seen.
The same structures are missing in a photo of the disputed site on Friday.
Army sources had said earlier in the day that by Tuesday, October 29, the process of withdrawal of troops in both the disputed areas would be completed and the troops would return to the positions that existed before the standoff between the two countries began in 2020. The process involves destroying the structures and restoring the land on which they stood.
Sources said both India and China will continue to have monitoring options in Depsang and Demchok and troops will inform the other side before leaving on patrol “to avoid any miscommunication”.
The standoff began in May 2020 and led to a clash in Galwan in Ladakh the following month in which 20 Indian soldiers were killed in action and the Chinese side also suffered losses, the exact numbers are unconfirmed.
Troops from both sides gathered and military-level talks began to resolve the standoff. In September 2022, Indian and Chinese troops withdrew from the disputed Gogra-Hot Springs area in Ladakh and returned to pre-April 2020 status.
‘Peace and stability’
After Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri’s announcement on Monday, External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar confirmed this at the NDTV World Summit.
Jaishankar said, “We have reached an agreement on patrolling and we are back to the 2020 status quo. With this, we can say that the withdrawal of troops with China is complete. Details will emerge at the appropriate time. ”
He said, “There are areas which, for various reasons after 2020, they blocked us, we blocked them. We have now reached an understanding that will allow patrolling as we were doing till 2020. ”
Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Wednesday met Chinese President Xi Jinping on the sidelines of the BRICS summit in Russia – their first bilateral since 2019 – and he welcomed the agreement. “It should be our priority to ensure that there is peace and stability on our border,” PM Modi told Jinping.
