TeleSUR special envoy Yunus Soner reports from Kazan, Russia, as 2nd day of the 2024 BRICS Summit continues. teleSUR
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00:00Rick's summit continued on its second day.
00:04Our special envoy Yunus Sunayr brings us details from Kazan, Russia.
00:09One of the major events on this summit was a bilateral meeting between the Chinese President
00:14Xi Jinping and the Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
00:19They met after five years without having met each other in any bilateral meeting and after
00:26having passed between their countries major tensions alongside the Himalayan border.
00:31We will talk about this, we will ask about this, Mr. Manish Chant who is the CEO of the
00:37Center for Global India Insights, what does it mean, what's going on in these relations
00:43between these two Asian giants?
00:46So as you pointed out, this was the first bilateral meeting between Prime Minister Modi
00:51and Xi in the last five years.
00:54The relations between the two countries and the dialogue process was completely frozen
00:58for the last more than four years, ever since Indian and Chinese soldiers locked in a, literally
01:05a fisticuff, a fight in the Himalayan border you spoke about in Ladakh.
01:11And there were large-scale incursions of Chinese troops which amounted in India's view to violation
01:17of India's territorial sovereignty.
01:20So India made it very clear that unless Chinese troops returned to their pre-220 position
01:29on the border, which is called Line of Actual Control, there wouldn't be any talks, no normalization
01:35of relations.
01:37And so this freeze has been on for the last five years and so this is a big story coming
01:43out of the BRICS summit in Kajan that the two major Asian powers, BRICS countries, have
01:51managed to resolve their differences and make a new beginning in the bilateral relations.
01:58So today's talks was very constructive and very forward-looking.
02:02What it has done is that the two leaders spent around 45 minutes and they charted out a sort
02:11of roadmap for normalizing and upscaling the relationship, leaving behind the ghost
02:17of Galwan behind.
02:19So the roadmap is essentially that we have a special mechanism called special representatives
02:26who look primarily into the border issue.
02:31So the two leaders have instructed their special representatives to meet as early as possible
02:37and sort out the larger boundary question, which is that the heart of India-China off-and-on tensions.
02:44What does that mean for the BRICS alliance if these two countries turn into a path of normalization?
02:52So I mean, this is very good news for BRICS.
02:55First of all, BRICS is good news for India-China relations because this is where they met seven
03:00years ago in 2017 also, in Xiamen Summit, where also relations were strained on account
03:09of a border conflict.
03:11The two leaders met and started afresh.
03:15So what does it mean for BRICS is that India and China are the two big countries in BRICS,
03:20the two leading economies, and this means greater cohesion, more coordination, and it
03:28strengthens the grouping because you cannot have a grouping.
03:31Let's not forget that now BRICS is expanded, but India, China, Russia, Brazil, South Africa,
03:36these are the founding members.
03:37So if you have two big countries not getting along with each other or having major issues,
03:43obviously it affects the cohesion of the grouping and it reduces, it diminishes.
03:48It also provides the West a handle to say, look, what kind of grouping is this, where
03:54the leaders of India and China can't talk to each other.
03:58So I think this is a major step forward.
04:01It means stronger BRICS and with the expansion, and also looking ahead today, what they also
04:08decided that they would collaborate more proactively in multilateral forums.
04:15So not just BRICS, but SCO, G20.
04:19Last year India hosted the G20 summit, and because of the troubled relations, Xi Jinping
04:26could not come personally to New Delhi, but he sent his premier, and China supported India,
04:34India G20 presidency.
04:36So basically at that point they decided to disentangle the bilateral from the multilateral,
04:42but now there'll be more energy, more momentum in India-China collaboration, multilateral
04:49forum, also in their bilateral ties.
04:53It was one of the major Western arguments why BRICS had no future, truly, that China
05:01and India had their conflicts.
05:03Their resolve now opens the path ahead for all the two countries within BRICS, for BRICS,
05:11and for them in multilateral organizations such as the UN and the G20.
05:17The two Asian giants have found a way to work together.