By Atul Aneja
The Kazan process which began with an ice-breaking meeting between Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping on the sidelines of the BRICS summit in October 2024 has reached its next stage.
The two strong leaders in today’s political context will be meeting again in Tianjin, China. This will be on August 31, at the sidelines of the summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO).
The dialogue between the two will be of prime importance. It can lead to a roadmap for bilateral engagements, leading to possibility of normalisation of relations, which had plunged to a new low in June 2020, when the two militaries were engaged in unarmed combat along their mountainous border. However, going far beyond bilateralism, the dialogue in Tianjin can lead to multipolar consolidation, anchored by BRICS+–a pivotal emerging economy grouping.
India and China, along with Russia are part of the BRICS nucleus. The BRICS, which also included Brazil and South Africa as its founding members, has further expanded its powerful wings to include financial heavyweights such as the United Arab Emirates (UAE) as well as Indonesia and Egypt. These influential Middle Powers possess considerable strategic bandwidth in North Africa and Asia respectively. Therefore improved relations between India and China–the two most populous countries in the world–has the potential to shift the balance of geopolitical and geoeconomic power on a global scale.
Both the countries have excellent relations with Russia, a major civilizational state which is at the heart of Eurasia.
In fact, within BRICS, the Russia-India-China (RIC) subgroup can be the centerpiece of a new post-West global system, anchored by these rising civilizational states.
India and China have also solidly bonded with the Global South–a factor that can completely change the complexion of the existing international order, leading to the powerful rise of a multipolar system, whose new rules will welcome the participation of the western nations, as equals, but not masters of the world.
Given the high importance of the meeting, what could be the next steps that Modi and Xi could take during their interaction in Tianjin?
First and foremost, the two leaders could cement their joint rejection of a military conflict across their disputed borders. While the final resolution of India-China border row continues to remain a distant dream, it is important that the existing confidence building measures to stabilise the border reach their next level.
So far, all the CBM’s to prevent a war, pending the final resolution of the boundary question have flowed out of the 1993 Peace and Tranquility accord that the two countries had signed. But an intermediary position higher than existing CBMs but short of the end game–final resolution of the boundary question– may still be possible.
In other words, the two leaders could consider the declaration of a no-war pact as a worthy step to rule out an all=out conflict between the two Asian giants. While such a declaration would be impossible during the Tianjin meeting, an in-principle nod to the idea may not be out of place.
This normative goal of a no-war pact can then be downstreamed for detailed discussions at the technical and official level, which may need to be wrapped up within a tight timeline. In any initiative like this, when trust levels are low, as in the case of India and China, a verification regime determined by the technical means such as satellite imagery, other means of aerial surveillance, hotlines and institutionalized meeting of border commanders become crucial. Fortunately, both the countries have ample experience in border management, which can be leveraged at a higher level so that a no-war pact between the two countries materialises.
Second, the Xi-Modi meeting can uncork some of the existing initiatives that remain bottled up after the Galwan unarmed clash of June 2020.
These include the revival of the stalled dialogue mechanism between India’s NITI Aayog, the Indian government’s premier think tank and China’s Development Research Center (DRC) of the State Council.
The two institutions have earlier held several rounds of talks, with the fifth dialogue taking place in Wuhan in November 2019.
This top notch interaction has covered several key areas, including WTO reform, urbanization and smart Cities, digital economy and high-tech innovation, sustainable development and green transportation as well as trade and investment facilitation.
Besides, NITI Aayog also spearheads the India-China strategic economic dialogue with China’s National Development and Reforms Commission (NDRC) as its counterpart. Their last interaction in September 2019 yielded agreements on collaboration in the fields of Artificial Intelligence, mobile communications, high-tech manufacturing as well as feasibility studies on railway upgrades, apart from water and waste management initiatives.
The revival of the above dialogues, can guide downstream collaboration on specific items for infrastructure development, advanced manufacturing, based on conventional and new energy solutions as well coordination to address macro-level global problems, such as climate change.
Third, China and India can consider reviving their counterterror military exercises, which have taken place in Kunming, capital of China’s Yunnan province.
Finally, the two leaders in Tianjin can consider reviving their informal summits that began in Wuhan, in central China in April 2018, in the aftermath of the 72-day military standoff in Doklam between the two armies in the previous year. This was followed up by the 2019 Mahbalipuram informal summit just before the military crisis in Eastern Ladakh surfaced.
Such an institutionalised mechanism can lead to strategic decision making at the highest level, leading to quantum jump in steering the collaborative rise of the two civilizational states.
It is important that Prime Minister Modi is heading to Tianjin when Indo-US ties are in free fall after US Donald Trump slapped 50 per cent tariffs on exports from India. This followed after New Delhi refused to throw its farmers under the bus by agreeing to lower duties on US farm imports into India. It also rejected the US demand of stopping energy imports from Russia. Besides, India was in Trump’s crosshairs for being an active member of the BRICS grouping. At a White House briefing on July 31, Trump railed: “They (Indians) have BRICS, which is basically a group of countries which are anti the United States and India is a member of that if you can believe it.”
While the US pressure may be one of the factors, it is not a primary driver for New Delhi’s re-think on China. Even before the Kazan meeting with Xi, some prominent Indian economists were advocating reviving India’s economic ties with China to spur foreign investments in India. More recently the NITI Aayog has proposed that Chinese companies be allowed a 24% stake in Indian firms without needing security clearance from the Ministry of Home Affairs or the Ministry of External Affairs.
The Chinese side too concurs that Trump’s tariffs are not the primary reason for the improvement in China India ties. Global Times, a tabloid belonging to the offices People’s Daily group, points out in a recent editorial that some western media outlets have interpreted Modi’s visit as an attempt to “hedge against” the US.
It points out that such a view is one-sided. “As two ancient civilizations with long-standing friendly exchanges, two major emerging economies, and key members of the Global South, both countries are at critical stages of their respective modernization journeys. They share broad common interests, and their relationship follows its own historical logic and internal momentum.”
The editorial also formally acknowledges that India does not follow Washington’s China containment strategy anchored in the Indo-Pacific doctrine. It asserts that Washington’s attempt to draw New Delhi into its so-called “Indo-Pacific strategy” to contain China “does not align with India’s independent foreign policy”.
The daily notes that as regional powers “China and India have extensive shared interests in areas such as counterterrorism, trade, and cultural exchange”.
The newspaper welcomed Prime Minister Modi to China with “genuine intentions to improve bilateral ties and pragmatic cooperation plans”, and to jointly usher in a new chapter of “the dragon and the elephant dancing together.”
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