Chinese President Xi Jinping and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi spoke at the sidelines of a BRICS summit in Johannesburg and asked their officials to work at resolving their border dispute quickly, Bloomberg reported on Thursday. 

The feud over where a 3,488-kilometer (2,170 mile) ill-defined border should lie erupted in May 2020 and sparked the worst clashes seen between the two nations in four decades, the report said.     

Thousands of troops were deployed to both sides of the boundary, and at least 20 Indian soldiers and a number of Chinese personnel were killed. At least 19 rounds of talks involving diplomats and military officials have made incremental progress in resolving the standoff, the report said.

“Modi raised the border dispute with President Xi,” India’s Foreign Secretary Vinay Kwatra said at a briefing in Johannesburg on Thursday, Bloomberg reported. “The two leaders directed officials to resolve the border dispute expeditiously.”

While China has sought to segregate the dispute from its overall relationship with India, New Delhi insists it is a key stumbling block, the Bloomberg report said. 

A similar unscheduled meeting between Modi and Xi on the sidelines of the Group of 20 gathering in Hamburg in 2017 led to a resolution of a tense 70-day stand-off between the two armies who were deployed toe-to-toe inside neighbouring Bhutan, the report said. 

Though the detente didn’t last long and the two armies had their worst face-off in decades three years later, said the report.

“We are two countries with huge population and economic sizes, we have to have good terms, maybe not today but tomorrow but we will do it in the long-term,” Li Kexin, director-general of the Department of International Economic Affairs at China’s Foreign Ministry was cited as saying in the Bloomberg report. 

(Editing by Sean Scaria seban.scaria@lseg.com)