Agence France-Presse,
New Delhi: India and China will hold their first wargames in December as part of a series of joint exercises between the two Asian neighbours who fought a war in 1962, an official announced Wednesday.
The announcement came immediately after Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh met his Chinese counterpart on the sidelines of an ASEAN summit in Singapore to discuss a possible bilateral leadership meeting in Beijing.
The two million-plus armies will send around 100 combat troops each for the manoeuvres, scheduled to be held in the third week of December in China's Yunnan province, Indian defence ministry spokesman Sitanshu Kar told AFP.
“The exact dates, components and equipment for the exercises will be decided next week in a meeting between the two sides in Kolkata,” Kar said.
He said the wargames will be followed by a second exercise planned by the Indian army and China's People's Liberation Army for 2008 in India.
“This exercise will focus on counter-terrorism and we are planning a second one which will be held in India next year,” Kar said, adding the manoeuvres signalled warming ties between the world's two most populous countries.
Senior defence ministry officials said “peacetime naval engagements” were also being considered by New Delhi and Beijing.
“We are looking at this step-by-step and then perhaps much larger joint operations can be put on the board,” one official said.
In September, New Delhi upset Beijing by hosting naval exercises involving 29 warships and 160 fighter aircraft from the United States, Australia, Japan and Singapore in the Indian Ocean.
The frost in the Sino-Indian ties however has showed signs of thawing since the 1990s, but they are yet to resolve a border row which triggered a brief but a bitter border war in 1962.
India says China occupies 38,000 square kilometres (14,670 square miles) of its territory, while Beijing claims 90,000 square kilometres, or the whole of the northeastern Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh.
