Virtual BRICS summit to see Modi, Xi participate in first plurilateral conclave after Ladakh standoff

The BRICS virtual summit on November 17 will have both Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the Chinese President Xi Jinping attending a plurilateral conclave for the first time after the military standoff along the disputed India-China boundary in eastern Ladakh started early May.

Modi and Xi will join President Vladimir Putin of Russia, President Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil and President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa in the annual BRICS summit, which will be held virtually in view of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Putin has convened the summit as he presently holds the chair of the BRICS – a bloc comprising Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. A statement issued by the Russian Government said that the conclave would focus on the “BRICS Partnership for Global Stability, Shared Security and Innovative Growth”.

An extraordinary G20 summit convened by the 20-nation-bloc’s current chair Saudi Arabia’s King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud 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 standoff.

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 standoff.

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 standoff, which started five months back, however, is yet to be resolved, notwithstanding regular talks between the diplomats and the military commanders.