New Delhi: The Congress party on Tuesday demanded a full-fledged debate on China in the upcoming Monsoon Session of Parliament, in light of the two nations heading towards ‘re-normalisation and resetting’ of ties, as stated by External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar after the SCO foreign ministers’ meeting in China.
EAM Jaishankar, during his visit to China, the first in five years after the 2020 Galwan clashes, met Chinese Vice President Han Zheng on Monday and noted the improvement in bilateral relations between the two nations.
Taking note of the development, Congress General Secretary Jairam Ramesh argued that if the country’s Parliament could discuss the border situation in 1962, when the Chinese invasion was at its peak, why could a similar debate not take place now.
“We hope that the Prime Minister will finally agree to such a discussion,” he wrote on X and stressed on the need for it, given China’s fast ascent in the global power matrix.
“It is essential to build a national consensus on the critical security and economic challenges arising from China’s rise as the world’s leading manufacturing power and its position as the second-largest economy, one that may well surpass the United States within a decade,” he further said.
Jairam Ramesh said that the Congress has been pushing for such a debate since 2020 and also reminded the government of China’s misadventures and misdeeds in the past few months and years, despite the EAM’s claims of ties between the two nations warming up after the PM Modi-President Xi Jinping meeting last year.
After meeting with the Chinese Vice-President, EAM Jaishankar said that the normalisation in ties would yield ‘positive outcomes’.
The Congress leader questioned this optimism and pointed to multiple Chinese actions in the recent past that will only hurt Indian interests in the subcontinent.
Raising strong concerns over China’s tacit support to Pakistan during ‘Operation Sindoor’, he said that the dragon was using it as a testing ground for its network-centric warfare and weapon systems.
He cited Deputy Chief of Army Staff Lt Gen Rahul R Singh’s statement that India fought three adversaries in ‘Operation Sindoor’, including China that gave Pakistan “live inputs” i.e. real time Intelligence on Indian military operations and also warned that Pakistan could soon strike a deal to acquire Chinese J-35 stealth fighters in the near future.
“China has restricted exports to India of critical materials like Rare-Earth magnets, speciality fertilisers, and tunnel-boring machines for infrastructure projects and it may impact many important sectors including telecom, pharmaceuticals, and electronics as they are critically dependent on Chinese imports,” the Congress leader pointed out.
He also claimed that Indian patrols still require Chinese concurrence to reach their patrolling points in Depsang, Demchok, and Chumar.
“Buffer zones in Galwan, Hot Spring, and Pangong Tso lie predominantly within the Indian claim line, preventing our troops from accessing points to which they had unrestricted access before April 2020,” he said.
He also recalled the EAM’s acceptance of China as the ‘bigger economy’ and the ‘clean chit’ by the Centre, stating that this only emboldened the dragon in its cover-up exercise internationally, despite infringement of Indian territory.
(IANS)
