Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi will visit China for the first time in over seven years, a government source has said, in a further sign of a diplomatic thaw with Beijing as tensions with the United States rise.
His trip will come at a time when India's relationship with the US faces its most serious crisis in years after President Donald Trump imposed the highest tariffs among Asian peers on goods imported from India and signed an executive order imposing an additional 25 percent tariff on India in response to its continued purchase of Russian oil.
Modi's visit to the Chinese city of Tianjin for the summit of the SCO, a Eurasian political and security grouping that includes Russia, will be his first since June 2018.
Subsequently, Sino-Indian ties deteriorated sharply after a military clash along their disputed Himalayan border in 2020.
Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping held talks on the sidelines of a BRICS summit in Russia in October that led to a thaw.
The giant Asian neighbours are now slowly defusing tensions that have hampered business relations and travel between the two countries.
Meanwhile, India's National Security Adviser Ajit Doval is in Russia on a scheduled visit and is expected to discuss India's purchases of Russian oil in the wake of Trump's pressure on India to stop buying Russian crude, according to another government source, who also did not want to be named.
Doval is likely to address India's defence cooperation with Russia, including obtaining faster access to pending exports to India of Moscow's S-400 air defence system and a possible visit by President Vladimir Putin to India.
Doval's trip will be followed by Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar's in the weeks to come.
US and Indian officials told Reuters a mix of political misjudgment, missed signals and bitterness scuttled trade deal negotiations between the world's biggest and fifth-largest economies, whose bilateral trade is worth over $190 billion.
India expects Trump's crackdown could cost it a competitive advantage in about $64 billion worth of goods sent to the US that account for 80 percent of its total exports, four separate sources told Reuters, citing an internal government assessment.
However, the relatively low share of exports in India's $4 trillion economy is expected to limit the direct impact on economic growth.
