New Delhi: More than 18 months after India and China reached an agreement to resolve the eastern Ladakh military standoff, New Delhi on Monday (June 22) said the two countries had made progress towards the “gradual normalisation” of bilateral relations.The assessment emerged from a meeting between national security adviser Ajit Doval and Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi on the sidelines of the BRICS National Security Advisers’ meeting in New Delhi.According to the brief Indian readout posted by the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA)’s spokesperson, the two sides reviewed recent developments in bilateral relations and “noted progress towards gradual normalisation”. Doval also underlined that “stable, predictable and constructive bilateral relations contribute to building of trust and better understanding between the two sides”.The MEA described the discussions as “constructive and forward-looking”. The Chinese side had not released its own account of the meeting till the filing of this report.In October 2024, India and China reached an agreement on patrolling arrangements in eastern Ladakh, which ended the last major point of military friction remaining from the four-year border standoff that had frozen ties.Days after that breakthrough, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping met in Russia’s Kazan for their first bilateral meeting in five years and agreed to revive dormant dialogue mechanisms. Since then, both sides have steadily expanded engagement across diplomatic, economic and people-to-people channels.The thaw has led to the resumption of direct flights, the easing of visa restrictions, the revival of the Kailash-Mansarovar Yatra and a series of high-level exchanges, including Modi’s visit to Tianjin for the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit in August 2025, his first trip to China in seven years.Doval and Wang have been at the centre of that process through the Special Representatives mechanism, which remains the highest-level channel for discussions on the boundary question. During their previous meeting in New Delhi in August last year, two sides agreed to establish an expert group under the Working Mechanism for Consultation and Coordination on India-China Border Affairs (WMCC) to explore an “early harvest” in boundary delimitation.At that meeting, both countries also agreed to begin discussions on de-escalation along the Line of Actual Control and reiterated the need to seek a fair, reasonable and mutually acceptable framework for settling the boundary dispute in accordance with the 2005 agreement on political parameters and guiding principles.The latest Doval-Wang talks came less than a month after Indian and Chinese officials met in Beijing under the WMCC framework. According to the Indian readout, the two sides discussed issues related to delimitation, border management, mechanism-building and cross-border cooperation, while agreeing to make “substantive preparation” for the next round of Special Representatives talks.