Chinese President Xi Jinping May Skip G20 Summit in Delhi Amid Border Row

New Delhi: Chinese President Xi Jinping may skip the forthcoming G-20 summit in New Delhi and Beijing may be represented by its Prime Minister Li Qiang instead, media reports including a Reuters report on Thursday have suggested, even as there is no official word of confirmation as yet from either Beijing or New Delhi on the matter.

This follows  continuing tensions between India and China on the border issue and a strong diplomatic protest by New Delhi with Beijing earlier this week on the publication of a Chinese official map showing India’s northeastern state of Arunachal Pradesh as Chinese territory.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has already opted out of attending the summit and Moscow will be represented by its foreign minister Sergey Lavrov. President Xi had last visited India in 2019.

External affairs minister S. Jaishankar had also said earlier this week that “it is an old habit of China” to include areas in their maps that belong to other countries and that “making absurd claims doesn’t make other people’s territory yours”. This also comes in the wake of the recent informal conversation between President Xi and Prime Minister Narendra Modi on the sidelines of the Brics summit in Johannesburg during which Modi had highlighted “India’s concerns on the resolved issues along the Line of Actual Control (LAC) in the western (Ladakh) sector of the India-China border area”. He had also “underlined (to the Chinese leader) that the maintenance of peace and tranquillity in the border areas and observing and respecting the LAC are essential for the normalisation of the India-China relationship”.

It may be recalled that India has maintained that China amassing a large number of its troops at the LAC in the Ladakh sector in the spring and summer of 2020 and the perceived reluctance of Chinese troops to pull back from all friction points in the Ladakh sector even now is a violation of the 1990s border pacts with India. India has maintained that ties cannot be normal with China unless Beijing pulls back its troops from all the friction points and restores the status quo of March 2020.