As 2025 beckons

2024 goes into history and the next year beckons. How did Indian diplomacy fare with China in this year and what would be the challenges and opportunities in the next?

India’s main challenge will continue to be China. Prime Minister Narendra Modi tried to advance Sino-India ties after assuming office in May 2014. The previous year, in 2013, Xi Jinping had become China’s President. He was determined to no longer follow Deng Xiaoping’s view that China should keep a low profile. He obviously felt that China’s time had come to seek a much higher position in the global pecking order. The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) was essentially designed to put together a group of countries that would be in the Chinese camp; major powers need camp followers. India opposed BRI and continues to do so even, among other reasons, because the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor which is a flagship BRI programme violates India’s sovereignty.

Modi who sets great store in moving Indian diplomacy through fostering strong personal bonds with his international peers decided to develop close friendly ties with Xi Jinping. While the Chinese President visited India Modi visited China. The two leaders met on numerous occasions on the sidelines of international conferences. Meanwhile, the Line of Actual Control remained more or less cool and commercial and economic ties between the two countries began to grow. The first sign of trouble came in 2017 because of a military stand-off between the two countries' armies in Doklam. The matter was, however, resolved in a few months and ties seemed to return to normal. Yes, earlier in 2016, despite Modi personally taking up the matter with him, Xi Jinping, did not accede to India’s request to lift its objection to this country becoming a member of the Nuclear Suppliers Group.

The world came in the grip of the Covid 19 from January 2020. On March 11 the WHO declared it to be a pandemic. It was largely and with good reason suspected to have originated in China. When India and the world’s attention was focused on the pandemic the Chinese army ingressed in five places in eastern Ladakh. A violent clash occurred in Galwan in June in which twenty Indian soldiers and an unknown, as yet, number of Chinese soldiers died. The Chinese actions were a direct violation of the 1990 bilateral agreements for the maintenance of peace and tranquility along the LAC.

India moved troops to the LAC to show that it would not accept China’s ingress. It also made it clear that it would continue to develop its border infrastructure. The two countries decided to engage in diplomatic and military negotiations. These continued for over four years. During this period and even now India has correctly continued to assert that without the border remaining peaceful relations cannot be normalized.

Just prior to Modi’s visit to Kazan, Russia in October this year to participate in the BRICS summit, Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri told the media, “Over the last several weeks, Indian and Chinese diplomatic and military negotiators have been in close contact with each other in a variety of forums, and as a result of these discussions, agreement has been arrived at on patrolling arrangements along the Line of Actual Control in the India-China border areas, leading to disengagement and a resolution of the issues that had arisen in these areas in 2020”. These remarks cleared the way for Modi and Xi Jinping to meet in Kazan.

Modi and Xi Jinping met on the sidelines of the BRICS summit. After the meeting the MEA press release noted “Welcoming the recent agreement for complete disengagement and resolution of issues that arose in 2020 in the India-China border areas, Prime Minister Modi underscored the importance of properly handling differences and disputes and not allowing them to disturb peace and tranquility. The two leaders agreed that the Special Representatives on the India-China boundary question will meet at an early date to oversee the management of peace & tranquility in border areas and to explore a fair, reasonable and mutually acceptable solution to the boundary question. The relevant dialogue mechanisms at the level of Foreign Ministers and other officials will also be utilized to stabilize and rebuild bilateral relations.

The two leaders affirmed that stable, predictable, and amicable bilateral relations between India and China, as two neighbors and the two largest nations on earth, will have a positive impact on regional and global peace and prosperity. It will also contribute to a multi-polar Asia and a multi-polar world. The leaders underlined the need to progress bilateral relations from a strategic and long-term perspective, enhance strategic communication and explore cooperation to address developmental challenges”.

The Chinese readout of the meeting seeks to emphasise its standard position: that the border issue should not hold back the relationship. This is at odds with the Indian position. The Special Representatives who met earlier this month after a hiatus of five years and agreed to resume some cross-border interactions and also the resumption of the Kailash Mansarovar Yatra. Despite this meetings’ decisions to move towards normalization the fact is that after the Chinese actions of 2020 the Indian public will always consider China as India’s main strategic challenge. It will remain wary of it despite growth of trade ties. These are more out of necessity as China is the factory of the world still.

In the coming years India and China may see a congruity of interests on some aspects of global issues such as climate change but so long as China wishes to constrain India’s position through its policies and actions including in India’s immediate neighbourhood, India will have to be continuously on its guard. Also, it has no alternative but to incur a much larger expenditure on maintaining full strategic and conventional defense against China.