The call for a new beginning and nomalisation of ties between India and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) made by Union External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar at the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation’s foreign ministers meeting in mid-July, is a welcome development. After meeting with his counterpart Wang Yi, Vice President Hang Zheng and President Xi Ping, Jaishankar called for open dialogue amid the current complex geopolitical situation and expressed confidence in sustaining improved bilateral ties. The fact that during his first visit to PRC in five years, he not only met his counterpart, but also the top Chinese leadership, indicates PRC’s seriousness about setting the stage for a new beginning of the Sino-India relationship which has been adversarial since the border war of 1962, and most recently the Galwan lake clash of May 2020.

This first sign of a thaw in Sino-India ties comes at a time of volatile global conditions. In the US, President Donald Trump is upending the multilateral trade order established by the US which after World War II ushered in an era of unprecedented global prosperity. Since he assumed office last year, President Trump has declared a tariffs war against several countries to balance bilateral trade surpluses. This wonky economics could well disrupt the economies of a large number of countries, including PRC and India, which export a wide range of goods and services to the US, the world’s wealthiest nation (GDP $30.5 trillion).

Simultaneously, the newly emergent globalised world is experiencing major armed conflicts — the 40-month Russia-Ukraine war, the Israel-Hamas conflict in Gaza and an uneasy ceasefire after the 12-day Israel-Iran slugfest.

Therefore, this is an opportune moment for India which is heavily dependent upon imports from China for a wide range of industries — chemicals, automobiles, electronics and machinery, among others, to initiate de novo negotiations with PRC, to settle once and for all the Sino-India boundaries demarcation issue that has been hanging fire for over half a century. For this to happen, there has to be acceptance within the Indian establishment that Sino-India border lines in Aksai Chin in the north-west and in the north-east were arbitrarily drawn and imposed in the pre-independence era by the British who it is well-established,  had a reputation for drawing arbitrary border lines during the age when they ruled over half the world. Therefore to insist that inherited Sino-Indian border lines drawn by imperious grandees of the British raj in India are written in stone, has an element of irrationality.

In the circumstances, this is an opportune moment for the BJP/NDA government at the Centre to evolve an all-party consensus to reopen the Sino-India border issue which has unwarrantedly poisoned relations between Asia’s two most populous — and potentially most prosperous — nations and begin negotiations on a clean slate.