People-to-people ties is the new operative word in India-China relations. Wang Yi, China's foreign minister, who arrived in New Delhi on Friday, held a two-hour long discussion with External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj on how to enhance the cultural links between the two Asian giants and how to enhance the people-to-people interaction.
Swaraj later said, “Wang Yi and I have met on a number of occasions, but we never devoted more than ten minutes to these issues. This visit of his is very special because our talks have focussed only on cultural links and people-to-people connect.”
Yi was visiting New Delhi for the first high-level mechanism on cultural and people-to-people exchanges. This mechanism is one of the outcomes of the Wuhan summit between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chinese Premiere Xi Jingping this April. Swaraj pointed out that this soft diplomacy was deemed important enough to be entrusted to the foreign ministers themselves.
The outcome of today's bilateral was an agreement to step up ties in ten areas, which Swaraj referred to as pillars. These include—cultural exchanges, film and television cooperation and joint production, museums, sports, youth, tourism, state and city level exchanges, traditional medicine, yoga, and education.
Several events in New Delhi were organised around the mechanism-level talks. These include a think tank forum, a joint media forum and a film festival. The media forum began immediately after the joint address, and both ministers emphasised the role of the media in reporting about the ties between the two countries, for each other, as well as for the world. Yi noted that India and China together were 2.7 billion people, a third of humanity, and how they inteact with each other is of interest not just to them, but to the entire world.
He added that there was great potential to step up multi-faceted cooperation. “Bit of us have several megacities, but we have not formed enough sister city pairs,” he said, adding that tourist footfalls in each other's countries too was far below the numbers expected from such large populations.
Swaraj mentioned that interactions between the two militaries should also step up in the form of joint exercises. She also added that while the trade between the two nations was increasing, the balance of trade issue still needs to be addressed. She expressed hope that China would provide access to Indian goods and services in its markets.
The two leaders added that cultural links and people connect will be an important facet of every multilateral organisation that the two nations are partners in, like Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, BRICS and RIC.
At this one ocassion, both sides chose to ignore the elephant in the room and did not even mention strategic issues, border problems and a host of vexing issues in Indo-China relations.
