NEW DELHI: When foreign minister S M Krishna meets his counterparts Sergey Lavrov and Yang Jiechi in Bangalore on Tuesday, the meeting will, for the first time, be held under the shadow of sharp differences between India and China. To that extent, some serious diplomacy will be expected by the Chinese and the Indians.
Russia and China have resolved their issues and have moved closer on many fronts, while there has been a sharp deterioration in the India-China fabric.
In a recent interview, foreign secretary Nirupama Rao said, "The structure that the three countries have devised enables us to discuss issues of regional importance and of course, our external affairs minister will be meeting his Chinese counterpart during this meeting."
According to sources, it will be India-China bilateral issues and the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan-Pakistan that is likely to dominate the discussions.
On the bilateral front, the Krishna-Yang meeting comes just after PM Manmohan Singh and Wen Jiabao covered the bilateral agenda on the margins of the East Asia summit over the weekend. To that extent, it may be merely a reiteration of ground already covered. But the feeling in the MEA is that India needs to engage the Chinese intensively at every forum to either reassure them about their real and imagined concerns, or reinforce held Indian positions. With Lavrov, Krishna was just in Moscow for a bilateral meeting to cover bilateral issues, which wouldn't have changed much since then.
But the most important item on their agenda would be the situation in Afghanistan-Pakistan. India wears its heart on its sleeve on the Af-Pak situation, but the meeting will be a unique opportunity for the three powers circling Af-Pak to discuss future possibilities, specially if things get worse, as they may well do.
Russia and India are together in that they don't want the Taliban back in Kabul, but China is more ambiguous, its position complicated by its close relationship with Pakistan on the one hand, and its problems with Islamic extremism in Xinjiang on the other. China is also one of the biggest investors in Afghanistan, having invested over $3 billion in the Aynak copper mines near Kabul. So logically, it should be on the same page.
But Pakistan is the ghost at the table. China will not want to see Pakistan marginalised, but all three countries have a strong interest in seeing Pakistan free of its greatest export: terrorism. India will have a good opportunity to see how the two other powers approach the evolving situation there. India will be particularly interested to hear how the two other powers regard the role and future of the Taliban. At the recent SCO meeting, Taliban sent a letter asking for their intervention in Afghanistan to toss out the US and NATO.
However, on almost every other count, RIC has had to yield space to more active groupings. In 1998, it was former Russian premier Yevgeny Primakov who proposed the trilateral. China, after initial scepticism, came on board with the first foreign ministers meeting in 2005. July, 2006, saw the first heads of government meeting on the sidelines of the G-8 summit in St Petersburg, Russia. The second meeting was held in New Delhi in February 2007 and the third at Harbin, China in October 2007. The last meeting was held in Yekaterinburg, Russia on the sidelines of the BRIC summit.
In many ways, says former foreign secretary Kanwal Sibal, BRIC made RIC redundant.
While India might want to make Af-Pak a big discussion issue at RIC, we must remember that Russia and China have formulated their positions with Afghanistan's next door neighbours, the Central Asian states at the recent meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, which now focuses on counter-terrorism and security, where India is excluded from the core.
Besides, China and Russia have also coordinated their positions on many international issues like Iran and nuclear issues, both countries being permanent members of the UNSC. India, as an outsider, automatically remains out of this calculus.
Yet supporters of RIC have argued that this is an evolving and useful forum for the three powers to work together, though this lofty idea is yet to really take off.
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