PM Modi, Xi likely to come face-to-face in four summits this month amid the India-China stand-off

Even as the six-month-long military stand-off along the disputed India-China boundary is still continuing, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping will take part in as many as four virtual plurilateral and multilateral summits this month.

Modi and Xi will take part in the virtual summits of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) and the BRICS (a bloc comprising Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa), which will be chaired by Russian President Vladimir Putin on November 10 and 17.

The Prime Minister and the Chinese President will also attend the 15th East Asia Summit, which will be held virtually along with the annual meetings of the ASEAN (Association of South-East Asian Nations) and the related forums from November 12 to 15. The East Asia Summit and the ASEAN meets will be chaired by Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc.

Modi and Xi will also attend the virtual G-20 summit, which will be chaired by Saudi Arabia’s King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud on November 21 and 22.

An extra-ordinary G-20 summit on March 26 was the last multilateral event both the Prime Minister and the Chinese President had participated – weeks before the soldiers of the two neighbouring nations got engaged in a stand-off.

Modi and Xi had an “informal summit” in a seaside resort in Tamil Nadu in October 2019. It was the second “informal summit” and the last bilateral engagement between the two leaders before the Chinese People’s Liberation Army’s aggressive moves to unilaterally alter the status quo along the disputed boundary between the two nations and the Indian Army’s additional deployment in response resulted in the stand-off.

Defence Minister Rajnath Singh and External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar, however, had meetings with their counterparts in the Chinese Government, Wei Fenghe and Wang Yi respectively, on the side-line of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization’s meetings in Moscow last month. The stand-off, which started five months back, however, is yet to be resolved, notwithstanding regular talks between the diplomats and the military commanders.