Qin Gang's India trip could open up new possibilities

It is good that Chinese Foreign Minister Qin Gang is traveling to India to attend the G20 Foreign Ministers' meeting on Thursday. This also gives China and India an opportunity to put bilateral ties back on track.

Then foreign minister Wang Yi, now China's top diplomat, visited New Delhi in March last year. Later in July, Indian Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar met Wang during the G20 Foreign Ministers meet in Bali.

Being a new foreign minister, his participation in the meeting in India allows Qin to make a fresh start. Since he is just beginning his tenure, he could be leading China's global engagements and might use this opportunity to engage with India and further strengthen his credentials as China's lead interlocutor for its growing global engagements.

Therefore, he should use this chance to study the major challenges to China-India ties and explore how best to take their developmental partnership forward. After all, it is high time these two fastest-growing large economies initiate a new chapter as part of confidence-building measures that have helped them work together since the early 1980s.

Also, given that India has invited 40 delegations — including non-G20 nations and representatives of international bodies — to the meeting, this could be a great occasion for Qin to explore building of a larger support base for China's recently enunciated Global Peace Initiative. But as China has already clarified, both China and India remained determined that, given its mandate, formal meetings of G20 should not be distracted by Ukraine crisis. China will be working with India to ensure that G20 debates continue to focus on prominent challenges to the global economy and to strengthen multilateralism, Qin can also contribute to India's effort to keep the G20 meeting focused on its mandate of addressing economic challenges rather than getting bogged down by geopolitics.

While the world risks getting divided into different blocs that have different understandings of "democracy", the G20 foreign ministers meeting will provide China and India an opportunity to share notes on their own understanding of the democratic process, which has often been a bone of contention between China and the industrialized Western nations.

The author is professor of international relations at Jawaharlal Nehru University (New Delhi) and is currently visiting professor at the University of British Columbia (Vancouver).