“It all started with Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to Japan. China has been having doubts for a while now. It’s about time India tries to have long-term engagements with China for the benefit of both nations,” Swamy told News18, a TV channel.
India and China are now engaged in a bitter war of words along the Line of Actual Control, the de facto border between the two countries since the war of 1962, in Sikkim, a state in India’s northeast.
On Thursday, China asked India to withdraw troops from the Donglong area in Sikkim sector as a “precondition to pursue any meaningful dialogue to settle the boundary issue” and also warned India to learn from “historical lessons”, an implicit reference to the 1962 war. Moreover, the Chinese reaction came on the day when Indian Army chief General Bipin Rawat visited the area.
The BJP MP, who has earned a reputation for shooting off his mouth, also thinks that the current round of tension could be a result of Chinese thinking that India is getting too close for comfort with the US after the recent meeting of Modi with President Donald Trump in the US.
“US has fatigued in terms of international relations. We are not junior partners of the US; we are equals. There can be no world peace without India and China joining hands,” Swamy added. The BJP legislator reportedly played an important role in re-establishing ties with China during the 1980s under former Prime Ministers Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi.
Swamy also said that if the government authorizes him to speak to the Chinese government, he is willing to do so. He also thinks that bad ties with both China and Pakistan could be “a defense nightmare for India.”
Indian experts can’t disagree with Swamy and advise to engage the Dragon whole-heartedly.
“Obviously we need much better ties with China. After all, Beijing’s record of using its economic clout for good is unrivalled: they have delivered prosperity to hundreds of millions of human beings, in China, Southeast Asia, and Africa. It’s time we accepted the reality of our poverty, get over a decades old historical conflict, and engage the dragon whole-heartedly. What matters is not the past, but the now and that means eliminating the everyday squalor of Indian life. As for the United States, all they want to do is sell arms to us and thereby ensnare us in their military-industrial complex. Far better to engage China to realize infrastructure and development projects that help all of us, rather than a handful of weapons manufacturers,” Dr Deep Kisor Datta-Ray, Associate Professor at the New Delhi-based O P Jindal International University, told Sputnik.
