Bonhomie ebbs, Modi has not yet congratulated Xi on re-election, unlike 2017

Though Xi has been re-elected to be the general secretary of the 20th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, Modi has not publicly congratulated him

Prime Minister Narendra Modi has not yet congratulated President Xi Jinping on his re-election as the leader of the Communist Party of China for the third term.

The bonhomie between the two leaders ebbed over the past two-and-a-half years with the soldiers of the Indian Army and the Chinese People’s Liberation Army engaged in a stand-off in eastern Ladakh since April-May 2020.

Though Xi has been re-elected to be the general secretary of the 20th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China on Sunday, Modi has not publicly congratulated him till late in the evening on Monday. This is in contrast to Modi’s gesture in October 2017, when the prime minister quickly congratulated Xi after his re-election as the CPC general secretary for the second term.

“Congratulations to President Xi on getting re-elected as (the) CPC General Secretary. Look forward to further promoting India-China ties together,” Modi had on October 26, 2017, posted in English and Mandarin Chinese on Weibo – a social media platform like Twitter.

He had made the gesture at a time when his government in New Delhi had been trying to mend its relations with Beijing after it had hit a new low during the 72-day-long stand-off between the Indian Army and the Chinese People’s Liberation Army at Doklam Plateau in western Bhutan from June 2017 to August 2017.

Modi and Xi held a bilateral meeting on the sideline of the 9th BRICS summit at Xiamen in China in September 2017.

With New Delhi keen to bring its relations with Beijing back on track, the Modi Government had in early 2018 issued an advisory, asking “senior leaders” and “government functionaries” in the states as well as at the Centre to stay away from events attended by the Tibetan spiritual leader Dalai Lama – ostensibly to avoid hurting the sensitivity of China.

Modi again posted a message on Weibo on March 19, 2018, congratulating Xi after he had been elected by the National People’s Congress of China as the president of the country for the second term. “I look forward to working with you to promote the development of India-China relations,” he posted on Weibo.

The two leaders then held an informal summit in April 2018 in Wuhan in central China. It had been followed by a series of bilateral meetings on the sidelines of multilateral and plurilateral events in third countries. They also held the second informal summit at Mamallapuram near Chennai in October 2019.

But the relations between New Delhi and Beijing had nosedived after the stand-off had started in eastern Ladakh in April-May 2020, with the Chinese PLA amassing large number of troops along the disputed boundary between the two nations in eastern Ladakh – thus making a unilateral move to change the status quo and push the LAC, the de facto boundary, westward into the territory of India. The Indian Army too had responded to the Chinese PLA’s aggressive moves with counter-deployment leading to the stand-off.

The stand-off had reached a flashpoint on June 15, 2020, when the soldiers of the two sides clashed in Galwan Valley. The Indian Army had lost 20 of its soldiers. At least four soldiers of the Chinese PLA had also been killed in the clash.

After New Delhi had started banning the apps linked to companies based in China, the Prime Minister too had deleted his account on Weibo.

Modi and Xi had attended the Shanghai Cooperation Organization’s summit at Samarkand in Uzbekistan last month They, however, had held no bilateral meeting on the sideline of the summit – although it had been the first such conclave attended by both after the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic in March 2020.