By IANS
New Delhi : Military officers of India and China will meet in Kolkata next week to fix the dates of their first war games to be held in China in December, an official said Friday.
“Military officers from the two countries will meet at (the Indian Army’s) Eastern Command headquarters (in Kolkata) next week to fix the dates for the joint drill,” the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
The war games will see the participation of about 100 troops from each army and will be conducted in the vicinity of Kunming, the capital of Yunnan province. They have been themed on an “anti-terror scenario in a mountainous region”.
The exercise was to have been conducted in November but was delayed because the two countries could not agree on the dates.
A breakthrough was achieved at the annual defence dialogue in Beijing last week, where Indian and Chinese officials also decided that India would host a similar joint drill in this country next year.
Bimal Jhulka, joint secretary in the defence ministry, headed the Indian side at the talks. Qian Lihua, director of the foreign affairs office of the Chinese defence ministry, led the host delegation.
Jhulka also met Chen Bingde, Chief of the General Staff of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army and a member of the Central Military Commission.
The annual defence dialogue is a component of the memorandum of understanding (MoU) signed during then Indian defence minister Pranab Mukherjee’s visit to China last year, during which he also toured a number of military establishments in the country.
The MoU was seen as a major step forward in improving India-China ties that had remained frosty since the two countries fought a bitter border war in 1962.
The thaw began in the mid-1980s and the two countries have made considerable progress since then with the two countries putting the border issue on the backburner as they move forward in the economic, political and cultural spheres.
The war games will bring the military sector within the ambit of the improving ties.