(TibetanReview.net, Feb12’25) –India and China are still “crossing the river and feeling the stones” and therefore cannot be said to have reached a stage where the former feels confident enough to open to investments from the latter very soon, reported Reuters Feb 11, citing India’s Chief Economic Adviser V Anantha Nageswaran.
“It requires both sides to understand mutual dependence and benefits,” Nageswaran has said, speaking at an event in Mumbai.
“I don’t think it is something that you’ll expect to see immediate results because both the sides are crossing the river by feeling the stones,” he has said, when asked whether India was considering making any changes to its policy on Chinese investments.
India, the country with the world’s largest population and fastest growing economy, has become particularly important for China, the world’s largest but faltering economy, in the face of prohibitive tariffs from the Trump administration of the United States.
India tightened its scrutiny of investments from Chinese companies since 2020, when relations between the two nuclear powers soured after clashes between their soldiers on the largely undemarcated Ladakh-border left 20 Indian and at least four Chinese soldiers dead in Jun 2020.
It was a wakeup call for India which had previously, generally avoided offending China for its frequent border violations. It accused Beijing of violating a series of written agreements between the two sides signed over many years after painstaking negotiations and adopted a number of tough policy measures which plunged their bilateral ties to decades-long low.