Despite Modi's 5 China trips & 18 meetings with Xi, Sino-Indian border dispute escalates

After China killed 20 Indian soldiers in Ladakh on Tuesday, questions have been raised about the effectiveness of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's umpteen meetings with Chinese President Xi Jinping since 2014.

Modi met Xi at least 18 times after becoming India's Prime Minister in 2014. This included visits to each other's countries and meetings on the sidelines of international summits.

Modi visited China five times, the most by an Indian prime minister in 70 years.

Modi's first visit to China was in 2015 (May 14 to 16). Xi received Modi in his home town of Xi'an, reciprocating Modi's reception to him in Ahmedabad in 2014.

Modi visited Hangzhou in 2016 (September 4 to 5) for the G20 Summit, Xiamen in 2017 (September 3 to 5) fo BRICS Summit, Wuhan in 2018 (April 27 to 28) for an informal summit and Quindao in the same year (April 27 to 28) for SCO summit.

Modi and Xi had agreed to maintain peace and tranquillity between the two countries in the informal summits held in Wuhan (April 2018) and Mahabalipuram in Chennai (October 2019).

Little wonder, then, that the Opposition Congress had begun to target Modi when reports of Chinese troop movement began to surface last week, which on Tuesday resulted in the death of Indian soldiers.

On January 13, the party's national treasurer Ahmed Patel tweeted India prime ministers' visits to China to drive home the point that Modi visited that country most number of times as prime minister.

“While Chinese have again occupied our territory, important to remember list of official visits to China — Jawaharlal Nehru: 1, Lal Bahadur Shastri: 0, Indira Gandhi: 0, Morarji Desai: 0, Rajiv Gandhi: 1, P.V. Narasimha Rao: 1, H.D. Deve Gowda: 0, Inder Kumar Gujral: 0, Atal Bihari Vajpayee: 1, Manmohan Singh: 2, Narendra Modi: 9 (5 times as PM, 4 times as Gujarat CM),” he tweeted.

Congress leader Anand Sharma, who heads the party's foreign affairs department had asked why the bonhomie between Modi and Xi was not reflected in the development at the border. "“It is indisputable that the Prime Minister invested heavily in the relationship with China over the last six years, right from the hospitality given to (President) Xi Jinping on the Sabarmati riverfront in Ahmedabad in 2014 to the two informal summits Modi held with him. Why is that bonhomie not reflected in the developments at the border?” The Telegraph newspaper quoted him as saying.