China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs stated that the visit by the president was on Sept 12-13, in which he would attend the 18th BRICS Summit in New Delhi. In 2019 President Xi was last in India, which was on a visit to Mahabalipuram, Tamil Nadu.
The above-mentioned statement will certainly resolve all queries regarding the participation of President Xi Jinping in the summit amid efforts of both countries to rebuild their relations.
However, Beijing stayed vague regarding Xi’s intentions prior to the summit. According to a statement made at a press conference during the week when a journalist inquired who from China was expected to be present at the summit, he/she simply answered: “If there is any news, we’ll make an announcement.” This was clarified Thursday when the Ministry of Foreign Affairs made a statement that Xi Jinping would visit India “at the invitation of the Prime Minister of the Republic of India Narendra Modi.”
As per Reuters, the delegation for this visit by Xi will consist of nearly 400 officials, almost double the size of the delegation he had taken with him in India in 2019. The Chinese officials have even stated that Beijing will be supporting India's chairmanship of BRICS this year, indicating that Xi's presence will not be just another diplomatic formality.
At present, India is chairing BRICS in 2026, and the agenda of the summit will revolve around global governance, trade, investments, technology, food and energy security, resilience of supply chains, and national currency cross-border payments, which has been the agenda of India in positioning the interests of the Global South in BRICS.
Xi's visit was not unplanned. Rather, it comes after the 25th round of talks at the level of special representatives regarding the border issue between India and China, which took place in Beijing towards the end of August and included Ajit Doval, National Security Advisor to India, and Wang Yi, Chinese Foreign Minister.
These talks reached an eight-point agreement, one of which is the commitment to continue negotiations for reaching a framework of resolution for the dispute along the border and efforts for early progress on issues in regard to areas in the border that are seen as less controversial. It is said that an expert team will work on this matter, along with another team that will work on border management.
The relation between both the countries deteriorated after the fight that happened in the Galwan Valley region of eastern Ladakh in June 2020 and led to a military standoff along the Line of Actual Control (LAC). Though both sides have been able to disengage from a number of points of conflict, their armed forces have not been able to de-escalate.
Normalization of economic relations seems likely to be one of the key issues of the visit. As per media reports, Xi is also taking with him his commerce minister, Wang Wentao, who is going to discuss the issues of trade and investment in detail with India's commerce minister, Piyush Goyal.
While India wants increased access to the Chinese market and decreased export restrictions imposed by China, China would want India to ease up the barriers for its businesses and reduce the number of bureaucratic steps that have to be completed by its companies while operating there. Despite the normalization of diplomatic ties, it seems that businesses from both sides still encounter problems with regulators and lack of mutual trust.
The economic normalization comes after years of limited interaction between the two nations after the Galwan Valley incident, during which flights, visas, and high-level contacts had been limited between the countries.
Xi and Modi will meet on the sidelines of the summit, say several reports, which will be their first significant one-to-one interaction in New Delhi in seven years. President Xi Jinping and Prime Minister Narendra Modi had already met in an informal meeting on the sidelines of the SCO summit that was held in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, in early September, which could be regarded as a prelude to the meeting that was due to take place in New Delhi.
The above-mentioned meeting occurred within the context of PM Modi’s visit to China in late August, during which he attended the SCO summit and had some talks, which were part of the efforts for improving ties between the two countries.
In spite of the diplomatic push toward success, the authorities and analysts have been prudent enough to interpret the visit not as a solution, but as an opportunity. As one of the reports on the visit goes, it would be wrong to consider the visit of the Chinese president to India after almost seven years of absence as something which resolves all the differences between the two countries.
It has been reported that there are still some unresolved disputes even outside the framework of the summit. For instance, there were reports of some alleged Chinese movements near the India border in the Upper Subansiri district of Arunachal Pradesh in mid-August.
The size of the security effort at the conference demonstrates the importance with which the city views the event. As reported, 15,000 Delhi Police personnel along with 200 paramilitary troops have been assigned for security arrangements for the two-day conference, and hence the importance of the conference as well as the delicacy of having the Chinese leader in the country is clearly understood.
President should visit New Delhi on Saturday, September 12 and attend the BRICS summit until September 13 and also interact with Prime Minister Modi before departing. Discussions regarding trade negotiations between Wang Wentao, the Chinese commerce minister, and Piyush Goyal as well as any other development concerning the eight-point agreement would be considered as practical results of the visit.
