Indian Defense Minister George Fernandes Wednesday said Beijing and New Delhi were not a threat to each other and that the time had come to "rearrange" mutual ties keeping in view the ground realities.

Addressing the concluding session of the three-day seminar on Asian Security and China, organized by the Institute of Defense Studies and Analysis, he said that the two countries were working on the complex boundary issue in a "mature and Asian civilization manner."

He said China and India had now acquired a certain degree of consensual mutuality on the vexed border problem.

"We have our differences, but we are working on them -- though the pace has been referred to as glacial," the Defense Minister added.

(People's Daily January 30, 2003)