SCO ministerial summit: Swaraj, Sitharaman to meet their Chinese counterparts in Beijing

The SCO summit will be in June in Qingdao with Prime Minister Modi attending the multilateral event.

Updated on: Mar 21, 2018, 09:07:24 IST

Hindustan Times, New Delhi | By Shishir Gupta

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The government’s engagement with the newly appointed Cabinet of Chinese President Xi Jinping will begin later this month with external affairs minister Sushma Swaraj and defence minister Nirmala Sitharaman expected to meet their counterparts, state councillor Wang Yi and defence minister General Wei Fenghe, on the sidelines of SCO ministerial summit in Beijing from April 24-26.

Sushma Swaraj and Nirmala Sitharaman will meet their Chinese counterparts on the sidelines of SCO ministerial summit in Beijing from April 24-26. (Reuters File Photo)

The meeting between Swaraj and Wang has been scheduled while the ministry of defence is expected to seek time from General Wei in a bid to build bilateral trust and cooperation. The SCO summit will be in June in Qingdao with Prime Minister Modi attending the multilateral event.

South Block officials indicated that National Security Adviser Ajit Doval is also expected to fly to Beijing after returning from Washington this weekend to meet his counterpart Wang, who is also the special representative for the India-China boundary dialogue. Wang was appointed state councillor by President Xi on Monday after his predecessor Yang Jiechi was elevated to the Politburo of the Chinese Communist Party.

Top diplomats and China experts told HT that the ongoing engagement with Beijing is designed to deepen economic and political cooperation as Delhi has neither the intention of provoking its neighbour nor the desire to embark on a full-fledged confrontation. This was made clear when cabinet secretary PK Sinha wrote a letter on February 26, asking all politicians and bureaucrats to refrain from participating in events organised by the Tibetan government in exile to celebrate the 60th year of exile of His Holiness The Dalai Lama.

While the Modi government wants the Tibetan government in exile to avoid indulging in any political activity perceived to be against Beijing, it is clear that it wants its core interests from the Line of Actual Control (LAC) to the Indian Ocean to be fully protected. Just as Chinese core interests of Tibet and Taiwan are non-negotiable for Beijing, Delhi is opposed to any unilateral changing of the LAC or Chinese activity in the Indian Ocean. Indian opposition to China Pakistan Economic Corridor, passing through Pakistan Occupied Kashmir, is now a matter of record. As reported earlier in HT, the ministerial engagement with China this month is expected to translate into a bilateral informal summit between Modi and Xi.

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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