China deployed military forces disregarding agreements: Jaishankar on border dispute in eastern Ladakh

External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar on Monday said that India and China are rising and in the process both the countries are changing the world order.

Citing talks between the leadership of the two countries in Mamallapuram and Wuhan, Jaishankar said India tried to maintain “balance” in relations through diplomacy, but after China’s military build-up on the Line of Actual Control Relations took a different turn. 2020 is a violation of the prescribed norms.

Speaking at a media summit organized by TV9 network, the External Affairs Minister described the rise of India and China as “significant” in the global geopolitical scenario.

Responding to a question, he said, “If you count three or four big things that have changed in the last 20-25 years, I think most people would agree that it is the rise of China and the rise of India.” will be.” .

”You can say that China started it much earlier because our own politics here delayed the era of reform. He is alright. Let bygones be bygones. But there is no question about it, both countries are moving forward and this is a very interesting problem for world politics.

The problem is this: both are changing the world order by their rise. So everyone has an impact on the world. But they also turned out to be neighbors. Jaishankar said, therefore their relationship is also changing, even though it is changing in comparison to the rest of the world.

The Foreign Minister argued that, therefore, the situation was making it “very complicated to strike a balance”. When Jaishankar was specifically asked about the informal summits between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping in the Chinese city of Wuhan in 2018 and Mamallapuram in 2019, he said they were part of “balance maintenance exercises”.

“We tried to maintain that balance naturally – first through diplomacy. So what you saw in Wuhan and Mamallapuram etc. was an exercise in maintaining balance,” he said.

“But what happened in 2020 was that China chose to move military forces in disregard of the agreements for whatever reason. They demanded a different response to balance,” he said.

“The logical thing for us to do was to move our forces on a very large scale. So from 2020 onwards, you have a balance, part of which is military posture in the border areas, part of which is the political relationship clearly affected by this border situation today,” he said.

“Part of it is the economic measures we have taken,” he said.

Jaishankar said the Modi government believes that the interests of the country’s working class, small enterprises and small scale industries should be protected from “unfair competition”.

“Today our effort is to build on our deep strengths. We have to build our digital capabilities, our telecom, our manufacturing, our pharma industry, our health self-reliance, our defense industry, our ability to deploy at the border which you can do only if you build the infrastructure, “They said.

Jaishankar suggested that India’s annual average expenditure on the border with China as of 2014 was around Rs 3,500 crore. Today it is around Rs 15,000 crore, he said.

He said that the infrastructure on the border has been neglected, you cannot protect the border if you do not build infrastructure there.

(This story has not been edited by News18 staff and is published from a syndicated news agency feed – PTI)