Originally published as ‘Samarkand SCO: Significance of the Modi-Xi non-meeting’, Moneycontrol, 19 September 2022. Prime Minister Narendra Modi did not meet one-on-one with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Uzbekistan on the sidelines of the 22nd meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation’s (SCO) Council of Heads of State. At least there is no publicly shared evidence of the meeting …
Continue reading “A Significant Non-Meeting: Modi and Xi at Samarkand”
Originally published at World Politics Review, 13 July 2022. It has been over two years since Chinese incursions in the summer of 2020 along the disputed India-China boundary in eastern Ladakh led to a series of skirmishes that left dozens of soldiers dead on both sides. Yet unlike a February 2019 confrontation with Pakistan, which …
Continue reading “Two Years After Border Clashes, India Still Lacks a Coherent China Policy”
India’s foreign policy under the BJP increasingly resembles Chinese foreign policy under the CPC in words and spirit.
Prime Minister Modi’s statement at the All Party Meeting on 19 June ended up casting doubt on India’s own behaviour and claims along the LAC and actually encourages further Chinese assertiveness all along disputed sectors on the LAC as well as the temptation to open up fresh disputes.
With the COVID-19 pandemic, the name “Wuhan” has become much better known in India than it ever was for the April 2018 informal summit between Modi and Xi in that city. It remains to be seen which of these two legacies from Wuhan will last in India-China relations.
The next ‘informal summit’ between Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping will be held in Varanasi on 12 October. The announcement of the date has been accompanied in recent days by a series of reports on the state of affairs on the Line of Actual Control (LAC) between the two countries. …
Continue reading “India-China Boundary Dispute: LAC Transgressions Will Continue”
US President Richard Nixon’s path-breaking visit to China in February 1972 could arguably be called the mother of all ‘resets’ of a major bilateral relationship. In his own words, it was ‘the week that… changed the world’ and there can be little disagreement on this score. The ‘informal summit’ scheduled later this week between Indian …
Continue reading “Modi-Xi ‘Informal Summit’: Domestic Priorities Uppermost”
China has many ways of affecting Indian politics. Indeed, an India-China ‘reset’, as envisaged by the Narendra Modi government and represented by the “informal summit” between Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping in the central Chinese city of Wuhan, has the very strong domestic context of several major state-level elections later this year and the …
Continue reading “Modi-Xi ‘Informal Summit’: Misplaced Hopes”
When China’s National People’s Congress – the rough equivalent of India’s Lok Sabha, but toothless – meets in the coming week it has to deal with a proposal by the ruling Communist Party of China to amend the state constitution to remove term limits for the President of the state. Coming from where it does, …
Continue reading “Term Limits Off for Xi: Some Reflections for India”
Thinking about China in India 