India doesn’t support China’s Belt and Road
CHINA failed to obtain India’s support for its ambitious Belt and Road infrastructure project at the end of a foreign ministers’ meeting of a major security bloc yesterday, ahead of an ice-breaking trip to China this week by India’s prime minister.
Belt and Road is Chinese President Xi Jinping’s scheme to build infrastructure to connect China to the rest of Asia and beyond, a giant reworking of its old Silk Road.
India has not signed up to the initiative, because parts of one key project, the $57 billion (R704bn) China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, run through Pakistan-administered Kashmir that India considers its own territory.
Whether or not China will be able to win India over to Belt and Road is likely to be a key measure of the success of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s trip to China to meet Xi for an informal meeting on Friday and Saturday.
But India’s foreign minister did not express support for Belt and Road in the communiqué released after foreign ministers of the China and Russia-led Shanghai Co-operation Organisation met in Beijing.
India, along with Pakistan, joined the group last year.
All the other foreign ministers – from Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan, Russia, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan – “reaffirmed support for China’s Belt and Road proposal”, the statement read.
Modi is coming to China as efforts at rapprochement gather pace following a testing year in ties between the two neighbours. The Asian giants were locked in a 73-day military stand-off in a remote, high-altitude stretch of their boundary last year.
The confrontation between the nuclear-armed powers in the Himalayas underscored Indian alarm at China’s expanding security and economic links in South Asia.
Modi will visit China again in June for a summit of the Shanghai Co-operation Organisation.
China will also have to tread carefully to avoid giving its close ally Pakistan cause for alarm. China on Monday reassured Pakistan that relations between the two countries were as firm as ever. – Reuters