Modi’s China reset is just wishful thinking

By Mihir Sharma

There’s an old joke in India: Our prime minister always knows where the camera is. So when pictures emerged from the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit in Tianjin of Narendra Modi holding hands with China’s Xi Jinping and Russia’s Vladimir Putin, there is no question that this was a considered, deliberate choice — a statement that India will give the authoritarians to its north yet another chance to show that they are worthy of trust.

This is a massive policy shift in a relatively short time. Just five years ago, Chinese and Indian soldiers were killing each other on the frozen heights of the Himalayan border they dispute. They stayed eyeball-to-eyeball while New Delhi slowly cut connections with Beijing — banning Chinese investment, throwing out TikTok, and cultivating an independent constituency in the Global South. Indian diplomacy presented the country as looking outward to the “Indo-Pacific,” a vast maritime area defined to include the US, instead of to a “Eurasia” dominated by continental powers like Russia and China.

If Modi now wants to reach out a hand to the leaders of Eurasia, one might assume it is entirely because India has been insulted and rejected by the US — laden with higher tariffs than almost all its peers, and continually needled by President Donald Trump’s advisers and officials.

But that isn’t the entire story. It isn’t even the main reason. An attempted rapprochement with China has been likely for some time. Officials were publicly arguing, well before Trump was re-elected, that India’s hard line on Chinese investment and trade was hurting its attempts to attract manufacturing investment. Supply lines, skilled trainers, and subcontractors — of the sort that Apple Inc., for example, would require — could only relocate to India with Beijing’s co-operation.

India’s shift marks the end of a hopeful period, during which some expected that reducing China’s hold over the world economy could be accomplished unilaterally, through wholesale cuts to trade or investment. Nobody attempted to go further down that path than New Delhi, and now it has been forced to reverse course.

Even had there been no solid economic rationale for warmer ties, Modi might have tried anyway. One of the hallmarks of his tenure in office has been his unquenchable hope that China will be kinder to its neighbour. Xi has given him little encouragement, but nevertheless Modi persists.

Even in Tianjin, the official readouts of the leaders’ meeting had noticeable differences. Beijing stressed the countries should “work together for a multipolar world;” New Delhi noted it asked for a multipolar world and a multipolar Asia. The Chinese leader is happy the two countries are talking again, but not happy enough to give an inch on anything substantive. Those soldiers in the Himalayas may have stepped back from each other a bit, but they haven’t returned entirely to their pre-confrontation lines.

This will not have deterred Modi. He has attempted resets with Xi several times already: In 2018 there was talk of the “Wuhan spirit” of conviviality shaping relations following a meeting there. These moments of good cheer have never lasted. Days, months, or years later, the Peoples Liberation Army pushes on the border just enough to make further normalization impossible. Sometimes just hours later: The first time Xi and Modi met, in 2014, news apparently came of a Chinese incursion while the two leaders were at dinner.

But where, in this delicate dance of elephant and dragon — in Xi’s words — does the Russian bear fit? Modi and Putin also held hands, after all. Was that, at least, a message to the West? Perhaps. But, from New Delhi’s perspective, Russia’s aspirations serve to control China’s aspirations, not enhance them. There are areas — northeastern and Central Asia, for example — where Russian and Chinese interests may not perfectly coincide. Putin and Modi may both hope that the presence of the other serves to render Xi less a leader and more an equal.

There is a great deal of wishful thinking all round. The Russians must have been led to believe that the coolness with which they have been treated by Indian officialdom since their invasion of Ukraine is now a thing of the past. But New Delhi’s attitude reflects hopes for a ceasefire; if Moscow remains intransigent, then this warmth may fade away even before Putin’s scheduled visit to India in December.

The Chinese, meanwhile, expect that Trump’s step-motherly treatment of India has shown them their true place in world affairs, but there’s no sign that India has moderated its aspirations. And the Indians just hope that, this time, they will not regret détente.

History says friendly clasps between India and China do not last. Modi always reaches out a hand, but it is eventually dashed away.