India & China likely to resume direct flights within weeks: Report

India and China are expected to resume direct flights within weeks, according to a report.

Direct flights between India and China were suspended in early 2020 with the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic. Weeks later, Chinese troops mounted incursions in the Indian Himalayas and resultant skirmishes, which came to a boil in June 2020 when Chinese soldiers attacked and killed 20 Indian soldiers , plunged the India-China relationships to the lowest point since 1962 when the two countries fought a war. Flights were therefore never resumed.

Bloomberg on Tuesday reported that India and China are set to resume direct flights as soon as next month and the announcement could be made on the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) Summit at the end of August in China.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi will attend the SCO Summit for the first time since the India-China relationship nosedived in 2020.

The report further said that the Indian government has asked airlines to prepare flights to China at short notice.

India & China take steps but relationship far from normal

The news has come at a time when India and China have taken a slew of steps to seek a reset in the bilateral relationship, such as China resuming the Kailash-Mansarovar Yatra and India resuming granting visas to Chinese tourists . But the relationship is far from normal as China has continued to needle India.

For example, China has continued to block rare earth supplies to India even as it has resumed supplies to other countries. China has also blocked the supply of speciality fertilisers to India and has blocked its engineers from working in mobile manufacturing factories in India  in a bid to stop India’s progress in ramping up domestic manufacturing.

Above all, China has continued to support Pakistan to the hilt, which was visible during the India-Pakistan conflict in May when Chinese support was such that Lieutenant General Rahul R Singh, the deputy chief of the Indian Army, said that China was essentially fighting India via a backdoor .

“We had one border and two adversaries — actually three. Pakistan was in the front. China was providing all possible support — 81 per cent of the military hardware with Pakistan is Chinese…China is able to test its weapons against other weapons, so it’s like a live lab available to them. Turkey also played an important role in providing the type of support it did,” said Singh last month.

Moreover, the border standoff at Ladakh that began in 2020 with Chinese incursions has not yet been fully resolved. Only partial rollback of forward deployment of personnel and war-waging equipment has taken place. Broader de-escalation is yet to take place and patrolling at all areas of contention is yet to be restored.