Why India’s new envoy to China is visiting Tibet soon after taking up the job

India’s new ambassador to China has paid his first visit to Tibet in the latest sign of thawing relations between the two Asian neighbours. Vikram Doraiswami – who speaks Chinese and took up the post in Beijing last month – arrived in Lhasa, capital of the Tibet autonomous region, on Thursday, according to a statement posted on social media by the Indian embassy. The visit was to “review arrangements made by the local government for Indian pilgrims proceeding to Mount Gang Renpoche and Lake Mapam Yun Tso”, the statement said. It said the pilgrims – destined for the sacred mountain and lake in Tibet that are known in India as Mount Kailash and Lake Manasarovar – were due to arrive later this month. Zhao Peng, vice-chairman of the Tibet autonomous region, briefed Doraiswami on the facilities and preparations for the Indian pilgrims and hosted the visiting Indian delegation for dinner on Thursday. It was Doraiswami’s first trip outside Beijing since he took up the job in the Chinese capital in May, an appointment that came as the world’s two most populous countries make efforts to rebuild their bilateral ties. While Indian ambassadors have previously visited Tibet, such trips were rarely seen in the decade up to 2025 because of border frictions and the Covid-19 pandemic. As part of a broader reset away from the deadly 2020 Galwan Valley clash in a disputed stretch of the Himalayas – which sent the relationship into a downward spiral – China last year restored access for Indian pilgrims to Tibet after a five-year suspension. Doraiswami’s predecessor, Pradeep Kumar Rawat, spent eight days in Tibet in June last year to review reception facilities for the pilgrims. The pilgrimage issue has become entangled in wider regional geopolitics. India announced in April that the country’s pilgrims would travel to China this year via an area where it has a territorial dispute with Nepal, drawing protests from Kathmandu. Nepalese Prime Minister Balendra Shah last month called for China and Britain to mediate in Nepal’s border dispute with India, which sparked a backlash from New Delhi. Meanwhile, China and India held their latest round of talks under a bilateral working mechanism for consultation and coordination on border affairs in Beijing two weeks ago. The Chinese readout said both sides had affirmed support for “continued peace and tranquillity” in the border area. India’s statement said both sides had expressed “satisfaction” with progress on maintaining peace and tranquillity, but New Delhi had stressed the need for a meeting soon on trans-border rivers. Still, border tensions between the two nuclear-armed nations have continued to simmer. China and India have never agreed on their border demarcation and had a short but bloody war over the issue in 1962. Both countries have in recent years accelerated infrastructure building on either side of their 3,200km (1,990-mile) Line of Actual Control – a boundary neither side has agreed on – in what analysts see as preparation for a potential future conflict. In the latest example, India’s longest road tunnel, the 13.14km Zojila Tunnel, was completed on Tuesday, just before Doraiswami’s Tibet visit, according to Indian media reports. The project is expected to provide all-weather connectivity for India to a disputed region along the western section of the China-India border. In April, Beijing renamed 23 more places with Chinese and Tibetan names in a contested eastern stretch of the China-India border. That marked the sixth set of “standardised” place names China has issued since 2017 for Arunachal Pradesh, an India-governed border state which Beijing claims as Zangnan, or Southern Tibet. “It is fully within China’s sovereign rights for the Chinese government to issue standard names for some of the places in Zangnan,” foreign ministry spokesman Guo Jiakun told reporters at the time. “China-India relations are generally stable at the moment. China’s commitment to improving and growing China-India relations has not changed,” he added. Beijing objected in December to New Delhi’s efforts to commemorate a 17th century Dalai Lama born in the region, another area of friction. New Delhi plays a role that is closely watched by Beijing on the issue of Tibet, where much of the long, undemarcated border between China and India is located. The 14th Dalai Lama has lived in exile in the northern Indian town of Dharamsala since fleeing Tibet in 1959, and there has been tension between Beijing and New Delhi over his succession plan. Beijing views the Dalai Lama as a “separatist” and accuses him of inciting unrest in Tibet, particularly in the 1980s and during the 2008 protests – charges that he denies.

Why India’s new envoy to China is visiting Tibet soon after taking up the job

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}While there are signs of improving ties, both nations have accelerated infrastructure construction near their border

While there are signs of improving ties, both nations have accelerated infrastructure construction near their border