NEW DELHI: Six years after Indian and Chinese soldiers bludgeoned each other to death with clubs and rocks on a frozen Himalayan ridge, China's president, Xi Jinping, walked past an honour guard of Indian troops and traditional dancers in Delhi this weekend, greeted with the pageantry usually reserved for close allies. The occasion was a summit of the BRICS grouping of developing economies, but the real story unfolding was the tentative rehabilitation of one of Asia's most consequential, and fraught, relationships.

The optics were carefully choreographed. Xi's arrival, the gala dinner in his honour, and the warm exchange of messages between him and Prime Minister Narendra Modi were all designed to project an image of normalcy between countries that fought a bloody border clash in the Galwan Valley in 2020, the deadliest confrontation between the two nuclear-armed neighbours in decades. That clash, which killed at least 20 Indian soldiers and an undisclosed number of Chinese troops, froze diplomatic and economic ties for years and hardened public opinion on both sides against reconciliation.

A Carefully Worded Thaw

The language used by both leaders this week was notable for its caution as much as its warmth. Modi said that "peace and tranquillity" along the border are essential for the broader development of bilateral relations, a formulation that acknowledges the two countries remain far from resolving the underlying territorial disputes even as they seek to de-escalate. He called for both nations to be guided by what he described as "three mutuals": mutual respect, mutual sensitivity and mutual interest.

Xi, for his part, framed the relationship in the language of Global South solidarity, describing India and China as two nations bearing "significant responsibilities" as leading members of the developing world. That framing is not incidental. It reflects a shared calculation in Beijing and Delhi that, at a moment when American global leadership looks less certain and less predictable, both countries have an interest in presenting themselves as stabilizing forces for the world's emerging economies, whatever tensions persist between them.

The exchange of "steady progress" language between Modi and Xi suggests both governments are content, for now, to manage rather than resolve their rivalry.

Old Rivalries, New Constraints

The rapprochement, such as it is, comes with obvious limits. India and China remain locked in an unresolved boundary dispute stretching across thousands of kilometers of the Himalayas, a legacy of colonial-era border ambiguities and the 1962 war between the two countries. Troop de-escalation agreements reached in the aftermath of Galwan have reduced the immediate risk of skirmishes, but neither side has meaningfully altered its long-term territorial claims or troop posture in the region.

Beneath the surface courtesies, the two countries remain competitors for influence across South Asia, the Indian Ocean, and the wider developing world. China's Belt and Road investments in Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh have long unsettled Delhi, which views its own neighbourhood as a natural sphere of influence. India, in turn, has deepened security and economic ties with the United States, Japan and Australia through groupings such as the Quad, partly as a hedge against Chinese power. Analysts note that even as Modi and Xi exchange pleasantries in front of cameras, both governments continue to quietly court the same audience: the developing nations of the Global South, whose votes and markets both Beijing and Delhi see as central to their claims to global leadership.

Reading the Regional Signals

Historically, thaws between India and Pakistan, and by extension the wider subcontinent, have often proven fragile in the face of sudden crises; the 1999 Lahore declaration between Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Nawaz Sharif, for instance, was followed within months by the Kargil war. Observers of India-China relations are wary of drawing overly optimistic conclusions from a single summit, however well-staged.

Still, the symbolism of this weekend's meeting cannot be dismissed. For India, hosting Xi with full ceremonial honours signals confidence that it can engage Beijing on its own terms without appearing weak, particularly at a moment when Delhi is also managing a complicated relationship with Washington. For China, the visit offers an opportunity to demonstrate that it is not diplomatically isolated, even as tensions with the West over trade, technology and Taiwan continue to mount.

What emerges from Delhi is less a resolution than a recalibration: two wary giants, still divided by an unresolved border and competing ambitions, finding it useful for now to project unity rather than confrontation. Whether that recalibration survives the next crisis on the border, or the next shift in the global balance of power, remains an open question.