India and China have made a major step forward in normalising bilateral relations after the Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi vowed to External Affairs Minister (EAM) S. Jaishankar that Beijing shall authorise the essential supply of fertilizers, rare earth minerals, and tunnel boring machines (TBMs) to India. This promise follows the fact that supplies had stalled a couple of months earlier (closer to a year), with the agriculture sector, auto manufacture industry, and infrastructure development sectors having been among the hardest hit. China contributes close to 30 percent of fertilizer imports by India, mainly urea, NPK, and DAP, and rare earth minerals in auto parts and TBMs in road and urban works.
Raising such issues during their meeting, EAM Jaishankar had done the needful, and the reaction of Wang Yi had been a constructive move in bilateral interactions. As the matter of trade and supply was debated, the terms of the boundary were consciously to have no place. They will instead be picked up by the National Security Advisor, Ajit Doval, in the Special Representative-level process, and the discussions will be on de-escalation along the 3,488km length of Actual Control (LAC). Though there have been certain steps towards curbing the areas of tensions in Ladakh, both armies continue to maintain a heavy presence on the border line, where there is a need to carry out confidence-building.
The discussions between Jaishankar and Wang were termed friendly. Interestingly, the meeting was clouded by the existence of US policies. On either side, the increased involvement of the decisions by Washington in influencing the lives of both India and China justified the need to enter a dialogue between the two Asian powers in an attempt to stabilize the uncertainties. Jaishankar too repeated the same Indian position on Taiwan, which was that New Delhi, similar to the other countries of the world, has no ties with Taiwan except the economic and cultural ones.
Imperative to this diplomatic outreach is a later meeting of Wang Yi with Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India. Global resumption of supplies is considered a significant event, not only in the short-run economic sense, by China.
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