Hoping Against Hope: What the Third Pole Needs From Modi and Xi This Weekend
A glacier collapsed on Langtang Lirung on the Nepal-China border and fell five kilometres into the valley below on the morning of August 26, 2026. The Bhotekoshi river reached the gauge at Syabrubesi in thirteen minutes. The warning texts went out to residents of Rasuwa, Nuwakot, Dhading and Chitwan thirty-eight minutes after the collapse. At least 1,369 people died in Nepal. Forty-three died in Tibet. The bodies of some victims were carried as many as 240 kilometres into India. We now know that there was no transboundary monitoring arrangement between China and Nepal, or between China and India, covering the slope that failed. There never was.
Seventeen days later, the leaders of India and China will meet in New Delhi.
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| File Photo: @China_Amb_India |
Xi Jinping's visit was confirmed by Beijing's Ministry of Foreign Affairs on September 10. He is bringing a delegation that is double the size of 2019. Modi-Xi talks are expected. Putin-Modi talks has taken place the day before the summit opens. In other words, the Tiger and the Dragon are both in New Delhi and the whole world is watching to see what they say to each other.
What I would like them to say as someone who was born just an hour's drive from where the great university of Nalanda once stood is something that I have not heard at a summit between these two countries in my living memory though I have spoken to diplomats and writers and experts who have informed me a great deal on what I am trying to write here. I would like our leaders to say that the mountain is the agenda.
In 629 CE, a Chinese monk named Xuanzang left Chang'an without imperial permission, crossed the Gobi Desert alone, and came here to Nalanda in Bihar to study. He spent about sixteen years in India. He returned with 657 Sanskrit texts and translated them into Chinese to transmit Indian mathematics, logic, philosophy and Buddhist thought to a civilisation that had walked 5,000 kilometres to find it. The monks at Nalanda asked him why he wanted to go home. We now know the answer. His translations shaped Chinese intellectual life for a thousand years.
The university he walked to has been revived and stands again in Bihar. The road between the two civilisations has always been here in Bihar but we lost touch with that ancient nerve a long time ago as the political will to walk it kept disappearing.
Yoga is now practised by 300 million people globally, with one of the largest concentrations of practitioners outside India actually residing in China. China gave the world tai chi and the Taoist philosophical tradition that has more structural overlap with Indian Advaita Vedanta than either country's foreign ministry has ever formally acknowledged. These are more than soft-power talking points. They are two thousand years of civilisational exchange that politics has repeatedly tried and failed to erase. The melting glacier doesn't care about Galwan and the flood doesn't stop at the LAC.
The practical case is just as strong as the philosophical one and I think it needs to be stated plainly for anyone who finds the civilisational argument too abstract.
India produces twenty percent of the world's generic medicines. China manufactures forty percent of the world's active pharmaceutical ingredients. They are already in the same supply chain. India's Qure.ai uses artificial intelligence to analyse chest X-rays for tuberculosis across the Global South. China deploys AI diagnostic systems across Southeast Asia. Both are doing the same thing in different countries and neither is talking to the other about the mechanism. China has the computing infrastructure. India has the distribution architecture in UPI and Aadhaar. China's problem is an ageing population and a domestic economy that needs new ideas and new markets. India's problem is a young population that needs jobs, skills and the infrastructure that will easily take sixty years to build without Chinese methods and technology. Anyone with a pencil and ten minutes can join the dots.
In sports, we already know this. Divya Deshmukh defeated China's Lei Tingjie in the Women's Speed Chess Championship last year. Namrata Batra faced Mengyue Chen of China in the wushu final at the World Games in Chengdu. PV Sindhu and Satwik-Chirag compete in China every season. India's young badminton players won gold in Chengdu last October. The Asian Games open in Aichi-Nagoya one week after this summit closes. In other words, the two countries have been building something on the sports field that their diplomats have not yet caught up to.
None of this is possible without naming what broke. Galwan.
The LAC remains a line of tension. China has withheld hydrological data on the Brahmaputra. The trade deficit runs to a hundred billion dollars in China's favour. These are the betrayals and a piece that imagines a cooperative future without naming them is not worth the reader's time and trust. Trust is not restored by summits alone. It is restored by the small things that follow them. The glacier sensor that sends its reading to both capitals simultaneously. The student who gets a visa in a week instead of six months. The Kailash Manasarovar pilgrim who crosses without incident, offers his prayers, and comes home to tell his family that the road to China is open again.
That is what No Betrayals actually means, the presence of a mechanism that makes disagreement manageable. A joint Himalayan monitoring system. A co-production framework for cinema. A student exchange programme that puts ten thousand young Indians in Chinese universities and ten thousand young Chinese in Indian ones every year and lets them figure out for themselves what their governments have been too cautious to say. Bring some of China into India and take some of India into China and leave the rest to the young.
The glacier on Langtang Lirung did not collapse because of a border dispute. It collapsed because the planet is warming and the Third Pole is the place where it is warming fastest and two countries with the data and the technology and the combined population of three billion people have spent six years not sharing what they know. That trust building should be the agenda and we can save everything else for the joint statement.
(Saket Suman is Editor at IndianRepublic.in, and the author of The Psychology of a Patriot.)