Li Keqiang’s Visit

COMMENTARY

China’s new PM Li Keqiang’s first trip outside his country was to India this month. He had prepared well for his meetings with the Indian leaders and went out of his way to display warmth laced with plainspeak and candour. While PM Manmohan Singh read out from a prepared text at the media meet, Premier Li spoke extempore and left a lasting impress with his straightforward approach.

It was good that Dr Manmohan Singh raised the border issue, including and most notably the incident of Chinese incursion in Ladakh, in his talks with his Chinese counterpart and at the media meet as well. The recent Sino-Indian border standoff was a major development that did vitiate bilateral ties just before Li’s visit. Hence to skirt the issue (as External Affairs Minister Salman Khurshid did during his recent trip to Beijing) would have been doubtless detrimental to Indian interest. Li appeared to agree with Dr Singh that concrete moves must be made through a fresh mechanism to address the problem in right earnest, though he did not lay as much emphasis on the issue as our PM. Nonetheless, it is a welcome sign that the border negotiations are to be fast-tracked and the special representatives of both sides are to meet within six weeks for this purpose.

The agreement to renew sharing of hydro-logical data on the Brahmaputra is a significant step forward as also the measures being taken to boost economic complementaries to tackle bilateral trade deficit and mutual access to each other’s markets. While a detailed analysis of the visit’s outsome must necessarily await the result of Li’s talks in Islamabad with his “all-weather” Pakistani friends, The Indian Express’ view on this score is definitely noteworthy:

...Li’s visit to Delhi, his first foreign destination as PM, was to be a moment when the bilateral relationship was to be elevated to a higher level. While that opportunity may have been lost, the Depsang interlude has opened the door for the construction of a new equilibrium in Sino-Indian relations based on realism. A candid discussion of the new challenges is only the first step forward in a long and arduous journey that Delhi and Beijing have now begun.

Li Keqiang’s trip had added a new momentum to Sino-Indian interaction in the days ahead. We have now to see what the future has in store for us.

Observer.