India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi and China's President Xi Jinping at their meeting at Hyderabad House in New Delhi in 2014. - Reuters
NEW DELHI: Chinese President Xi Jinping and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi will hold their first bilateral meeting since 2022 on Wednesday, after the two countries eased a four-year border stalemate earlier this week.
The two leaders will meet on the sidelines of the BRICS summit in the Russian city of Kazan, India’s foreign secretary Vikram Misri said on Tuesday (Oct 22).
Modi and Xi had a brief conversation when they attended the bloc’s meeting in Johannesburg in 2023 and last had a formal sitdown during the Group of 20 leaders’ summit in Bali a year earlier.
"I can confirm that there will be a bilateral meeting held between Prime Minister Modi and President Xi Jinping” on Wednesday, Misri said in a briefing in Kazan.
"The exact time and other logistics are being worked out, but the meeting will take place.”
The meeting comes after Beijing and New Delhi reached an agreement on Monday to allow border patrolling operations in both countries to resume, completing a disengagement process along the disputed Himalayan borders.
Relations between China and India have been frozen since June 2020 when clashes between soldiers along the border left at least 20 Indian and at least five Chinese dead. Since then, India have imposed strict rules on Chinese businesses seeking to invest in the country, banned hundreds of Chinese apps and slowed visa approvals.
Xi visited the southern Indian city of Chennai in 2019, after hosting Modi in the Chinese city of Wuhan a year earlier.
The leaders of the world’s two most populous countries have separately met with Russian President Vladimir Putin during the three-day BRICS summit, the largest gathering of world leaders in Russia since he ordered the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
They both praised expanding relations with Russia in a display of unity at a time when the Kremlin looks to cast Putin as standing up to the West in attempting to reshape the global order.
Xi said during a meeting on the sidelines of the summit that the "deep friendship” between Russia and China won’t change amid the "chaos” in the world. Modi in turn said his recent visits to Russia demonstrate "our close and deepening” relations, according to televised remarks. - Bloomberg
