National Security Advisor Ajit Doval will travel to Beijing on Monday for the 25th round of India-China Special Representatives (SR) talks on the boundary issue with Chinese Foreign Minister and his counterpart Wang Yi, officials said.
Doval and Wang are scheduled to hold the talks on Tuesday as part of the dialogue mechanism established in 2003 to address the 3,488-km India-China boundary dispute.
Although the mechanism has not resolved the boundary question, officials on both sides view it as an important channel for managing tensions and keeping communication open.
The talks come ahead of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s expected visit to India for the BRICS summit in New Delhi on September 12-13. While there has been no official confirmation of Xi’s visit, officials remain hopeful that he will attend, potentially providing an opportunity for a meeting with Prime Minister Narendra Modi on the sidelines of the summit.
Modi and Xi last met in August last year on the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit in Tianjin.
Ahead of the Doval-Wang talks, External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar on Saturday stressed that peace along the border is essential for improving bilateral ties with China.
"I think we went through a particularly bad patch between the summer of 2020 and the autumn of 2024, and that was primarily an outcome of the situation in the border areas," Jaishankar said at the Economic Times World Leaders Forum in New Delhi.
"At the end of the day, peace and tranquillity in the border areas is a prerequisite for good relations, and the state of the border, to a very large measure, naturally would determine the state of the relations," he said.
His remarks came amid reports of increased Chinese military activity in Arunachal Pradesh’s Upper Subansiri region in recent weeks.
China’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Guo Jiakun said on August 12 that the situation along the China-India border was "generally stable at the moment”.
Referring to the 36th meeting of the Working Mechanism for Consultation and Coordination on China-India Border Affairs, Guo said, “The two sides agreed to maintain communication via diplomatic and military channels and jointly uphold peace and tranquility in the border areas”.
External Affairs Ministry spokesperson Randhir Jaiswal said on August 11 that India considers developments in the border areas with China "most serious" and that maintaining peace and tranquillity along the Line of Actual Control is of "utmost importance".
New Delhi has also rejected Beijing’s objections to India’s decision to formally identify 27 places and geographical features in Arunachal Pradesh by their standard names, reiterating that the State is an "inalienable and integral" part of India.
China, which claims Arunachal Pradesh as part of South Tibet, has been issuing its own names for places in the region since 2017. India has dismissed the move as "vain and preposterous", maintaining that such actions cannot alter the "undeniable" reality that Arunachal Pradesh "was, is, and will" always remain an integral part of India.
(With inputs from PTI)