Formed 20 years ago on the sidelines of a UN meet in New York, it has acquitted itself well and brought 20 more nations into its fold. It involves nearly half of the world's population, 40 per cent of the global GDP and 20 per cent of international trade. The alliance sought to promote geopolitical cooperation involving even mutually suspicious nations like India and China under one umbrella. The grouping's leaders holding the third bilateral meeting in New Delhi, in a space of two years, is also significant because India is hosting it after a seven-year gap, necessitating the presence of China's Xi Jinping alongside Prime Minister Narendra Modi in a new spirit of limited bonhomie.
With the promotion of trade between these nations being the principal agenda of the meeting, member nations will benefit from its decisions, and this will, in parallel, act as a balm on strains in relationships between, say, India and China. Cooperation between Asia's two largest nations with populations totalling nearly 3 billion, is a prerequisite to regional and global peace. Such sentiments were reflected in Xi's statement that India and China are "partners in development, not rivals," and PM Modi's stress on border peace between the two nations as an important factor for regional cooperation. Significantly, China quoted Modi as stressing during the bilateral meeting with Xi that relations between the two countries will not be influenced by any "third country" - oblique references not only to the US but also Pakistan. India, Modi asserted, continued to follow an independent foreign policy. This should soothe the dragon's nerves. Modi has also rightly cited the huge trade imbalance between China and India - the latter importing goods massively and disproportionately from the former-but this is also due to China being a manufacturing nation while India is not able to push its industrialization agenda significantly. That Xi skipped the dinner hosted by the Prime Minister on Saturday is, however, a dampener on hopes for normalizing ties between the two nations. This occurred even as Modi cited a "steady improvement" in Sino-Indian relations.
China has grown hugely in the last quarter of a century - from a position where both nations were on equal ground by the turn of the century. This is equally true of the military strengths of the two nations; China currently has five times India's might. At the same time, the Chinese military at the ground level is no match for the physical might and moral resolve of the Indian army. Firepower from the air alone cannot win a war, as both the US and Russia learned the hard way recently. China is mindful of this fact and has only attempted limited provocations along India's partly demarcated border regions. China has also been hesitant to send its military to Taiwan, which it claims is part of the Communist mainland. Peace is a prerequisite for progress.