Eight months after Prime Minister Narendra Modi met Chinese President Xi Jinping at the G20 Summit in Bali for their first in-person meeting in public view since the start of the standoff along the Line of Actual Control in May 2020, the government, for the first time, said Thursday that the two leaders had spoken about the “need to stabilise bilateral relations”. In November last year, while there was no substantive readout on their conversation — captured by cameras at the Summit dinner — Indian officials had said that the “Prime Minister and President Xi Jinping, who were both attending the G20 dinner hosted by the Indonesian President, exchanged courtesies at the conclusion of the dinner”. But this week, after National Security Advisor Ajit Doval met top Chinese diplomat Wang Yi in South Africa on the sidelines of a meeting of BRICS NSAs, the Chinese Foreign Ministry mentioned the “important consensus” between Xi and Modi at the Bali Summit. “At the end of last year, President Xi Jinping and Prime Minister Modi reached an important consensus on stabilising China-India relations in Bali,” the Chinese Foreign Ministry statement said. On Thursday, while responding to questions, Arindam Bagchi, spokesperson for the Ministry of External Affairs, said, “Prime Minister (Modi) and President Xi Jinping, at the conclusion of that dinner hosted by the Indonesian President, exchanged courtesies and also spoke of the need to stabilise our bilateral relations. As you are aware, we have steadfastly maintained that the key to resolution of this whole issue is to resolve the situation along the LAC on the western sector of the India-China boundary, and to restore peace and tranquillity in the border areas.” #WATCH | Prime Minister Narendra Modi meets Chinese President Xi Jinping and US Secretary of State Antony Blinken at G20 dinner hosted by Indonesian President Joko Widodo in Bali, Indonesia. (Source: Reuters) pic.twitter.com/nZorkq4R1Y — ANI (@ANI) November 15, 2022 This is a standard template response after more than three years of the military standoff along the LAC in eastern Ladakh where 50,000-60,000 troops are deployed. In Bali, the handshake between Modi and Xi took place towards the end of the dinner. The two leaders greeted each other as Xi walked by. They shook hands and the video showed a brief relaxed conversation, before the camera moved elsewhere and the transmission ended. Since then, ministers and officials from both sides have met several times but there has been no resolution to the standoff in sight. And earlier this week, in one of his sharpest statements in three years on the border standoff, Doval told Wang Yi that the situation along the LAC since 2020 had “eroded strategic trust and the public and political basis of the relationship”. In March this year, External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar met the newly-appointed Chinese Foreign Minister Qin Gang – he was removed this week and Wangi Yi returned to the post – on the margins of the meeting of the G20 Foreign Ministers in New Delhi. Jaishankar described the current state of the bilateral relationship as “abnormal” when they discussed the standoff.
