China warned Kashmir an internal matter

NEW DELHI: India on Tuesday warned China that the government’s contentious move to strip Kashmir of its autonomy and split the region into two parts was an “internal matter” after Beijing slammed the “unilateral” decision.

India, Pakistan and China claim all or parts of the disputed Himalayan region, with New Delhi’s announcement on Monday sparking a fierce response from its two nuclear neighbours.

Beijing was particularly critical of India’s decision to turn Kashmir’s mostly Buddhist region of Ladakh into an administrative territory directly ruled by New Delhi.

“China is always opposed to India’s inclusion of the Chinese territory in the western sector of the China-India boundary into its administrative jurisdiction,” Foreign Ministry spokeswomen Hua Chunying said.

“Recently India has continued to undermine China’s territorial sovereignty by unilaterally changing its domestic law.

“Such practice is unacceptable and will not come into force.”

India says China is illegally occupying 38,000 square kilometres of its northwestern territory, while Beijing claims a 90,000-square-kilometre chunk of Arunachal Pradesh state in northeast India.

The Indian government said Ladakh’s new designation as a “union territory” was “an internal matter concerning the territory of India”.

“India does not comment on the internal affairs of other countries and similarly expects other countries to do likewise,” Indian foreign ministry spokesman Raveesh Kumar said.

Border disputes between India and China have been the subject of fruitless talks since 1962, when the two nations fought a brief and brutal war over the region.