- Ambassador to China Vikram Misri says they will be ‘meeting more and more in common waters’, and more exchanges are needed
- He also says preparations are under way for President Xi Jinping to visit India
While the two nations’ militaries communicated extensively, it was mainly between their land forces, and that should be extended to the navies and air forces, Vikram Misri said.
“We need to talk about the two air forces and the two navies – especially the two navies – because we are operating in the same waters and increasingly in the coming years, we will be meeting more and more in common waters,” Misri said.
Misri said the two nations had made incremental progress, and opened new points where “border personnel can meet and exchange information, or exchange views about any particular situation”.
The ambassador was visiting the Indian consulate in Hong Kong over the weekend, six months after taking up the post and six weeks after Prime Minister Narendra Modi was re-elected.
He said preparations were under way for Chinese President Xi Jinping to visit India, which was expected to happen in the fourth quarter, after they pledged earlier to strengthen cooperation.
Tensions between
have periodically flared along their 4,000km (2,485-mile) border, resulting in a brief war in 1962. Relations have also been strained by China’s ties with Pakistan, and India’s concern over China’s growing presence in the Indian Ocean.
, which has projects that run through the disputed Kashmir region.
But he said the two nations should not let their differences evolve into disputes, and they should focus on areas where they can cooperate.
One such area was maritime and investment cooperation in the Indo-Pacific region, including infrastructure and disaster response. The US in recent years has focused on the Indo-Pacific region, and has asked its allies to send naval vessels to the area as a counterbalance to Beijing.
“We have made the point that our vision of the Indo-Pacific is not a strategy, which sometimes is a concern on the part of some partners, aimed against any particular country,” Misri said. “It is definitely not a military alliance in any format.
“It is on the other hand a vision that aims at economic and development cooperation with our partners in the Indo-Pacific space,” he said, adding that India was discussing such cooperation with China.
He also said trilateral meetings between China, India and Russia would become more regular after their three leaders met on the sidelines of the
summit in Osaka, Japan last month, when they vowed to uphold multilateralism.
India also had a trilateral meeting with Japan and the United States during the G20 summit.
“The fact that these countries seek us out also shows that they see value in engaging with India, and we have important issues to discuss in each of these settings,” he said. “None of our individual relationships is going to come at the cost of a relationship with any other partner.”
Misri also said there could be a broader consensus between China and India on counterterrorism. The two nations have clashed over Indian efforts to blacklist Masood Azhar, leader of the Pakistan-based terror group Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM), at the United Nations, which China objected to for years – a move seen in India as being done at the behest of Islamabad.
Azhar was finally listed as a global terrorist by the UN in May, after JeM claimed responsibility for a deadly terror attack on Indian security forces in Pulwama in February, although the listing did not directly reference the attack.
“It could have happened earlier … but I’m glad that it did happen, and we hope to build on that – that should be taken as progress, and we hope to build on that in the coming years,” Misri said.
“Everybody is aware of the context in which the listing happened, and therefore, I don’t think it’s hidden from anybody as to what this was aimed at or who this was aimed at, or what the motivation for the action might have been.”
As for the tensions between India and Pakistan following the terror strike in Indian-controlled Kashmir, Misri said progress would be “largely dependent on Pakistan” and the actions it needed to take to address the “ecosystem of terror that prevails in different parts of that country”.
Source: SCMP
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