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• India and China have agreed to launch a bilateral maritime dialogue, ostensibly to avert future flashpoints between the two competing naval powers in the Indian Ocean region.
• External Affairs Minister S M Krishna and his Chinese counterpart, Yang Jiechi, here on Thursday decided that the two countries would hold maritime dialogues at regular intervals. The decision came at a time when New Delhi and Beijing were preparing for Chinese President Hu Jintao’s visit to India to attend the BRICS summit on March 28 and 29 next.
• Hu will have a meeting with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on the sidelines of the BRICS summit.
• Hu’s visit to New Delhi is likely to be his last as Chinese President, as Beijing is set for a leadership change later this year. He had visited India last in 2006.
• “The strategic partnership (between India and China) needs to be strengthened,” Krishna said after his talks with Yang, who is visiting New Delhi as part of a “mutually agreed mechanism of annual exchange of visits at the level of foreign ministers”.
• “The Chinese government is committed to enhancing the China-India strategic and cooperative partnership,” said Yang, who landed here on Wednesday, just days after Beijing protested against Defence Minister A K Antony’s visit to Arunachal Pradesh, provoking New Delhi to reiterate that the northeastern state was an integral part of India.
• It was Beijing that had last month offered a maritime dialogue with New Delhi. The two countries, however, are yet to work on the finer details of the structure of the dialogue.
• Yang, who is on a visit to New Delhi and Krishna also decided that the diplomats of the two countries would hold the first meeting of the newly-created “Working Mechanism for Consultation and Coordination on India-China Border Affairs” in Beijing next week.

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