New Delhi: Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi arrived in the Indian capital on Thursday, his first trip since troops from the two countries engaged in a tense faceoff and occasional clashes along the border, Indian media reported.
The Press Trust of India news agency said Wang was expected to meet India’s External Affairs Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar and National Security Adviser Ajit Doval on Friday. There was no official announcement of the visit by either New Delhi or Beijing.
“Nothing from us regarding this,” an Indian foreign ministry official said when asked for comment.
The aim of Wang Yi’s visit is to restart physical engagement and also invite Prime Minister Narendra Modi for a BRICS meeting to be hosted by Beijing later this year, news agency PTI has reported.
The suspense over the visit persisted till the last minute and there was no official confirmation of the visit even when the Chinese minister landed in Delhi. The landing could be confirmed only through tracking the flight path of his plane, which took off from Afghanistan.
Several rounds of talks
India-China relations have taken a downturn as Chinese incursions became more frequent in Ladakh and led to the clash in Galwan Valley in which 20 Indian and several Chinese soldiers died.
Repeated rounds of military-level talks have led to de-escalation — the two sides completed the disengagement process last year in the north and south banks of the Pangong lake and in the Gogra area. But there has been no return to the status quo that prevailed before 2020.
On March 11, India and China held the 15th round of military dialogue to resolve the pending issues.
Jaishankar had several rounds of talks with Wang Yi in Moscow and Dushanbe to defuse tensions.
In September 2020, they held extensive talks in Moscow on the sidelines of a conclave of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation during which they reached a five-point agreement to resolve the border row in eastern Ladakh.
They also had a bilateral meeting on the sidelines of another SCO meeting in Tajik capital city Dushanbe in July last year. Another meeting took place in September in Dushanbe.
Wang made a surprise visit Thursday to Afghanistan’s capital, where he met with the country’s new Taliban rulers.
