Modi meets Xi as India, China ties recover from 2020 military clash

NEW DELHI/BEIJING: Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping held their first formal talks in five years on Wednesday, signalling that ties between the Asian giants damaged by a deadly military clash in 2020 had begun to recover.

The two leaders met on the sidelines of the summit of the BRICS grouping in the southwestern Russian city of Kazan, two days after New Delhi announced that it had reached a deal with Beijing to resolve the four-year military stand-off on their Himalayan frontier.

China and India are intense rivals and have regularly accused each other of trying to seize territory along their unofficial divide, known as the Line of Actual Control.

After a border skirmish in 2020, which killed at least 20 Indian and four Chinese soldiers, both sides pulled back tens of thousands of troops and agreed not to send patrols into a narrow strip surrounding the Line of Actual Control.

However, the meeting between the leaders of the world's two most populous nations comes after Beijing's foreign ministry said on Tuesday it had given its "positive approval" to a border deal.

"Recently, China and India have maintained close communication through diplomatic and military channels on issues relating to the China-India border," Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Lin Jian told a regular news briefing.

"Currently, the two sides have reached a resolution on the relevant issues. China gives its positive approval to this," Lin said.

"In the next stage, we will properly implement that resolution with the Indian side," he added.

The statement by Beijing's foreign ministry confirmed a similar statement by New Delhi's Misri on Monday.

The top Indian foreign ministry bureaucrat said that "agreement has been arrived at on patrolling arrangements along the Line of Actual Control".

The deal would lead to "disengagement and eventually a resolution of the issues that had arisen in these areas in 2020," said Misri.

Meanwhile, India's external affairs minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar said disengagement with China was "complete" and that details would come out in "due course".

The understanding "creates a basis for peace and tranquillity along the border, which were there before 2020," he said at a conference hosted by Indian broadcaster NDTV.

Disputes over the 3,500-kilometre frontier are a perennial source of tension between China and India, major economies vying for strategic influence across South Asia.