Why Modi’s India is warming to China

President Xi Jinping should find the “handshake across the Himalayas” a lot warmer than usual when he starts his India trip today.

As India prepares to overcome the reflexive suspicion of its giant neighbour and open the floodgates to Chinese capital, and Xi respond by opening the chequebook, relations between the two Asian giants are set for, as India’s National Security Adviser Ajit Doval puts it, an “orbital jump”.

From Hindi-Chini bhai bhai (India and China are brothers) to Chindia, rhetoric flies thick and fast when it comes to China and India, as a way of sugarcoating a fraught relationship. But the words of the former spymaster, who was in Beijing last week to finalise the details of Xi’s trip, mirror a deeper churning in India’s strategic outlook in favour of China at a time when China is also gravitating towards India.

“With the incredibly rapid growth of bilateral trade and recent partnerships such as the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa), India’s importance to China has risen to a new level. China considers India as one of its most important strategic partners,” says Guo Suiyan, associate professor at the Institute of South Asian Studies in the Yunnan Academy of Social Sciences.

China and India began a cautious détente after shutting each other out for two decades over a border war in 1962 in which India suffered a humiliating defeat. Over the years, they have gradually escalated engagement, especially in trade, but relations have been dogged by mutual suspicion stemming from a contested border and overlapping territorial claims. There are now signs of change.

“India’s strategic circles have noted that the Chinese government has been trying to reach out to India. This has prompted a reassessment of our China policy,” says Jagannath Panda, a research fellow at the Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses in New Delhi.