External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar on Friday said that India and China’s relations were going through a “bad patch” because Beijing violated the bilateral agreements, PTI reported.

“...and that indicates some rethink about where they want to take our relationship, but that’s for them to answer,” he said at a panel of ‘Greater Power Competition: The Emerging World Order’ at the Bloomberg New Economic Forum in Singapore.

India and China have been locked in a border standoff since their troops clashed in Galwan Valley in eastern Ladakh in June last year. Twenty Indian soldiers were killed in the clash. China put the number of casualties on its side at four.

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China has been building infrastructure along the Line of Actual Control, which has concerned India. In November, a Pentagon report also pointed out that China’s building of a village between the Tibet Autonomous Region and Arunachal Pradesh has strained its relation with India.

Jaishankar on Friday said China was aware of what went wrong with its relationship with India. “I have been meeting my counterpart Wang Yi a number of times,” he said. “As you would have experienced, I speak fairly clearly, reasonably understandably [and] there is no lack of clarity so if they want to hear it, I am sure they would have heard it.”

The external affairs minister also spoke on issues like economic security, health security and digital security. He added that the world was not “unipolar or bipolar” as there are many countries “who have come into play”.

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Meanwhile, India and China on Thursday agreed to “find an early resolution” to the disputes related to the border along the Line of Actual Control in Ladakh for disengaging completely from all friction points in the Western Sector.

High-ranking officials from the two countries decided to hold the 14th round of meetings of the senior commanders “at an early date”.

Also read:

Ladakh standoff: India, China agree to find ‘early resolution’ for complete disengagement