The >visit of President Xi Jinping was remarkable for many things but mostly for the shift in the way India has done diplomacy with China. Overshadowing President Xi’s visit was an incident on the Line of Actual control in the Chumar region of Ladakh, where troops and civilians were in a stand-off over construction activity on the Indian side. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s statement to the media, in the presence of the Chinese President, publicly driving home New Delhi’s concerns about the “repeated incidents” at the border was addressed perhaps as much to Bharatiya Janata Party constituencies who want to see a hard line pressed on China, as it was to Beijing. The previous UPA government had preferred to send out quieter messages on the border question. This, combined with Mr. Modi upending protocol and conventions to accord Mr. Xi a more than effusive welcome in Ahmedabad, succeeded in giving new optics to New Delhi’s China policy. The new signalling seems to have elicited a quick response, with the Chinese side saying that the two leaders had committed themselves to resolving the border issue “as soon as possible”, and that they had reached a “consensus” on the way forward. In a joint statement, the two sides acknowledged that “peace and tranquility on the India-China border areas was [ … ] an important guarantor for the development and continued growth of bilateral relations,” and that “pending a final resolution of the boundary question, the two sides would continue to make joint efforts to maintain peace and tranquility in the border areas.”
Despite Prime Minister Modi’s keenness to demonstrate the difference in his approach, beneath the new veneer there was enough continuity with the past too, in the way the government was careful to keep the strategic aspects of the ties separate from the economic and trade issues. In 2013, the BJP, then in the opposition, had taken on the UPA for its perceived inability to face up to China during a stand-off between troops in Ladakh, even asking what use trade relations were when the government could not stand up for the country’s territory. Now in power, the BJP knows that the two issues are best compartmentalised — the incident in Ladakh during President Xi’s visit did not prevent India from welcoming Chinese investments, though at $20 billion the pledges were lower than expected. China has also agreed to address the imbalance in bilateral trade. The overall positive atmospherics of the visit despite the overhang of the Ladakh stand-off also carry an important message to the world, ahead of Mr. Modi’s visit later this month to the United States, that India and China are entirely capable of managing their relations despite their differences.
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