New Delhi: Congress MP Shashi Tharoor on Friday expressed caution with the way China has “behaved on our borders” and Beijing’s “overt support” to Pakistan during Operation Sindoor, calling for “predictable relationships” where trade won’t be “weaponised” against India.
Tharoor’s remarks came amid a political row over Indo-Tibetan Border Police (ITBP) chief Shatrujeet Kapur’s purported remarks that the Army is successfully dealing with a “face-off (with China) in Arunachal Pradesh”.
Speaking at an interactive session at the NDTV World Summit, Tharoor said: “The way in which China has behaved on our borders, the way in which they’ve nibbled away at our territory, their overt support for Pakistan during the brief conflict (Operation Sindoor) between our two countries last year is worrying.”
“China not only supplied a vast amount of weapons, which is their legal right to do, but also supplied real-time data while the conflict was going on from their satellite spot above our territory, which was actually a hostile act. These are all things we have to really worry about,” he added.
Talking about India-China trade relations, Tharoor called the situation on the border as one of interdependence without trust.
“On our own borders we have the problem of interdependence without trust. I can’t even say interdependence because our dependence on China is far greater than theirs on us and yet can we trust them?” he pointed out.
“Galwan was not the only incident. There were other incidents in which China essentially unilaterally upended the understanding that had existed between the two countries of a tranquil border and this worries us. Why is it that they want to create this? It was initially supposed to be in their interest that the border situation remains tranquil while they dramatically expanded their exports to us. The exports are still expanding and they’re still giving us a rough time,” the Congress leader said.
Moreover, Tharoor also expressed concern over India’s “dependence” on Chinese imports, which in turn has shown that they can be “turned off whenever they want”.
“Those exports, by the way, have also created another dependency, which is that the Chinese have shown us repeatedly they can be turned off when they want. They actually turned off, for example, the export of Rare Earths to India for a couple of years. We had developed a major dependence on the large-size tunnel-boring machines, 100 per cent of which were coming from China. Now suddenly they decided not to export those to us as well. We could no longer bore holes into hillsides and construct our highways and so on for a couple of years until they chose to turn the tap back on again,” he said.
Further, Tharoor emphasised on having a “predictable relationship” with China where trade cannot be “weaponised” against India.
“We need, as far as possible, predictable relationships. Relationships which won’t be weaponised, and trade dependencies which won’t be weaponised against us,” he said.
–IANS–
