The foreign ministers of China and India, Wang Yi and Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, will meet today on the sidelines of a conference in Moscow. Their conversation is sure to be frosty: earlier this week, a four-month stand-off between the two countries’ armed forces escalated into warning shots being fired in the western Himalayas. This was the first discharge of guns between the two nations in 45 years.
Chinese president Xi Jinping and Indian prime minister Narendra Modi have so far refrained from speaking to each other to defuse the tension. Worryingly, the belligerence from the Chinese bears resemblance to its tone before the two countries went to war in 1962. ‘The Chinese troops will resolutely fulfil their duty and defend China’s territorial integrity,’ the Chinese foreign ministry spokesman warned.
Last week, Indian soldiers took control of a strategic mountain spot.
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