New Delhi: Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri will be on a two-day visit to Beijing starting 26 January, as high-level interactions between the two governments continue following Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping’s meeting last October.
“Foreign Secretary Shri Vikram Misri will be visiting Beijing on 26-27 January 2025 for a meeting of the Foreign Secretary-Vice Minister mechanism between India and China. The resumption of this bilateral mechanism flows from the agreement at the leadership level to discuss the next steps for India-China relations, including in the political, economic, and people-to-people domains,” said the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) in a statement Thursday.
This will be the third high-level interchange between New Delhi and Beijing in as many months after the agreement on disengagement at the friction points on the border was first announced on 21 October 2024, by Misri in New Delhi.
The agreement paved the way for a bilateral meeting between Modi and Xi on the margins of the BRICS summit in the Russian city of Kazan on 23 October, the first meeting between the two leaders in five years.
External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar met with his Chinese counterpart Wang Yi on the margins of the G20 Leaders’ Summit at Rio De Janeiro in November 2024. The Jaishankar-Wang meet was followed by a meeting of the special representative mechanism between Indian National Security Adviser Ajit Doval and Wang in December.
The frequent meetings follow a four-year chill in ties after the clashes at Galwan in summer 2020. The clashes, which occurred in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, impacted all areas of bilateral ties. The Galwan incident also led to escalating military presence of both countries in the region.
In 2024, China pushed for normalisation of ties with New Delhi, which led to two meetings between Jaishankar and Wang on the margins of the SCO and ASEAN summits in July 2024, before the eventual disengagement agreement was signed.
The meeting between Doval and Wang was the first at the special representative-level since 2019. India, however, distanced itself from the “six-point consensus”, which Beijing claimed was arrived at during the Doval-Wang talks in December 2024. There was no such term found in India’s readout from the meeting.
At both the Jaishankar and Doval meets, New Delhi urged Beijing to allow the resumption of the Kailash-Mansarovar Yatra, which has remained suspended since 2020 due to the pandemic. According to the Ministry of External Affairs, the special representatives gave a “positive” direction towards the resumption of the yatra in December 2024.
China, however, has been pushing for the resumption of direct flights between the two countries, which have remained suspended since the pandemic. It has also urged New Delhi to issue more visas to Chinese nationals.
However, MEA spokesperson Randhir Jaiswal made it clear in December that restoration of all bilateral ties was a “step by step” process.
(Edited by Tikli Basu)
