Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping met on Indian soil for the first time in seven years on Tuesday, sitting down on the sidelines of the BRICS Summit 2026 in New Delhi in a meeting both sides described as productive, even as the core disputes that have poisoned relations for the better part of a decade remain unresolved.

The two leaders welcomed what they called "steady progress" in bilateral ties, a carefully chosen phrase that captures both the genuine thaw of the past two years and the caution with which both governments approach a relationship still shadowed by mistrust. The last time Xi visited India was in 2019, before a deadly clash between Indian and Chinese troops in the Galwan Valley in 2020 froze high-level exchanges and pushed the two Asian giants into their most serious military standoff in decades.

A Meeting Long in the Making

That the two leaders are meeting again in India at all is significant. For years after Galwan, diplomatic contact between New Delhi and Beijing was largely confined to military and bureaucratic channels, focused narrowly on disengaging troops along the Line of Actual Control, the poorly defined and disputed frontier that separates the two countries. A gradual normalisation has taken hold since 2024, including agreements on patrolling arrangements in contested areas of Ladakh, but Tuesday's meeting marks the first time Xi has set foot in India since the crisis began, and the first bilateral encounter between the two leaders on Indian territory in seven years.

Officials from both sides indicated that the agenda extended well beyond pleasantries. Chief among the unresolved issues is the status of Arunachal Pradesh, the Indian state in the eastern Himalayas that Beijing claims in its entirety and refers to as "South Tibet." China has periodically renamed towns and villages in the state, issued protests over visits by Indian officials, and objected to Modi's own trips there, a practice that has become a reliable irritant in the relationship even during periods of relative calm elsewhere on the border.

The Mega Dam Dispute

Also on the table was China's construction of a vast hydropower dam on the Yarlung Tsangpo river in Tibet, close to the Indian border. The river becomes the Brahmaputra as it flows into Arunachal Pradesh and Assam before entering Bangladesh, and Indian officials have long warned that a project of this scale gives Beijing significant leverage over downstream water flows, with potential consequences for agriculture, flooding, and regional ecology across northeastern India. China has defended the project as a legitimate infrastructure undertaking, but New Delhi has repeatedly sought greater transparency and consultation, requests that have met with limited success.

These two issues, the territorial claim over Arunachal Pradesh and the dam on a river India depends on, illustrate the structural nature of the India-China rivalry. Unlike disputes that can be resolved through a single agreement, both touch on sovereignty and resource security in ways that neither government can easily compromise on without domestic political cost.

What "Steady Progress" Really Means

The language both sides used after the meeting, emphasising incremental gains rather than breakthroughs, reflects a relationship being carefully managed rather than genuinely resolved. This is consistent with a broader pattern in how India and China have approached each other since the two nations emerged as rising powers in the twenty-first century: cooperation on select multilateral platforms, such as BRICS itself, alongside deep and unresolved bilateral tension.

That tension has historical roots. The India-China border has never been fully demarcated, a legacy of colonial-era ambiguity and the 1962 war fought over competing claims in the Himalayas. Successive rounds of talks since the 1980s produced confidence-building measures but no final settlement, leaving the frontier a persistent flashpoint. Arunachal Pradesh, annexed by India but claimed by China, sits at the heart of that unfinished business, much as other Himalayan buffer states such as Sikkim and Bhutan have historically been contested ground between larger powers.

The BRICS grouping itself, of which India and China are founding members alongside Brazil, Russia and South Africa, was born partly out of a shared ambition among emerging economies to challenge Western-dominated economic institutions. Yet the bloc has always been an uneasy alliance of convenience. India and China compete for regional influence, contest their shared border, and increasingly compete for markets and technological dominance, even as they sit at the same table calling for a more balanced global order. Some analysts have long questioned whether such cooperation could ever be more than tactical, given how little the two countries share beyond a common frustration with Western primacy.

For now, the fact that Modi and Xi are talking again, on Indian soil, at the head of a summit New Delhi is hosting, suggests both governments see value in stabilising ties rather than letting them drift further. But with Arunachal Pradesh, the Brahmaputra dam, and the underlying border dispute all unresolved, "steady progress" is likely to remain the operative phrase for the India-China relationship for some time to come: real, but limited; welcome, but fragile.