New Delhi: Indian External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar said he was “confident” that ties between New Delhi and Beijing would “maintain a positive trajectory” during a visit to the Chinese capital Monday.
“We have marked, Excellency, the 75th anniversary of the establishment of our diplomatic relations. The resumption of the Kailash Mansarovar Yatra is also widely appreciated in India. Continued normalisation of our ties can produce mutually beneficial outcomes,” Jaishankar said during a bilateral meeting with Han Zheng, the Vice-President of China.
This is Jaishankar’s first visit to China since clashes between the two nations in Galwan in the summer of 2020. The minister is on a two-day visit to the neighbouring country, holding bilateral talks in Beijing before travelling to Tianjin for the foreign ministers’ meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO). Earlier Sunday, Jaishankar travelled to Singapore for a day-long visit.
“Our bilateral relationship, as you have pointed, has been steadily improving since the meeting between Prime Minister (Narendra) Modi and President Xi Jinping in Kazan last October. I am confident that my discussions in this visit will maintain that positive trajectory,” Jaishankar added during the discussion with Han, according to a statement published by the Ministry of External Affairs.
Jaishankar is expected to meet with his Chinese counterpart Wang Yi later Monday. The two last met in February on the sidelines of the G20 foreign ministers’ meeting in South Africa. Jaishankar has met Wang multiple times in the last year, particularly in July 2024, which eventually led to a thaw in ties between the two neighbouring countries.
Relations between India and China plummeted following the clashes in Galwan in 2020. Eventually, on 21 October, 2024, Indian Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri announced that New Delhi and Beijing had reached an agreement to disengage at the friction points across the Line of Actual Control (LAC).
The agreement set the stage for a meeting between PM Modi and Chinese President Xi on the margins of the BRICS summit in the Russian city of Kazan in October 2024.
Since then, a number of mechanisms between India and China have resumed operation, including the special representative (SR) mechanism on the border question and the foreign secretary-vice minister mechanism.
The SR’s of India and China, Ajit Doval and Wang Yi, met in Beijing last December, while Misri travelled to the Chinese capital in January 2025 to hold discussions with Vice Foreign Minister Sun Weidong.
Last month, Doval and Defence Minister Rajnath Singh travelled to China for SCO meetings. Singh refused to sign a joint statement from the defence ministers’ meeting at the SCO due to the lack of language on terrorism, in particular the terrorist attack in Jammu & Kashmir’s Pahalgam.
The SCO foreign ministers’ meeting will be one of the few occasions where both Indian and Pakistani leadership will be in the same room. Wang Yi is expected to travel to India later in the month for the next round of SR talks.
(Edited by Nida Fatima Siddiqui)
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