Chinese President Xi Jinping may put off his India visit till the dust settles down on the reorganisation of Jammu and Kashmir. Xi was to arrive here next week for the second summit with PM Narendra Modi in the informal settings of Mamallapuram in Tamil Nadu, without the trappings of formalities and bureaucratese. In 2018, the two leaders had interacted for more than 10 hours in the sylvan surroundings of Wuhan on the banks of the Yangtze.

It may be awkward for the Chinese President to visit India when the Army is staging one of its biggest war exercises in Arunachal Pradesh, an area of extreme sensitivity for Beijing, with recently bought American equipment.

“One can’t expect Xi to visit when Indian troops are doing a war exercise in Arunachal Pradesh. The Chinese have even objected to visits by our Prime Ministers and Presidents,” said strategic analyst Pravin Sawhney.The Army exercise, HimVijay, does conform to two Sino-India agreements and one protocol on peace and tranquility on the Line of Actual Control (LAC) with China. As per this arrangement, the Chinese would have been notified in advance about the size, scope and duration of the exercise. Yet Xi would not like visuals of him attempting normalisation of ties with PM Narendra Modi while the Indian Army conducts war games in Arunachal.

A bigger sticking point though could be J&K. “The boundary in the western sector (Ladakh) was never defined. There is no boundary,” says Sawhney, disagreeing with External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar’s observation that China had misinterpreted New Delhi’s decision to bifurcate Jammu and Kashmir into two Union Territories — J&K and Ladakh. “We are sort of reformatting this within our existing boundaries,” Jaishankar had told the Chinese.Explaining his position, he had said, “I went a few days after the legislation (removal of Article 370 and reorganisation of J&K) to China and explained to them that as far  as they were concerned, nothing had changed. India’s boundary had not changed, the LAC had not changed.” — TNS