India not averse to trilateral meet with Russia and China

New Delhi: The Modi government is not averse to Moscow’s proposal to restart Russia-India-China meetings, and the trilateral mechanism may resume on the sidelines of the BRICS summit in Rio de Janeiro early next month.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi, President Xi Jinping of China and President Vladimir Putin of Russia are likely to attend the BRICS summit to be hosted by President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil on July 6 and 7. Moscow is keen to use the opportunity to hold the RIC (Russia-India-China) summit after a hiatus of six years.

"I would like to confirm our genuine interest in the earliest resumption of the work within the format of the troika — Russia, India, China — which was established many years ago on the initiative of [former Russian Prime Minister] Yevgeny Primakov, and which has organised meetings more than 20 times at the ministerial level since then, not only at the level of foreign policy chiefs, but also the heads of other economic, trade and financial agencies of the three countries," Sergey Lavrov was quoted saying by Russian news agency TASS.

New Delhi, however, is of the view that External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar should first hold a meeting with his Chinese and Russian counterparts — Wang Yi and Sergey Lavrov, respectively — in Rio de Janeiro first to set the stage for a summit later, a source told DH on Wednesday.

Modi, Putin and Xi had held the second RIC (Russia-India-China) summit on the sidelines of the G-20 conclave in Buenos Aires in December 2018 — almost 12 years after the then leaders of the three nations held the first trilateral meeting. They held the third RIC summit on the sidelines of the G-20 meet in Osaka in June 2019. The summit, however, could not be held since 2020, as the Covid-19 pandemic swept the world and India’s relations with China hit a new low over the military stand-off between the two nations in eastern Ladakh.

Jaishankar, however, on June 23, 2020, and on November 26, 2021, joined Lavrov and Wang in virtual RIC meetings.

The meeting of the RIC foreign ministers also did not take place in the past three years.

The relations between New Delhi and Beijing were on the mend since the stand-off along the LAC came to an end in October 2024.

But the bilateral ties have again come under shadow, with Beijing extending its support to Islamabad after India-Pakistan tensions escalated in the wake of the April 22 terrorist attack in Jammu and Kashmir. Even before India launched Operation Sindoor, China vowed to support its "all-weather ally" Pakistan in "safeguarding its territorial integrity and sovereignty". Beijing also supported Islamabad’s call for an impartial probe into the killing of 26 people at Baisaran near Pahalgam, although The Resistance Force, an offshoot of Lashkar-e-Tayyiba based in Pakistan, claimed responsibility for the latest carnage in India.