When Chinese President Xi Jinping flies into New Delhi on Saturday for his first visit to India in seven years, he will hold a bilateral meeting with Prime Minister Narendra Modi that will allow the two sides to consolidate efforts to normalise ties and address the dragging boundary dispute.
Modi is set to hold several crucial bilateral meetings on the margins of the Brics Summit that will facilitate reviews of ties and discussions on global issues such as the conflicts in West Asia and Ukraine. More significantly, the Working Mechanism for Consultation and Coordination (WMCC) on border affairs and the Special Representatives on the border issue — India’s National Security Adviser Ajit Doval and China’s foreign minister Wang Yi — have met several times over the past two years and discussed measures such as boundary demarcation. However, differences continue to persist on a range of issues, including China’s restrictions on visas for Indian businesspeople, Beijing’s curbs on exports of key technologies and equipment, and China’s insistence that the border issue should be separated from the development of the overall relationship.
China’s foreign ministry officially confirmed Xi’s participation in the Brics Summit only on Thursday afternoon, saying that he will travel to India during September 12-13 at the invitation of Modi. Modi and Xi have held talks on the margins of multilateral events in recent years, but they last met on Indian soil in October 2019, when the Chinese President travelled to Mamallapuram in Tamil Nadu for the second India-China informal summit, a mechanism created for the two leaders to address complex issues in a more unstructured format.
India has repeatedly said the state of the border will determine the course of bilateral ties. Besides meeting Xi on Saturday evening, Modi will also hold talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian, Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto and UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Friday, people familiar with the matter said.
Modi met both Putin and Pezeshkian on the margins of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation Summit in Kyrgyzstan on August 31. Because of US sanctions, the people said Modi’s meeting with Pezeshkian, who is visiting India for the first time since he became President in July 2024, will focus on the West Asia conflict, especially efforts to ensure the well-being of Indian seafarers and ensure the unimpeded flow of energy and goods, as well as bilateral ties and connectivity initiatives, including India’s participation in Iran’s Chabahar port, which has been under a cloud of uncertainty.
Their meetings in New Delhi are expected to focus on bilateral relations and global issues such as the wars in Ukraine and West Asia, the people said. The Indian PM told Putin at their last meeting that “endless war must give way to the end of war” as he again nudged him to end the conflict in Ukraine, and the Indian side is expected to discuss ways to end the conflict, which New Delhi believes has caused immense harm to the Global South.
