Indo-China Cooperation

Geography does not offer nations a choice of neighbours, and nowhere is that truer than along the Himalayan frontier separating India and China. Two civilisations of roughly one and a half billion people each, both nuclear-armed, both custodians of rivers that sustain hundreds of millions of lives downstream, and both indispensable to the functioning of the modern global economy, are bound together whether their Governments find that convenient or not. In an era when the old, dollar-centred world order is visibly fraying, the case for pragmatic cooperation between Asia's two giants has never been more compelling.

The complementarity between the two economies is difficult to overstate. China has spent three decades building itself into the world's manufacturing backbone and its most formidable technological powerhouse, and it remains the source of the rare earth minerals on which industries from electric vehicles to defence systems the world over now depend. India, by contrast, offers something equally scarce in a slowing global economy: a vast and youthful consumer market with decades of growth still ahead of it. The trade relationship between the two exceeds a hundred billion dollars annually, heavily favouring Beijing, is itself proof of how tightly the two economies are already interwoven. The imbalance is a genuine grievance for New Delhi, and rightly so, but the answer lies in negotiated market access and supply-chain reform, not in severing a relationship that plainly serves both sides.

What has changed the calculus more than anything else is the wider world. Washington's tariff offensives and the turbulence radiating from conflicts in the Middle East have left both capitals acutely aware of the dangers of a global order organised too tightly around a single power and a single currency. BRICS, whatever its limitations as an institution, has become the natural forum in which India and China can hedge against that over-concentration without formally breaking from the existing system. But that hedge carries credibility only if its two largest members are not simultaneously eyeing each other across a militarised border. A grouping meant to diversify global power cannot itself be paralysed by bilateral suspicion.

Encouragingly, the normalisation already underway suggests both sides understand this. Direct flights have resumed after years of suspension. The Kailash Mansarovar Yatra once again carries Indian pilgrims across Tibet. Border trade through passes such as Lipulekh and Shipki La has flickered back to life, restoring centuries-old commercial habits that outlasted empires long before either Government existed in its present form. National Security Adviser Ajit Doval's talks with Wang Yi in Beijing, followed by Prime Minister Modi's meeting with President Xi Jinping on the margins of the BRICS summit in New Delhi, mark the clearest sign yet that both leaderships wish to keep the relationship on an upward trajectory. That the two leaders publicly agreed to be guided by mutual respect, mutual sensitivity and mutual interest, and committed to a fair and mutually acceptable resolution of the boundary dispute, matters enormously, precisely because such commitments are rare and hard-won.

None of these steps should be mistaken for resolution. Some 3,488 kilometres of border remain undemarcated, tensions persist in the Arunachal Pradesh sector, and the trust deficit created by cross-border terrorism sponsored from Pakistan is not going to dissolve through barter trade or pilgrimage alone. But normalisation was never going to arrive as a single dramatic accord; it will come, if it comes at all, through the accumulation of precisely these unglamorous, incremental steps; through habits of cooperation that make the next difficult conversation slightly easier than the last.

The strategic logic is, in the end, straightforward. A confrontational, distrustful relationship between the world's two most populous nations serves neither Indian nor Chinese interests, and it certainly does not serve the interests of a Global South looking to both for leadership. A cooperative one, by contrast, creates a combination of manufacturing might, technological capacity, resource access and market scale that few blocs anywhere could rival. Aggression and suspicion are not policies; they are the absence of one. Dialogue, however slow and however frustrating, remains the only route that leads anywhere useful. Both leaders appear to agree on this. What remains is the harder task of proving it, year after year.