New Delhi: Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s planned 27-28 April summit with Chinese president Xi Jinping is already drawing comparisons with another that took place nearly three decades ago—the landmark December summit 1988 between the late prime minister Rajiv Gandhi and then leader of China Deng Xiaoping.
Since the informal summit was announced on Sunday, the Chinese media has called it as key as the Rajiv-Deng meet, which came with all the trappings of a major diplomatic event and helped thaw ties seen to be in deep freeze.
The Modi-Xi summit in contrast is billed “informal”—no specifics are likely to come up for discussions, and no joint statement or agreements envisaged.
Spread over two days in the central Chinese city of Wuhan, the talks will be unstructured, primarily between the two leaders with only their interpreters present.
Others could possibly join in, but if they do, it will be without talking points or a prepared agenda.
Xi has had such meetings only with former US president Barrack Obama and his successor Donald Trump.
At home in China, this will be the first such informal summit Xi is hosting.
“The intention of this is to ensure that at the leadership level there is a strategic communication. Both countries are emerging as important countries in the world, we are both neighbours. There are risks involved as well, therefore there is a need for discussions to mitigate and handle those differences and of course growing the relationship. That is the important objective. I foresee a discussion that is focused on the positives in the relationship,” a person familiar with the development said.
The main expectation on the Indian side at least is for a new paradigm for bilateral ties that will stabilise the relationship rocked by the 73-day military stand-off in Doklam last year—an offshoot of their unsettled border dispute a legacy of the 1962 India-China war.
As an Indian official familiar with the development recently put it: “India’s ties with other P-5 (permanent members of the UN Security Council i.e. US, France, the UK and Russia) members are on solid footing. This (the relationship with China) is the one we need to fix.”
“There is a lot of mistrust in the relationship,” said Manoj Joshi, senior fellow at the New Delhi-based Observer Research Foundation think tank. The Modi-Xi summit would see the two sides “talk to each other in the frank way about what the other side is concerned about and work out a modus vivendi that envisages both sides pursue their national interests without entangling with each other”, he said.
The Modi-Xi meet comes after the Chinese president has been declared China’s most powerful leader since Mao Zedong, modern China’s founding father.
The Chinese National People’s Congress in March removed the two-term limit on the President’s tenure, which means India and its leadership will deal with Xi for the seeming foreseeable future.
As to the outcomes from the summit, analysts say they may not be immediately apparent. This is because it may take time for both sides to reorient policies to match the outcomes.
At the very least, the expectation is to forestall another Doklam kind of a face-off, said former foreign secretary Kanwal Sibal.
According to Joshi, India would hope for an improvement in the quality of communication between the leaderships of the two sides. “There could also be an understanding that the two countries don’t rub up against each other in their respective spheres of influence,” he added.
Ahead of his departure on Thursday, Modi in a statement said “President Xi and I will exchange views on a range of issues of bilateral and global importance. We will discuss our respective visions and priorities for national development, particularly in the context of current and future international situation.” “We will also review the developments in the India-China relations from a strategic and long-term perspective.”