India-China rapprochement: A season of wishful thinking?

The record doesn't show Beijing as a reliable partner for New Delhi

- Mihir Sharma

When pictures emerged from the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) summit in Tianjin of Prime Minister Narendra Modi holding hands with China's Xi Jinping and Russia's Vladimir Putin, there was no question that this was a 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 fighting 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, rather than to a 'Eurasia' dominated by continental powers like Russia and China.

If Modi now wants to reach out a hand to the leaders of Eurasia, one might assume it is entirely because India has been insulted and rejected by the US—laden with higher tariffs than almost all its peers and continually needled by President Donald Trump's advisors and officials.