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Top Chinese and Indian envoys meet for BRICS at UN, but hold no bilateral talks to ease border issues
- Photo-op brings foreign ministers together while tensions stay high over decades-long border dispute
- India used Security Council meeting to decry China’s bid to block blacklisting of suspected terrorist
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After days of separate diplomatic engagements, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi and Indian External Affairs Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar finally stood next to each other during a BRICS foreign ministers’ meeting photo-op on Thursday on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in New York.
Flanked by their counterparts from Brazil, Russia, and South Africa – the other members of the association of emerging economies – the two men wore thin, awkward smiles, and chose not to sit down for a one-on-one discussion to ease increasingly strained ties over their countries’ decades-long border dispute.
The Indian foreign minister has repeatedly said bilateral relations could not improve unless there was “peace” on the border. But that is not the only sticking point.
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During a UN Security Council meeting on the situation in Ukraine earlier on Thursday, India took the opportunity to lambast China for blocking its attempt alongside the US last week to blacklist Sajid Mir, a commander of the Pakistan-based Islamist militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba. India claims Mir played a role in the Mumbai terrorist attacks of 2008 that killed more than 300 people.
“Politics should never ever provide cover to evade accountability … nor indeed to facilitate impunity,” Jaishankar said. “Regrettably, we have seen this of late in this very chamber, when it comes to sanctioning some of the world’s most dreaded terrorists.”
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