BEIJING — India staged one of its most compressed diplomatic blitzes of the year on Monday, with Foreign Minister S. Jaishankar in Moscow holding India-Russia BRICS summit talks while National Security Adviser Ajit Doval touched down in the Chinese capital — two missions, two capitals, one day, and a clear signal about where New Delhi has positioned itself in a world that no longer waits for countries to choose sides.
Doval’s arrival opened a two-day schedule that includes the 25th round of India-China Special Representatives’ Talks on the boundary question on Tuesday, co-chaired with Wang Yi, a member of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China Central Committee and director of China’s Office of the Central Commission for Foreign Affairs. A separate session with Chinese Vice President Han Zheng is also on the agenda — an elevation in diplomatic protocol that suggests Beijing is treating this round as more than a routine procedural exchange, according to an announcement by China’s Foreign Ministry on Monday.
The talks come after a striking convergence of bilateral progress. At the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit in Tianjin last month, Prime Minister Narendra Modi met President Xi Jinping in their most substantive session since the deadly Galwan Valley clash in June 2020 upended six years of managed engagement. It was Modi’s first visit to China since 2018, producing agreements to restore direct flights between the two countries, reopen border trading points shuttered since the 2020 standoff, and resume the Kailash Mansarovar Yatra — the pilgrimage route to Tibet that carries both religious weight and political symbolism.
“Our relationship got a positive direction,” Modi said at the conclusion of the Tianjin summit. “There is peace and stability on the borders.” The formulation was intentional: peace and stability are conditions to be maintained, not a border dispute declared resolved.
That distinction will be tested in Tuesday’s talks. The Special Representatives’ mechanism was established in 2003 to maintain high-level contact on the India-China Boundary Question — the formal diplomatic phrasing for a dispute spanning roughly 3,488 kilometres of contested terrain from Ladakh to Arunachal Pradesh. Twenty-four previous rounds produced agreed protocols, patrol coordination mechanisms, and confidence-building measures. What they have not produced is agreement on the hard geography underlying the Line of Actual Control in the Depsang Plains and the Demchok sector — the areas where physical friction most recently erupted before the 2020 freeze.
Expert-level groups formed at the 24th round in August 2025, after Wang Yi visited India and produced the package of confidence measures that restarted the thaw, have been working through technical assessments of delimitation options. Whether Tuesday’s meeting will be asked to endorse any of those findings, or whether it will reset the mandate for another round of expert-level dialogue, is information neither government shared before Doval’s arrival.
There is, however, a timeline neither side can ignore. The BRICS summit is scheduled for New Delhi on September 12-13, and Xi Jinping is expected to attend — his first visit to India in seven years. A publicly visible failure in Beijing this week would complicate the atmospherics essential to that meeting. For India, hosting both Putin and Xi on Indian soil within weeks of each other is not merely a diplomatic convenience. It is the visible proof of a non-aligned posture that New Delhi’s foreign policy establishment has been carefully constructing since at least 2022.
China has not been passive in framing that dynamic. Beijing’s ambassador stated at Tianjin that China “firmly opposes” the tariffs Washington has imposed on India, pledging solidarity against protectionist measures — a stance that fits a broader pattern in which US Iran sanctions and tariff pressure on trading partners are pushing countries that have long avoided formal alignment into parallel bilateral conversations about the cost of American economic statecraft. Wang Yi’s own statement following his 2025 New Delhi visit described sound China-India ties as serving “the two peoples’ interests” — language calibrated to present the relationship as mutually beneficial rather than reactive.
The strategic logic in Delhi and Beijing may converge, but the trust deficit built up since 2020 takes longer to narrow. The India-Russia BRICS mission proceeding in Moscow simultaneously with Doval’s Beijing visit reminds observers that India is not threading a needle toward any single alignment. It is running several conversations simultaneously, with each interlocutor fully aware the others are happening.
Whether that posture is sustainable depends partly on what Doval and Wang Yi can actually agree on when the cameras are off. The 25 rounds of Special Representatives’ Talks have produced measurable progress: a return to pre-2020 patrol arrangements in the Galwan Valley area, a functioning hotline, and restored commander-level contacts. The areas of remaining dispute — Depsang and Demchok — have been acknowledged by both sides as unfinished business. How long unfinished business can coexist with warming relations at every other level is a question the talks cannot answer, only defer.
What neither government is prepared to say publicly is how much that deferral costs. For the traders, truckers, students, and pilgrims whose crossings have been blocked or reduced since 2020, the diplomatic calendar in Beijing this week is not an abstraction. It is the line between a route that reopens and one that does not.
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