Finance
External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar will travel to Singapore and China from July 13 to 15, the Ministry of External Affairs said on Saturday.
In Singapore, he will “meet his counterpart and the leadership of Singapore as part of the regular exchanges between our two countries,” the MEA said.
Thereafter, he will “visit the People’s Republic of China to participate in the SCO Council of Foreign Ministers’ Meeting (CFM) being held in Tianjin. Jaishankar will also hold bilateral meetings on the sidelines of the Foreign Ministers’ Meeting, it said.
The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation’s (SCO) Council of Ministers of Foreign Affairs will meet in Tianjin on July 15, according to a statement issued by a Chinese Foreign Ministry official on Saturday.
Foreign ministers from other SCO member nations, as well as heads of the bloc’s permanent bodies, will attend the conference at the invitation of the Communist Party of China’s Political Bureau member and Foreign Minister Wang Yi, according to the announcement.
The ministers will discuss SCO cooperation in a variety of disciplines, as well as key international and regional challenges, the statement said.
Wang may also visit India this month to hold a fresh round of talks with NSA Ajit Doval under the framework of Special Representatives (SR) dialogue on the boundary dispute, it is learnt.
Wang and Doval are both designated SRs for the border mechanism. Both countries attempted to resolve the disagreement through 23 rounds of talks under the SRs procedure, but were unsuccessful.
This will be Jaishankar’s first trip to China since the military stalemate over the LAC in eastern Ladakh in May 2020.
The Foreign Ministers’ meeting will also set the setting for the SCO Leaders’ Summit in Tianjin, which is anticipated to take place in early September.
Jaishankar’s visit comes after Defence Minister Rajnath Singh and NSA Doval visited China for SCO talks in June last week. Singh participated in the SCO Defence Ministers’ Conference in Qingdao.
During his talks with Chinese Defense Minister Gen Dong Jun on June 26, Singh proposed that India and China resolve the “complex issues” through a structured roadmap that includes actions to de-escalate tensions along the border and revitalize the existing border-demarcation process.
Singh and Dong had bilateral talks on the margins of a SCO conference, focusing on maintaining peace and quiet along the LA.
Singh also emphasized the importance of creating “good neighbourly conditions” to maximize mutual benefits and asked for “taking action on the ground” to address the “trust deficit” caused by the 2020 eastern Ladakh border conflict, according to an Indian readout of the meeting on June 27.
In response to Singh’s statement, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning stated that the boundary dispute is “complicated, and it takes time to settle it.”
Source: IE
