India And China Are Partners Not Rivals, Modi and Xi Say

Source Credit : Reuters

India and China are development partners, not rivals, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping agreed on Sunday, as they discussed ways to improve trade ties amid global tariff uncertainty.

Modi is in China for the first time in seven years to attend a two-day meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation regional security bloc, along with Russian President Vladimir Putin and leaders from Iran, Pakistan and four Central Asian states in a show of Global South solidarity.

Analysts say Xi and Modi are seeking to align against pressure from the West, days after U.S. President Donald Trump imposed a punitive total of 50% tariff on Indian goods, partly in response to New Delhi’s purchase of Russian oil.

Trump’s moves hurt decades of carefully cultivated U.S. ties with New Delhi, which Washington had hoped would act as a regional counterweight to Beijing.

Modi told Xi his country was committed to improving ties with China and discussed reducing India’s burgeoning bilateral trade deficit of nearly $99.2 billion, while emphasizing the need to maintain peace and stability at their disputed border after a clash in 2020 triggered a five-year military standoff.

“We are committed to progressing our relations based on mutual respect, trust and sensitivities,” Modi said during the meeting on the sidelines of the summit, according to a video posted on his official X account.

He said an atmosphere of “peace and stability” has been created on their disputed Himalayan border and that cooperation between the two nations was linked to the interests of 2.8 billion people of the world’s two most populous countries.

The nuclear-armed Asian neighbors share a 3,800 km (2,400 miles) border that is poorly demarcated and has been disputed since the 1950s.

Xi said that China and India are each other’s development opportunities rather than threats, Chinese state news agency Xinhua reported.

“We must ... not let the border issue define the overall China-India relationship,” Xinhua reported Xi as saying.

China-India ties could be “stable and far-reaching” if both sides focus on viewing each other as partners instead of rivals, Xi added.

Ties between the nations were ruptured by the 2020 clash, in which 20 Indian and four Chinese soldiers died in hand-to-hand combat, following which the Himalayan border was heavily militarized by both sides.