The ties between India and China are “better” today as compared to a couple of years ago, External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar has said, underlining that as the border issues are resolved, the relationship returns to normalcy.
“If you asked me, compared to where you were in 2025, is the relationship better today? Compared to 2024, even more so,” Mr. Jaishankar said during a conversation hosted at Asia Society on Monday (September 28, 2026).
Mr. Jaishankar was responding to a question on India-China relations, which have seen an upswing in recent times, including with President Xi Jinping’s recent visit to India for the BRICS Leaders’ Summit hosted by New Delh i. I would say yes. Referring to the ‘G2’ summit meeting between U.S.
He said it’s not so much a “structural change”, but part of the reason why things have improved is “they had gone so much off-track that the moment you stabilised it, it was going to improve, because after what happened in 2020 and the long standoff that we had on the border, the relationship had really been impacted. Following the 2020 border standoff between India and China, all “normal contacts” between the two nations had come to a halt, he said, adding that while “trade was continuing”, official exchanges, visa issuance, and flights had been impacted. “So once the border standoff was resolved, it was natural that this would start to improve,” he said. “We also maintained consistently a very elementary principle of statecraft – don’t get locked into a problem which benefits others,” Mr. Jaishankar said. President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping last week in Washington, Jaishankar said that when the second most consequential or the weightiest economy joins the first, “while they may have their points of convergence, overall they are in a competitive mode.”
