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What did the Modi–Xi meeting in Kazan signal?
Summary
A look back at the first India–China bilateral meeting in five years, held on the sidelines of the BRICS summit.
What did it mean when Narendra Modi and Xi Jinping sat down together on 23 October 2024? The Prime Minister of India and the President of China held a bilateral meeting on the sidelines of the 16th BRICS summit in Kazan, Russia.
The talks were the first bilateral meeting between the two leaders in five years. They came in the aftermath of the 2020 border skirmishes between Indian and Chinese troops, which makes the fact of the meeting itself the most concrete outcome that was reported at the time.
The setting mattered as well. Kazan hosted the BRICS summit, and the meeting took place on its margins rather than as a standalone state visit, a format that allowed the two leaders to meet without a separate bilateral occasion.
A separate story from the same days
Two days earlier, on 21 October 2024, an Ilyushin Il-76 cargo plane crashed in North Darfur, Sudan. The crash killed its crew of two Russians and three Sudanese nationals. The Rapid Support Forces claimed they had shot the aircraft down with a surface-to-air missile and said they had recovered its flight recorder. Russia said its diplomats in Sudan were investigating the crash.
The two events were unrelated in the reports, but both showed Russia's name appearing in international news that week, as host in Kazan and as a country with citizens among the dead in Darfur.
