Why Doval's Beijing trip matters: The full story behind the 25th round of talks

National Security Advisor Ajit Doval arrives in Beijing on Monday for the 25th round of Special Representatives (SR) talks with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi, scheduled for Tuesday, according to official sources.

In 1962, India and China fought the Sino-Indian War. The fighting lasted about a month, from October 20 to November 21, and ran on two fronts roughly 1,000 kilometres apart, Aksai Chin in the west and the North-East Frontier Agency, now Arunachal Pradesh, in the east. The immediate dispute was the unresolved border itself, aggravated after India granted the Dalai Lama asylum in 1959. The Chinese forces were victorious, and after a ceasefire that took effect on November 21, China withdrew from most of the territory it had captured in the east, but retained control of Aksai Chin, the 38,000 sq km region it had been administering since the mid-1950s. 

Since 1962, India and China have never fought another full war. But the border itself was never properly settled, so the disagreement never really went away. For decades, things stayed mostly calm on the surface, even though both sides kept disagreeing quietly about exactly where the line between them should run. That quiet was broken in 2020.

China moved troops toward the Line of Actual Control in eastern Ladakh, and on the night of June 15, 2020, Indian and Chinese soldiers clashed in the Galwan Valley. Twenty Indian soldiers were killed, including Colonel Santosh Babu of the 16th Bihar Regiment. China later acknowledged four of its own soldiers died, although independent estimates suggested the toll was higher, in the dozens. It was the first fatal clash between the two armies in 45 years, and the deadliest since the 1962 war.

What followed was years of standoff. Troops on both sides dug into multiple points along the border in Ladakh, and getting them to pull back took an enormous amount of quiet diplomacy. Soldiers disengaged from Galwan in July 2020, then from the area around Pangong Tso lake in February 2021, then from Gogra in August 2021. 

The last friction point, Hot Springs (PP-15), was resolved only in September 2022. But even as these pullbacks happened, the relationship stayed tense. In December 2022, there was another flashpoint, this time far from Ladakh, in the Tawang sector of Arunachal Pradesh. Chinese troops tried to push into an area called Yangtse and change the situation on the ground there, and Indian soldiers pushed back. Nobody died this time, but it showed that trouble could flare up almost anywhere along this long, disputed border.

The last two sticking points, two areas called Depsang and Demchok, took the longest to sort out. It wasn't until October 2024, more than four years after Galwan, that India and China finally agreed to restore patrolling in these areas the way it had existed before the standoff began. Just a few days later, Prime Minister Modi and President Xi Jinping met on the sidelines of the BRICS summit in Kazan, Russia, and Modi said that "maintaining peace and tranquillity in the border areas should be our priority."

Since then, things have slowly started to thaw. Doval and Wang met in Beijing in December 2024 for the 23rd round of talks, the first SR meeting in five years, the mechanism having been frozen after Galwan. 

Early in 2025, Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri visited Beijing, and the two sides agreed to bring back the Kailash Mansarovar pilgrimage, which had been suspended since the pandemic; the resumption was announced in April, and the first batches went in June 2025. 

The 24th round followed in August 2025, when Wang Yi visited India. The two NSAs met again bilaterally in June 2026, on the sidelines of the BRICS NSAs meeting in New Delhi. 

Tuesday's talks are expected to cover the Line of Actual Control, how troops are being managed on the border, and the overall state of relations between the two countries, as per reports.

This meeting is happening just weeks before Xi Jinping is expected to visit India for the BRICS Summit in New Delhi, scheduled for September 12-13. The officials on both sides remain hopeful about his visit, though nothing has been formally confirmed yet. If these talks go well, it could open the door for a possible meeting between Modi and Xi while he's in India for the summit.

But it isn't all smooth sailing. The meeting comes amid recent reports of incursions by Chinese troops in the Upper Subansiri region of Arunachal Pradesh along the LAC. India has treated the reports seriously with External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar calling it "aggressive posturing" by Chinese troops and said border peace is a prerequisite for ties, even as the Defence Ministry has not formally clarified the scale of the reported incursions. The two sides, meanwhile, held the 36th round of their border-management mechanism earlier this month.

(With PTI Inputs)