first since 2018: Prime Minister Narendra Modi will visit China at the end of the month for the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit in Tianjin. Image source: ANIChinese
Foreign Minister Wang Yi is in India for his first visit in over three years. He is visiting in his capacity as Special Representative (SR) on the boundary talks and is reciprocating the visit made to Beijing by Indian SR and National Security Adviser Ajit Doval in December 2024. Prime Minister Narendra Modi is also headed to China at the end of the month for the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) summit in Tianjin. It will also be his first visit since 2018 and the first since tensions erupted on the Line of Actual Control (LAC) between the two countries in the summer of 2020, leading to fatalities on both sides.
After a long-drawn disengagement process at the LAC, these visits are being seen as part of a return to ‘normalisation’ in the relationship, even though New Delhi had frequently claimed that the relationship could not return to ‘normal’ without a return to status quo ante the 2020 Chinese transgressions on the LAC.
The irony is that this ‘normalisation’ is not one that is the result of hard bargains or one that showcases any advantages for India. On the contrary, it comes when India has, as one analyst put it, gone “from occupying a near-perfect geopolitical sweet spot to now inhabiting a geopolitical no-good-option deadlock”.
There are many reasons why India finds itself in such a situation, but the principal one has to be Pakistan.
‘Pakistan’ here is used to represent not just that country itself but also the oversized space that it occupies in the Indian Government’s thinking and attention. There are two aspects to this.
One, ‘Pakistan’ represents the failure of the Indian political class and government machinery to accept the bigger geopolitical challenge that China poses. Despite a boost to infrastructure spending post Galwan, the inadequate resources and attention devoted to military reforms and modernisation mean that there is also inadequate thinking about military responses to China.
There is clearly a preference for dealing with the ‘devil you know rather than the devil you don’t’. As a result, the natural response to China’s repeated transgressions is defensive, not offensive, just as the Pavlovian response to Pakistani provocations is to always go on the offensive.
Either way, the result is the same — India ends up reaching, or being forced to reach, deals or compromises before its objectives are fully met.
This brings us to the second aspect — the inability to meet objectives is not entirely the fault of the military but is also the result of political conditions in India. China obviously does not raise the emotional hackles of the average Indian citizen as much as Pakistan does.
As a result, Pakistan policy is driven by sentiment and pandering to public rage rather than by cold logic. One would think then that because China excites no comparable emotion, the Indian policy would be driven by logic and rational thinking.
However, the lack of attention from the public has led to a situation where there is underinvestment in understanding China in the belief that the consequences can be ignored or hidden from the people, with no one any the wiser.
More than the mercurial US President Donald Trump, it is this reality that has forced India’s hand with respect to China — forcing it to walk back on economic restrictions imposed on China in the wake of Galwan and allowing its condition of ‘restoration of status quo ante’ on the LAC to be forgotten.
Eastern Ladakh has disappeared from the front pages and we do not know for sure if even disengagement is complete or if Chinese troops are meeting their end of the bargain — of allowing Indian troops access to all patrolling points they had been blocked from.
What is more, despite the stress on Pakistan, Prime Minister Modi is travelling to China just months after Beijing openly collaborated with Pakistan militarily during Operation Sindoor in May.
China has also driven trilateral partnerships flanking India weeks after the Indo-Pak conflict — with Afghanistan and Pakistan and with Pakistan and Bangladesh.
In fact, from New Delhi, Wang Yi will be travelling to Kabul for a trilateral meeting with the foreign ministers of Pakistan and Afghan Taliban and then to Islamabad, making it clear where his India visit stands in China’s scheme of things.
Meanwhile, after a pause of some years, Pakistan itself has returned, post Operation Sindoor, to its smooth balancing act between China and the US. Pakistani analysts now view the situation as one of “great advantage to both China and Pakistan” and of Islamabad now being able to exercise “strategic balancing and non-alignment”.
Wang Yi’s visit is unlikely to achieve much on the boundary dispute. And while both Doval and Modi will, no doubt, raise concerns on the LAC and Pakistan with their Chinese interlocutors, the focus will most likely be on seeking economic relief — namely access to Chinese manpower and supplies, whether for India’s iPhone factories or its electric vehicle industry. China, however, cannot be expected to be very accommodative on even these issues.
The logic is quite simple. If China denies New Delhi’s requests, the Indian Government is either unlikely to be affected by public opprobrium or will be able to divert public attention, leaving Beijing with no consequences.
Even if China accedes to Indian requests, the political impact on the Indian Government is not likely to be anywhere near as consequential as with decisions related to Pakistan, leaving Beijing little to gain in terms of goodwill either. China might make promises, but will not deliver them.
India’s Pakistan and China policies — and now, it would appear, also its US policy — have been beset by tactical and strategic missteps. China will take advantage.
Originally Published as ‘India’s China policy at a crossroads’, The Tribune, 19 August 2025.