India, China move to resume direct flights, Mansarovar yatra

In a major diplomatic step toward improving bilateral ties, India and China have agreed on a slew of measures, including working to resume direct flights, resuming the Kailash Mansarovar yatra starting this summer, and sharing trans-border river data, a ministry of external affairs (MEA) statement said.

The decisions came after foreign secretary Vikram Misri met with Chinese vice-foreign minister Sun Weidong, Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi, and minister of international development of the Communist Party of China Liu Jianchao in Beijing.

Talks between Misri and Weidong to review the state of India-China bilateral ties “comprehensively,” and “the agreement to take certain people-centric steps to stabilize and rebuild ties,” come after Prime Minister Narendra Modi and President Xi Jinping signed off on the specifics at their meeting in Kazan in October, MEA statement said.

The border situation did not find a mention in the MEA statement, which, however noted that “the two sides recognize that 2025, being the 75th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between India and China, should be utilized to redouble public diplomacy efforts to create better awareness about each other and restore mutual trust and confidence among the public.”

“The two sides took stock of the extant mechanisms for functional exchanges. It was agreed to resume these dialogues step by step and to utilize them to address each other’s priority areas of interest and concern,” it added.

On trade, the statement said “specific concerns” in the economic and trade areas were discussed with a view to resolving these issues and “promoting long-term policy transparency and predictability.”

In Wang Yi’s meeting with Misri, the Chinese foreign minister said both countries “should seize the opportunity to meet each other halfway, explore more substantive measures, and commit themselves to mutual understanding, mutual support and mutual achievement, rather than mutual suspicion, alienation and mutual depletion.”

The statement came after external affairs minister S. Jaishankar had outlined India’s approach of “mutual respect, mutual sensitivity, and mutual interests.”

Indian foreign policy analysts, meanwhile, have advised caution as Beijing moves to set aside the border row and instead focuses on evolving relations in other fields such as trade and people-to-people connect.

“India wants mutual respect, mutual sensitivity, and mutual interest, while China wants suspicion removed, estrangement refrained, and mutual exhaustion refrained,” Professor Srikanth Kondapalli, dean, School of International Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, said.

“The Chinese position is to set aside the territorial dispute and evolve relations in other fields like trade, but India has been demanding to first resolve the border issue and then go ahead with the other bilateral relations,” Kondapalli said.

Considering this, “India will go slow” on improving ties, he said, pointing to the MEA release which stressed that India will proceed “step by step,” rather than “simply opening up everything in the bilateral relations.”

When India and China completed disengagement at Depsang and Demchok in Ladakh in November last year, Jaishankar had said that the next goal would be de-escalation of tension between both countries, Kondapalli said.

“As de-escalation is not being addressed, or is being addressed at a very slow pace, it will have implications for the normalization of relations between both countries,” he stressed.

Dissecting Beijing’s foreign policy approach since US President Donald Trump’s return to the White House starting with his election win in November, Kondapalli said China has been pushing to improve people-to-people links with Japan, Singapore, and Australia as well.

“The Chinese political system is quite agile. When they perceive a rising adversary, they proactively engage with other countries. Recently, they have even reached out to Europe, which itself has faced criticism from the US,” Kondapalli said.