Disengagement of troops by India, China from PP15 of LAC may set stage for Modi-Xi meeting next week

The move by the Indian Army and the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) to end the stand-off at Patrol Point 15 on the Line of Actual Control (LAC) in eastern Ladakh on Thursday may set the stage for a meeting between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and President Xi Jinping at Samarkand in Uzbekistan next week.

With Modi likely to play host to Xi in New Delhi twice next year, the speculation was rife about the possibility of the two leaders holding a bilateral meeting on the sideline of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation’s summit being hosted by Uzbek President Shavkat Mirziyoyev on September 15 and 16. But what apparently came in the way of creating a conducive atmosphere for the meeting between the two leaders was the lack of progress for a year in the negotiations to resolve the military stand-off between the Indian Army and the Chinese PLA along the LAC in eastern Ladakh.

Also Read | India, China begin disengagement in Gogra-Hotsprings PP-15 in eastern Ladakh

New Delhi has been repeatedly sending out a message to Beijing over the past few weeks, underlining that normalcy in India-China relations could only be restored only after the complete disengagement of troops in the remaining face-off points along the LAC followed by the mutual withdrawal of additional forces deployed by both sides in the “depth-areas” in the respective sides of the LAC.

The two sides started mutual withdrawal of the troops from Patrol Point 15 on Thursday, thus ending the stalemate in negotiations to resolve the stand-off, which started in April-May 2020. Though the disengagement from PP-15 will not completely restore the status quo along the LAC, it is likely to make it easier for New Delhi and Beijing to arrange a meeting between the two leaders on the sideline of the SCO summit in Uzbekistan.

New Delhi and Beijing claimed that the two sides had reached a consensus to mutually withdraw troops from Gogra-Hotsprings area, when the senior military commanders of the two nations met for the 16th round of negotiations between military commanders of the two nations. It, however, took the Indian Army and the Chinese PLA almost two months to implement the consensus reached on July 17 and the disengagement of the troops from the PP-15 started just a week before the leaders of the two nations would reach the ancient Silk-Road city in southeastern Uzbekistan for the SCO summit.

Modi will take over the presidency of the SCO’s Council of Heads of State after the summit next week. He will host the summit of the bloc in New Delhi next year. The speculation about the bilateral meeting between him and the Chinese President started because the host of the next summit of any plurilateral organization generally would generally have such engagements with other leaders of the bloc during the preceding summit. Xi is also among the world leaders whom Modi is likely to host for the G20 summit in New Delhi next year, in addition to the SCO Heads of State meet.

If the Modi-Xi meeting happens in Samarkand, it will be the first such occasion after the India-China military stand-off along the LAC in eastern Ladakh started in 2020 and took the relations between the two neighbouring nations to a new low. The last bilateral engagement between the two leaders had been held at a seaside resort at Mamallapuram in Tamil Nadu in October 2019, when they had met for a sequel to their ‘informal summit’ at Wuhan in central China in April 2018.

Modi and Xi will also attend the G20 summit which Indonesian President Joko Widodo would host in Bali later this year.