Kazan: Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping will hold bilateral talks today on the sidelines of the ongoing 16th BRICS Summit in Russia’s Kazan city.
Hours after China, without mentioning the agreement on patrolling along the Line of Actual Control, confirmed it had “reached a solution” and would “work with India” to “effectively implement” the plan, India announced Tuesday that Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping would hold a bilateral meeting Wednesday on the sidelines of the ,capital of Tatarstan in Russia.
The agreement on patrolling arrangements on the Line of Actual Control (LAC), announced by the Indian side on Monday, had raised the possibility of the first formal interaction between Modi and Xi since their brief encounter on the sidelines of the G20 Summit in Bali in November 2022.
This will be the first bilateral meeting between the two leaders in five years — they met for an informal summit in Mahabalipuram in October 2019, months before the Chinese incursions in eastern Ladakh that triggered a military standoff along the LAC. They did have pull-aside meetings in Bali (2022) and Johannesburg (2023), but Wednesday will be the first proper and structured bilateral meeting.
The agreement on patrolling along the LAC was the outcome of several rounds of diplomatic and military talks between India and China. It also followed a string of meetings of senior leaders of the two sides in recent months – external affairs minister S Jaishankar met his Chinese counterpart Wang Yi on the margins of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) Summit in Kazakhstan on July 4 and on the sidelines of Asean-related meetings in Laos on July 25, while National Security Adviser Ajit Doval met Wang during a Brics-related meeting in St Petersburg on September 12.
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