New Delhi: India and China during a consultation on Wednesday (March 25) made progress on deciding a process for the resumption of the Kailash-Mansarovar pilgrimage this year and agreed to work on arrangements to resume direct flights and media interactions, the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) said.
However, the Kailash-Mansarovar yatra – which takes place in China’s Tibet province – did not figure in Beijing’s separate readout of the talks.
The two sides met in Beijing on Wednesday as part of a consultative meeting led by the MEA’s East Asia joint secretary Gourangalal Das and director general of the Asian affairs department of China’s foreign ministry Liu Jinsong.
The meeting came a day after the 33rd edition of the foreign-office led Working Mechanism for Consultation & Coordination on India-China Border Affairs took place in Beijing and against the backdrop of a thaw in bilateral relations.
On Wednesday the two sides reviewed the steps they took to implement the decisions taken when India’s foreign secretary and a Chinese vice foreign minister met in Beijing in January, the MEA said.
This included agreeing to “continue efforts to further facilitate and promote people-to-people exchanges, including arrangements for the resumption of direct flights” as well as interactions between media and think-tanks.
“The two sides have made further progress on the modalities to resume Kailash Manasarovar Yatra in 2025,” the MEA added.
It also said that either side spoke about resuming dialogue mechanisms “in a step-by-step manner” in order to address each other’s most important areas of interest and concern as well as to “move relations on to a more stable and predictable path”.
During the foreign secretary-vice foreign minister meeting, India and China had agreed to resume direct flights, the Kailash-Mansarovar pilgrimage and data-sharing on trans-boundary rivers.
While China’s readout did not mention the pilgrimage, it said that the two countries agreed to “step up the resumption of direct flights” and facilitate the exchange of journalists.
India and China denied visa extensions to each other’s journalists following the eruption of tensions in 2020 – caused by deadly clashes between their troops in eastern Ladakh – leading to China having no reporters in Delhi and India having just one in Beijing.
The freeze in ties due to the clashes also led to the Kailash-Mansarovar pilgrimage being halted and the prolonged suspension of direct flights originally implemented due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Relations thawed in October when India and China struck a deal to disengage their troops from two friction points in eastern Ladakh, which in turn gave way to the first bilateral meeting in five years between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping.
Beijing also said that on Wednesday that India and China agreed to strengthen cooperation in multilateral forums such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation and to “jointly adhere to multilateralism and advocate multipolarisation”.
