NEW DELHI: India and China will reaffirm their warming relations when their leaders meet in Europe next month but they must step past their border dispute and Pakistan’s stand on Kashmir to normalize ties, experts say.
Chinese President Hu Jintao, on his first foreign tour since taking office in March, will meet Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee in Russia and in France, before playing host to him in Beijing later in June.
India hopes the meetings on the wings of global events in Europe will form the basis of the Beijing meeting.
Sino-Indian ties have remained in a quagmire of mistrust since they fought a border war in 1962.
“The summit is of extreme importance and accordingly we are timetabling factors that could impinge on it,” a top Indian official said in a hint of the ongoing moves to mend ties with China’s closest ally, Pakistan.
India, which has fought two of three wars with Pakistan over Kashmir since 1947, has responded to Islamabad’s overtures and has set in motion steps to resolve the ownership row over the divided Himalayan state.
“If our border dispute is a thorn in Sino-Indian ties then India-Pakistan relations are also an impediment in the way of restoring close ties with our largest neighbour,” the Indian official said.
India accuses China of occupying 38,000 square kilometres of territory in northwestern Kashmir while Beijing lays claim to 90,000 square kilometres of land in India’s Arunachal Pradesh state.
Officials from the two sides have met 15 times since the 1980s in a bid to convert a line of control across the disputed territory into a formal border, the talks resulting in an exchange of maps but, more importantly, a cessation of military hostilities since 1996.
Sujit Dutta, an Indian expert on China, said the US-led war in Iraq, globalization of markets and regional issues have begun to tell on the nerves of the leaderships in the world’s two most populous nations.
“The whole relation is now being shaped by new factors as both are engaged in modernization, worried by external security and the global situation,” said Dutta.
“And finally there is this factor that the United States has emerged as the most powerful state. Sino-Indian relationships are being determined and driven by many of these factors,” he added.
Dutta said that since China and India recognized that their border row as well as the normalization of India-Pakistan relations were “complex and long-drawn,” the two sides would have to step past them and start afresh.
“Arms transfers between India and China are not on the ground as of yet but other areas of cooperation in security matters is potentially possible,” he predicted.
Sino-Indian ties crashed in 1998 when Delhi conducted nuclear tests but the wounds began healing in 1999 when the then foreign minister Jaswant Singh met his Chinese counterpart Tang Jiaxuan in Manila and then flew to Beijing the same year.
Retired major general Afzal Karim said the two sides now see the urgency of setting up regional blocs.
“If they can get along together it will be a very wise move because the world is dominated by just one power, which is the US,” Karim said, but ruled out any immediate military coalitions.
“India is also cosying up to the United States and so it is not quite sure to what extent China will go but it is very good that Vajpayee is travelling to China and the talks could go beyond our disputes and focus on the international security environment,” Karim said.
“Both India and China are exploring each other, very gingerly.
“India also wants to tell the world it has other options for an alliance if not a coalition ... But each has to look at their own strategic interests, which includes trade,” he said.
Sino-Indian annual two-way trade has grown from a paltry few hundred million dollars in the 1990s to five billion dollars at present.—AFP