Wang Yi to visit India this month, Modi to travel to China, Putin comes in later this year
While admitting that bilateral meetings on the sidelines of the SCO summit are being planned, sources refused to get into details.
New Delhi: Prime Minister Narendra Modi is set to travel to Tianjin in China this month for the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit, his first trip to the country since 2019 where he will be joined by Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin among others, ThePrint has learnt. The SCO Summit will be held 31 August to 1 September.
Ahead of the visit, Member of Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC) and Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi is set to travel to India to hold talks with National Security Adviser Ajit Doval on the larger border issue between the two countries on 18 August.
Though both visits have not been formally announced, sources said that they are on.
Interestingly, Doval is currently in Russia to hold his annual meeting with counterpart Sergei Shoigu to set the stage for Putin's long-pending trip to India which has been delayed ever since the Ukraine conflict started.
Defence Minister Rajnath Singh and External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar had also attended the SCO meetings held earlier this year.
Asked if all these visits and meetings are a signal to the US whose President Donald Trump has threatened to sanction India and raised tariffs for oil deals with Russia, sources explained that these are all scheduled visits.
Modi's visit to China and a likely bilateral with Jinping comes after relations between both countries stabilised gradually after the May 2020 intrusion by Chinese troops in Ladakh, which eventually led to the Galwan clash that killed 20 Indian soldiers and several on the Chinese side. China has officially claimed four deaths on their side.
Since then, both sides have held several rounds of talks at political, military and diplomatic levels.
While both countries have managed to disengage from a face-off situation over this period at all locations, the larger question of de-escalation and restarting of regular patrols remain.
After over four years of tensions, Modi and Xi met on the sidelines of the 16th BRICS Summit at Kazan on 23 October 2024.
Just ahead of the meeting then, India and China had agreed to restart patrols in the Depsang area of Eastern Ladakh.
Since then, rapid normalisation has taken place which includes opening up of visas for the Chinese by India and the restart of the Kailash Mansarovar yatra by China.
China is aiming to restart direct air travel from India for both Indian and Chinese airlines, which India currently has not allowed.
(Edited by Viny Mishra)
Also Read: China's information war against Rafale
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