Modi’s China Reset Is Just Wishful Thinking
History tells us that Beijing will not allow this détente to last. The Indian leader’s bonhomie with Xi was just for the cameras.
This resent won’t last.
Photographer: Suo Takekuma/AFP/Getty Images
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.