In June 2014, days after Prime Minister Narendra Modi had been sworn in for the first time, one of the first high-level visitors from outside the SAARC region was Wang Yi. Mr. Wang, who was appointed the Foreign Minister of China in 2013, travelled to New Delhi as Special Envoy of President Xi Jinping to meet Mr. Modi, whom he called an “old friend of China”, referring to Mr. Modi’s visits during his tenure as Gujarat Chief Minister, and said the NDA’s return to power had “injected a new vitality into an ancient civilisation”.
Mr. Wang’s mission was clear — to secure a visit by Mr. Xi to Delhi that September, and to invite Mr. Modi to Beijing soon after. Both visits were cleared quickly. A few days after Mr. Wang’s visit on June 8-9, the government also decided to put off two other engagements: the India-U.S.-Japan trilateral (the Quad was not revived until 2017), set for June 23-24 in Delhi, was cancelled, and Mr. Modi postponed his visit to Japan that had been fixed for July 3-5, ostensibly due to an upcoming Parliament session, much to his hosts’ disappointment. Speculation in South Block was rife: did the Chinese Foreign Minister have something to do with the decisions, to clear the “optics” before the Xi visit in September 2014?
