Will Narendra Modi’s snub of Xi Jinping’s belt and road derail China-India ties?

The Indian prime minister refused to back the Chinese leader’s ambitious global infrastructure vision at a summit last week, but the apparent snub is not getting in the way of amicable ties between Asia’s two biggest economies

Reading Time:4 minutes

Chinese President Xi Jinping and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the BRICS Summit at the Xiamen International Conference and Exhibition Center in 2017. Photo: AFP

Published: 1:19pm, 19 Jun 2019Updated: 10:50pm, 19 Jun 2019

Their informal summit in Wuhan last year created all the right optics; even their chemistry seemed on point. So, when Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping met last week on the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), the bonhomie seemed like it was there to stay.

But a day later, cracks appeared to emerge. India, holding on to its long-stated position, delivered a public snub to China by refusing to endorse its ambitious, trillion-dollar Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in the SCO summit’s Bishkek declaration.

Now, after equal parts public bonhomie and disagreement over the BRI, where do India-China ties finally stand? Somewhere in the middle, by all indications.

With just 10 days before Xi and Modi meet again at the Russia-India-China (RIC) trilateral meeting on the sidelines of the Group of 20 (G20) summit in Osaka, there have been increasing signs that both countries may now be trialling a fresh approach to diplomacy – one that neither sidesteps contentious issues nor does it allow differences to derail ties.

Chinese President Xi Jinping leads other leaders of Shanghai Cooperation Organisation: Russia’s Vladimir Putin and India’s Narendra Modi at the 2018 summit. Photo: Xinhua

Such an approach would delink the thorny issues – like the decades-old border dispute and the BRI – from other non-contentious issues of cooperation in other sectors.