By Li Fei (China Daily)
Updated: 2007-12-26 07:04

KUNMING, Yunnan: China and India wrapped up their first joint anti-terror military exercise Tuesday, with armed forces of the world's two most populous countries vowing to expand military exchange.

The successful five-day drill codenamed "Hand-In-Hand 2007" was a "sign of the deepening friendly exchanges between China and India and their militaries," Ma Xiaotian, deputy chief of the General Staff of the People's Liberation Army (PLA) of China, said at the closing ceremony Tuesday.

"China will continue to push forward military exchanges and cooperation with India in an effort to safeguard regional security and stability," Ma said, noting that military ties are an important part of bilateral relations.

Declaring it "a grand success", Indian Lieutenant General Susheel Gupta, also the head of India's military observer delegation, said the drill was "a milestone confidence-building measure".

"It would be a precursor for more exchange and interactions between the two armies in the years to come," Susheel said.

"We look forward to having continued exchanges and cooperation between the two armies," the general said.

In the final maneuver Tuesday, Chinese and Indian armies set up a joint command post plus a joint battle decision-making unit and conducted "faultlessly smooth" anti-terror combat operations, demonstrating all they had learned in the past few days.

The three-hour drill, in which 56 unnamed international terrorists were eliminated by the joint operations in a mock scenario, is the culmination of a five-day joint drill between 103 troops from each of the two militaries, which began last Friday.

The joint anti-terror drill, which took place in Southwest China's Yunnan Province, marked a new beginning for military exchanges between China and India and is significant to regional security as ties between the two armies warm up, experts said.

The security cooperation and exchanges between Asia's two big powers and their militaries "is of great significance to the security development in the whole region," Peng Guangqian, a senior researcher with the Beijing-based Academy of Military Sciences, said.

But he opined the two sides still "have spacious room" to expand and upgrade their exchanges in the military field.

"The joint training would become a new stepping stone to further deepen such exchanges," Peng said.

M.D. Nalapat, professor of Geopolitics at India's Manipal University, said the drillwould help make conflict avoidance the base of Sino-Indian ties, rather than the destructive floor of fresh conflict that some parties may seek to create.