China, India step gingerly on mending ties

Chinese President Hu Jintao, on his first foreign tour since taking office in March, will meet Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee in Russia and in France, before playing host to him in Beijing later in June.

India hopes the meetings on the wings of global events in Europe will form the basis of the Beijing meeting.

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Sino-Indian ties have remained in a quagmire of mistrust since they fought a border war in 1962.

"The summit is of extreme importance and accordingly we are timetabling factors that could impinge on it," a top Indian official said in a hint of the ongoing moves to mend ties with China's closest ally Pakistan.

India, which has fought two of three wars with Pakistan over Kashmir since 1947, has responded to Islamabad's overtures and has set in motion steps to resolve the ownership row over the divided Himalayan state.

"If our border dispute is a thorn in Sino-Indian ties then India-Pakistan relations are also an impediment in the way of restoring close ties with our largest neighbour," the Indian official said.

India accuses China of occupying 38,000 square kilometres (14,672 square miles) of territory in northwestern Kashmir while Beijing lays claim to 90,000 square kilometres (34,749 square miles) of land in India's Arunachal Pradesh state.

Officials from the two sides have met 15 times since the 1980s in a bid to convert a line of control across the disputed territory into a formal border, the talks resulting in an exchange of maps but, more importantly, a cessation of military hostilities since 1996.

Sujit Dutta, an Indian expert on China, said the US-led war in Iraq, globalisation of markets and regional issues have begun to tell on the nerves of the leaderships in the world's two most populous nations.

"The whole relation is now being shaped by new factors as both are engaged in modernisation, worried by external security and the global situation," said Dutta.

"And finally there is this factor that the United States has emerged as the most powerful state. Sino-Indian relationships are being determined and driven by many of these factors," he added.

Dutta said that since China and India recognised that their border row as well as the normalisation of India-Pakistan relations were "complex and long-drawn," the two sides would have to step past them and start afresh.