External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar will travel to Singapore and China from July 13 to 15, the Ministry of External Affairs said on Saturday.
In Singapore, he will “meet his counterpart and the leadership of Singapore as part of the regular exchanges between our two countries,” the MEA said.
Thereafter, he will “visit the People’s Republic of China to participate in the SCO Council of Foreign Ministers’ Meeting (CFM) being held in Tianjin. Jaishankar will also hold bilateral meetings on the sidelines of the Foreign Ministers’ Meeting, it said.
The Meeting of the Council of the Ministers of Foreign Affairs of theShanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) will be held in Tianjin on July 15, a statement by a spokesperson of the Chinese Foreign Ministry said Saturday.
At the invitation of the member of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China and Foreign Minister Wang Yi, foreign ministers of other SCO member states and heads of the bloc’s permanent bodies will attend the meeting, the statement said.
The ministers will exchange views on SCO cooperation in various fields and major international and regional issues, it said.
Wang may also visit India this month to hold a fresh round of talks with NSA Ajit Doval under the framework of Special Representatives (SR) dialogue on the boundary dispute, it is learnt.
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Both Wang and Doval are the designated SRs of the boundary mechanism. Both countries held 23 rounds of talks under the SRs mechanism to resolve the dispute but without success.
This will be Jaishankar’s first visit to China since the military standoff along the LAC in eastern Ladakh in May 2020.
The meeting of the Foreign Ministers will also set the stage for the SCO Leaders’ Summit in Tianjin, expected to be held early September.
Jaishankar’s visit follows visits by Defence Minister Rajnath Singh and NSA Doval, who had travelled to China in June last week for SCO meetings. Singh took part in the SCO Defence Ministers’ conference in Qingdao.
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During his talks with Chinese Defence Minister Gen Dong Jun on June 26, Singh proposed that India and China should solve the “complex issues” under a structured roadmap comprising steps to de-escalate tensions along the frontiers and rejuvenate the existing mechanism to demarcate the borders.
Singh and Dong held bilateral talks on the sidelines of a conclave of the SCO with a focus on maintaining peace and tranquillity along the LAC.
Singh had also emphasised the need to create “good neighbourly conditions” to achieve the best mutual benefits and called for “taking action on the ground” to bridge the “trust deficit” resulting from the 2020 eastern Ladakh border standoff, according to an Indian readout on the meeting on June 27.
Reacting to Singh’s statement, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning had said that the boundary question is “complicated, and it takes time to settle it”.
