The current state of India-China relations will be in focus this weekend when the eighth Brics summit is held in Goa. A summit-eve comment by China’s vice-foreign minister Li Baodong that Beijing is “ready for discussions with India to explore possibilities” on India’s application to join the NSG should be taken with a pinch of salt: the minister is not high-ranking enough for his comment to be considered significant, specially as he qualified it with a lot of talk about procedures, norms and regulations, and how China isn’t the only one to decide the rules of admission to the export control regime. But the fact that China’s President Xi Jinping and Prime Minister Narendra Modi will meet on Brics’ sidelines should be seen as a furtherance of the maturity in ties despite the tensions inherent in the two nations’ positions on Pakistan.
The one concession apparently made is that China may make a distinction between the applications by India and Pakistan for admission into NSG. There again, it remains to be seen if China will walk the talk, although India’s stand on not signing the NPT will be a handle China will use.
Ties with China may be of the eternal blow hot-blow cold variety, but at no time have they tended to dip alarmingly into openly antagonistic levels as we have seen in the yo-yo ties with Pakistan. China is known to play the “good cop-bad cop” routine on issues involving India, but the door has always been open for discussions. At one-on-one meetings at summits, both leaders are known to speak their minds. Mr Modi had made his point on the China-Pakistan Corridor passing through PoK at a previous meeting in Hungzhou during the G-20 summit last month. Pakistan is invariably the elephant in the room on all such occasions; and the latest counter-terror operation India ran is bound to be an issue. China has already made its position known; its opposition to anyone making “political gains in the name of counter-terrorism” makes its point unequivocally.
The sticking point is now China’s brazen support of Masood Azhar, in blocking a UN ban on the Jaish chief with a “technical hold” move that will keep the issue in abeyance for more time. China may be seen as a tacit supporter of Pakistan’s terrorism in a relationship that is seen today as stronger than that between Pakistan and the United States. And yet India has consistently sought stable ties with China, including continuing the military exercises along the Line of Actual Control, a border known for its calm despite the occasional complaints of Chinese transgressions. The Xi-Modi meeting may offer further proof that India-China ties don’t depend on any one of many sticky issues.
