PM Modi raises LAC concerns, Xi harps on normal ties

India and China have differed on which side sought the meeting between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping.

Published on: Aug 25, 2023, 10:07:23 IST

By Shishir Gupta

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Contrary to the statement issued by the Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson on Prime Minister Narendra Modi's brief exchange with Chinese President Xi Jinping on Thursday, authoritative sources told HT that the meeting was sought by the Chinese side. Prime Minister Modi and President Xi Jinping met at the leaders' lounge during the BRICS Summit briefly with their interpreters. While the Chinese description of the meeting indicates that both India and China want to normalise relations, this doesn't appear to be the case as PM Modi raised concerns over massive PLA deployment in East Ladakh. It is understood that Prime Minister Modi made it clear that the route towards normalisation goes through disengagement and de-escalation along the 3,488 km LAC.

Chinese President Xi Jinping and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi spoke on the sidelines of the BRICS summit in Johannesburg. (Bloomberg)

The Chinese side, however, wants India to keep the sensitive boundary issues and its military concerns on the side while pursuing speedy normalisation of ties. Since 1977, China has been advocating parallel-track diplomacy by keeping the boundary issue separate from trade ties. This has resulted in India facing a trade deficit of nearly $70 billion. With India and China issuing separate statements on the Modi-Xi meeting, it is evident that there was very little common ground in the meeting. Simply put, the two sides presented the views of their respective countries.

In a Chinese readout on Friday on the exchanges between the two leaders on the sidelines of the BRICS Summit in Johannesburg, it was claimed that President Xi Jinping spoke with Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the latter’s request.

"President Xi stressed that improving China-India relations serves common interests of the two countries and peoples, and is also conducive to peace, stability and development of the world and the region," it said.

"The two sides should bear in mind the overall interests of their bilateral relations and handle properly the border issue so as to jointly safeguard peace & tranquility in the border region," the statement said.

India's foreign secretary Vinay Kwatra said Prime Minister Modi conveyed to President Xi India's concerns on the "unresolved" issues along the LAC in eastern Ladakh, underlining that maintenance of peace and tranquility in border areas was essential for normalisation of India-China ties.

"In this regard, two leaders agreed to direct their relevant officials to intensify efforts at expeditious disengagement and deescalation," Kwatra added.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Shishir Gupta
Shishir Gupta is Executive Editor at Hindustan Times and one of India's top journalists covering national security, strategic affairs, foreign policy and geopolitics. Over the past three decades, he has extensively reported on India's military, diplomatic and security landscape, covering every major conflict and national security challenge, from the 1999 Kargil War and the 2020 East Ladakh standoff to Operation Sindoor in 2025. He has also covered major terror attacks, including the IC-814 hijacking, the 26/11 Mumbai attacks and the 2025 Pahalgam terror strike, along with numerous Pakistan-backed terrorist incidents in the Kashmir Valley and across India. He has reported on national and state elections for more than three decades. A recognised authority on strategic affairs, Gupta has covered India's nuclear programme since the Pokhran-II (Shakti series) tests in May 1998 and has written extensively on global nuclear issues, Indian diplomacy and the country's expanding global outreach. He has also reported widely on international conflicts and terrorism, with a special focus on the Indian subcontinent. Gupta has interviewed Prime Minister Narendra Modi more than four times, including Modi's first interview with the print media after becoming Prime Minister in May 2014. His other interviews include three with the Dalai Lama, as well as conversations with Benjamin Netanyahu, Amit Shah, Yogi Adityanath, S. Jaishankar, Nirmala Sitharaman and Piyush Goyal. He is the author of Indian Mujahideen: The Enemy Within (Hachette, 2011) and Himalayan Face-off: Chinese Assertion and Indian Riposte (Hachette, 2014). He was awarded the Chevening-Wolfson Joint Scholarship at Wolfson College, University of Cambridge, UK, in 1998 and participated in the International Visitor Leadership Program (IVLP) of the US State Department in 2006. He received the Ben Gurion Prize from Israel in 2011 and the K. Subrahmanyam Prize for Strategic Studies in 2015 from the Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (MP-IDSA). Since 2024, he has hosted Point Blank, Hindustan Times' weekly YouTube show on global geopolitics.Read More

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