G20 summit chance for PM Modi to hold meetings with Xi, Biden, Sunak

The G20 summit at Bali in Indonesia next week will offer opportunities for Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s bilateral meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping, in addition to the ones with the United States President Joe Biden and the new British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak.

Modi will visit Bali from Monday to Wednesday to attend the 17th G20 summit being hosted by Indonesian President Joko Widodo, the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) announced in New Delhi on Thursday. “The prime minister will hold bilateral meetings with some of his counterparts,” Arindam Bagchi, the spokesperson of the MEA, told journalists. He, however, did not specify who were the leaders whom the prime minister would meet.

A source in New Delhi, however, said that Modi would definitely hold a bilateral meeting with Widodo, the host of the summit. He would hold a bilateral meeting with Sunak – the first Hindu Prime Minister of the United Kingdom – too. It would be the first in-person bilateral meeting between Modi and Sunak, who succeeded Liz Truss at the 10 Downing Street in London on October 25. They earlier had a phone-call though. A bilateral meeting with the US President might also be squeezed into his schedule in Bali, added the source.

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Widodo will symbolically hand over the G20 presidency to Prime Minister Narendra Modi during the closing session of the 17th summit.

India will formally take over the presidency of the G20 on December 1 and will host the 18th summit of the bloc in New Delhi in September 2023.

The officials in New Delhi, however, did not confirm or rule out the possibility of the prime minister’s bilateral meeting with the president of China.

If Modi and Xi hold a bilateral meeting in Bali, it will be the first such occasion after the military stand-off along the Line of Actual Control (LAC) in eastern Ladakh started in April-May 2020.

The two leaders had an informal summit at a seaside resort at Mamallapuram in Tamil Nadu in October 2019. It was a sequel to the first informal summit that had been held at Wuhan in central China in April 2018. They last had a bilateral meeting on the sideline of the BRICS summit in Brasilia in November 2019. The stand-off along the LAC in eastern Ladakh, however, brought the relations between the two nations to a new low and the two leaders had no such bilateral engagement in the past three years.

Though Modi and Xi attended the Shanghai Cooperation Organization’s summit at Samarkand in Uzbekistan on September 15 and 16, they had held no bilateral meeting on the sideline of the conclave.

The disengagement of troops in Gogra-Hotsprings (Patrolling Point 15) area on the LAC between September 8 to 12 did end an impasse in the protracted negotiations to resolve the stand-off. It came almost a year after the two sides had mutually withdrawn troops from Gogra Post (Patrolling Point 17A) in August 2021. Earlier, the Indian Army and the Chinese PLA had mutually withdrawn troops from Galwan Valley in June 2020 and from the northern bank of Pangong Tso in February 2021.

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After the disengagement of troops by the two sides from PP15 between September 8 and 12, External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar acknowledged it as “one problem less on border”, thus tacitly underlining that the more-than-two-year-long stand-off along the LAC – the de facto boundary between the two nations – was not over yet.

The Chinese PLA continues to block the Indian Army’s access to Patrol Points 10, 11, 12, 12A and 13 by deploying troops in Depsang Bulge, well inside the territory of India along the country’s LAC with China. A similar face-off also continues in Demchok on the LAC.

The two sides are likely to hold a meeting of the military commanders to continue negotiations to resolve the remaining issues along the LAC.