In an unanticipated development, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi will be holding a bilateral meeting with his Chinese counterpart President Xi Jinping on the sidelines of the BRICS summit in Kazan, Russia, on October 22, 2024.
This is said to be the first formal meeting between the two leaders in the last five years. The last time when two leaders met for a formal meeting was in October 2019 in Mahabalipuram, Tamil Nadu.
The confirmation on this came to fore through Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri who announced that the bilateral meeting between the two leaders will be held during the BRICS summit.
The crucial development comes shortly after the Indian government announced that both India and China have reached an agreement to resume patrolling at the remaining friction points along the Line of Actual Control (LAC) in eastern Ladakh. The area is known for simmering tension between the forces of the two countries given the Galwan Valley clash of the year 2020.
It was the Indian external affairs minister S Jaishankar who detailed the disengagement process between Indian and China, saying that the situation along the Line of Actual Control (LAC) has returned to what it was before May 2020.
Over the past decade, India-China relations have expanded and diversified through several high-level visits.
However, both India and China are yet to achieve a full resolution on regular stand offs between the two militaries. This has also been a reason why the ties between these two of the world’s largest economies have only plunged in the last few years.
Such developments have also impacted the frequency of meetings between the two countries despite having more than thirty dialogue mechanisms in place at various levels, across bilateral political, economic, cultural, people-to-people and consular matters, along with dialogues on regional and global issues.
