In October 2019, when Chinese President Xi Jinping was coming out of his special Boeing 747 aircraft in Chennai to hold a bilateral meeting with Prime Minister Narendra Modi, little did the world know that it would take five years for both the leaders to shake hands and hold a bilateral meeting again.
This week in Russia’s Kazan, Modi and Xi held a bilateral meeting five years after a thaw in ties brought about by an agreement on border patrolling in Eastern Ladakh. Sino-Indian ties hit a low after the Glawan clashes in 2020, leading to the death of 20 Indian soldiers, including Colonel Santosh Babu, the Commanding Officer (CO) of the 16th Battalion of the Bihar Regiment.
On the eve of the BRICS summit, for which PM Modi travelled to Kazan, Foreign Secretary Vikas Misry said that India and China had reached an agreement on patrolling along the Line of Actual Control (LAC) in eastern Ladakh, “leading to disengagement”.
The breakthrough in talks between India and China after months of eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation came after several meetings held between diplomats and military officers of the two countries.
India’s sustained engagement with Chinese officials is in stark contrast to the diplomatic freeze that it has practised in the case of Pakistan. India severed ties with Pakistan after the 2019 Pulwama terror attack, in which 40 CRPF personnel were killed.
Since then, there have been no bilaterals between the top leaders of the two countries. Recently, External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar visited Islamabad to participate in the multilateral Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) summit, but there were no official bilateral meetings with Pakistani officials.
There are several reasons why India is reorienting its ties with China, but not with Pakistan. India and China witnessed an upward trend in bilateral trade despite tension in ties. In 2015, just after PM Modi’s coming to power, trade between the two countries stood at $71.66 billion, which increased to $118.4 billion in 2023-24, making China India’s largest trading partner, even ahead of the United States.
The Economic Survey presented this year called for an increase in Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) from China to boost India’s participation in the global supply chain and exports. It highlighted that if India were to take advantage of the prevailing “China plus one’ strategy, it needed to either integrate into Chinese supply chains or use the FDI from China “for boosting India’s exports to the US”, in the same way other East Asian economies had done in the past.
“It is more effective to have Chinese companies invest in India and then export the products to these markets rather than importing from China, adding minimal value,” the Economic Survey said. “The Chinese economy is facing some problems. There is a crisis in the housing sector. 90 million empty housing units are lying all over China. Eighty per cent of the household savings of the people of China are invested in that. The housing prices have dropped by 30%. The industrial income has dropped by almost 17.6%. So, with the US election, Trump looming on the horizon and Europe also tightening the screws on China, the Indian market becomes very important. So the Chinese had to swallow their pride,” Singh said while speaking to India Today TV’s Consulting Editor Rajdeep Sardesai.
In contrast to this, India doesn’t find enough potential in its economic ties with Pakistan. Pakistan snapped trade ties with India after the revocation of Article 370 in Jammu & Kashmir. While Pakistan needs India to cool down food inflation, which peaked at 31% in October 2023, it has very little to offer to India.
Pakistan’s export of terrorism to India, its political instability, and its limited ability to pay in US dollars given its foreign currency crisis are some of the reasons why India is not keen on reviving economic ties with it. This is not to say that China is the best neighbour India could have. However, having border disputes is very different from having a neighbour that uses terror as an intrinsic part of foreign policy.
India has engaged with countries with which it has had border disputes. In 2015, the 100th Constitutional Amendment Act solved the border dispute with Bangladesh. That China was open to discussing the border issue enabled the two countries to engage in dialogue even after violent
clashes in Galwan in June 2020
.
In contrast, the continuous use of terrorism by Pakistan against India not only made dialogue impossible but also led to a significant trust deficit between the two neighbours. Pakistan’s repeated betrayal of India’s peace initiatives also led to frustration within the South Block, with the two nations calling back their High Commissioners.
“It has attacked our Parliament, our financial capital, Mumbai, marketplaces, and pilgrimage routes. The list is long. For such a country to speak about violence anywhere is hypocrisy at its worst”, India’s response to Pakistan in the recently concluded United Nations General Assembly critically highlighted its frustration. However, it has to be borne in mind that China has an expansionist mindset, and border issues might crop up again.
With PM Modi winning the Lok Sabha polls for the third time and Xi Jinping cementing his position in the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), the two nations found a chance to reboot their ties after the Galwan crisis.
In 2018, a similar approach was displayed when PM Modi travelled to Wuhan in China for a two-day informal summit on the back of strained ties after a 73-day-long face-off between the Indian Army and the People’s Liberation Army in Doklam. In Pakistan’s case, engagement is tough because of the lack of strong political leadership with the pendulum tilting towards the military. Its power matrix is convoluted.
In 2014, PM Modi reached out to Pakistan by inviting all Saarc country leaders to his swearing-in ceremony. Then Pakistan PM Nawaz Sharif attended the event. In December 2015, Modi also made a surprise visit to Pakistan to meet Sharif.
Days later, India witnessed a deadly attack on its military installations in Pathankot. In the same year, another deadly attack on a military camp in Uri led to the death of 19 soldiers, pushing the ties between the two countries into a deep freeze. While India tried to engage with the civilian leadership of Pakistan, the military was steering it in another direction.
There’s fresh hope after the breakthrough in eastern Ladakh between India and China, but experts suggest that India should be cautious about China’s motives. The cautious optimism regarding China comes after talks. It shows how mutual economic requirements and strong leadership can help feuding countries sit at the talks table. This is why India’s responses to China and Pakistan have been different.
