Indo-China Dialogue

Five years on from the bloodshed at Galwan, the India-China relationship is being rebuilt brick by brick, and largely through the unglamorous instruments of statecraft rather than grand declarations. Direct flights have resumed after half a decade of silence in the skies. The Kailash Mansarovar Yatra, suspended for years, once again carries Indian pilgrims across the Himalaya. Border trade through passes such as Lipulekh and Shipki La has flickered back to life, and NSA Ajit Doval's extensive talks with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi in Beijing this week mark the 25th round of the Special Representatives' dialogue on the boundary question. Each of these developments, taken alone, is modest. Taken together, they describe a relationship in genuine, if cautious, recovery.

Yet it would be a mistake to read this recovery as resolution. With 3,488 kilometres of border remain contested, much of it undemarcated and subject to competing claims that have hardened rather than softened over with time. The Upper Subansiri region of Arunachal Pradesh, which Beijing insists on calling South Tibet, remains a live flashpoint, with reports of assertive Chinese troop movements surfacing even as diplomats exchange warm words in Beijing drawing rooms. This is the essential paradox of the current thaw: economic and cultural ties are visibly warming even as the fundamental territorial dispute that triggered Galwan in the first place stays essentially unresolved. Flights and pilgrimages restore the human texture of the relationship; they do not, by themselves, move a single boundary marker.

That is precisely why the structured mechanisms matter so much. The Special Representatives' framework, in place since 2003, has never delivered a final settlement. Still, it has proved its worth as a pressure valve - a channel through which recurring flare-ups can be managed before they metastasise into confrontation. Doval's visit, coming weeks ahead of President Xi Jinping's expected presence at the BRICS summit in India, is best understood in this light: not as a breakthrough, but as the necessary maintenance of a relationship that cannot be allowed to drift back towards the freeze of 2020. Progress on delimitation will, realistically, be measured by incremental understandings over years rather than sudden accords.

What has changed, and changed for the better, is the wider strategic context in which this bilateral relationship now sits. The tariff war launched by Washington, followed by the turbulence of the Iran-Israel-US confrontation, has left both New Delhi and Beijing newly conscious of the risks of an international order organised too tightly around a single dominant power and a single reserve currency. India and China together account for well over a third of humanity, and, on current trade figures exceeding one hundred billion dollars annually, are each other's indispensable economic partners whether they fully embrace that fact or not. BRICS offers both capitals a forum in which to hedge against dollar-centric trade without formally severing ties to the existing order - but that hedge only has credibility if the two largest members of the bloc are not simultaneously eyeing each other across a militarised frontier.

This is the sense in which mutual interest, not sentiment, ought to be the organising principle of the relationship going forward. Neither country can choose its neighbour, and geography has bound India and China together for millennia regardless of the political temperature between them. Coexistence is not a concession; it is simply the recognition of an unalterable fact. Back-channel military-to-military contacts and front-facing ministerial dialogue are not mutually exclusive tracks but complementary ones, each reinforcing the other's credibility. Trade imbalances, restrictions on critical exports such as rare earths, and the unresolved question of cross-border terrorism sponsored from Pakistan will all continue to test the relationship's limits.

None of this diminishes what has been achieved since 2020. But normalisation must be understood as a process, not an event - one that requires the two sides to keep talking. The choice before both capitals is not between confrontation and friendship, but between vigilant, patient engagement and the far costlier alternative of drift. Doval's visit to Beijing is one more instalment in that patient work. It should be judged not by whether it resolves the border question but by whether it keeps the channels open for the harder conversations still to come.