Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi hailed Russian leader Vladimir Putin as a “friend” while his government moved to bolster relations with China, another sign the South Asian nation is tilting away from the US in the face of Donald Trump’s tariff threats.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi had been moving to align India with the United States and freeze out China. Now, efforts to rebuild ties between the Asian giants are gaining momentum.

PM Narendra Modi is likely to be in China for the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) later this month. This will be his first trip to the Asian country in seven years and the first since the 2020 Galwan Valley clash.

India and China are aware of the “very high political, economic and military cost of frozen relations,” he says. “China felt it had pushed India too close to the U.S. while India realized that it was losing its vaunted strategic autonomy by getting too close to Washington and turning Beijing into an adversary.”

Beijing has officially welcomed PM Modi to attend the SCO summit this month-end. However, “fence sitter” India could make a 180-degree turn to strike a deal with US President Trump and skip the SCO, some in China say.

Indian Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar and his Chinese counterpart Wang Yi yesterday discussed border peace, trade issues and bilateral

The breakthrough in bilateral talks, the first after the Galwan Valley face-off between the soldiers of the two countries at the Line of Actual Control (LAC) in June 2020, was made possible after New Delhi and Beijing reached an agreement on patrolling along the nearly 3500-km LAC to end the four-year-long border confrontation.

Prime Minister Modi is expected to travel to China later this month after a gap of over seven years to attend the annual summit of the SCO. In the last few months, both sides revived the Special Representative dialogue on the boundary question and other dialogue mechanisms.

China has welcomed Prime Minister Narendra Modi for his upcoming visit to the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) summit, as Beijing seeks closer ties with New Delhi amid global concerns over the tariffs imposed by US President Donald Trump.