Skip to main content

China frees 10 Indian soldiers after military talks

NEW DELHI: Three days after clashes in the Galwan Valley of Ladakh left 20 Indian soldiers dead, the Chinese on Thursday evening released 10 Indian Army personnel, including a Lieutenant Colonel and three Majors, from their custody, The Hindu said.

It quoted an unnamed security source as saying that all 10 persons were released around 5pm after an agreement was reached at the Major General-level talks on Wednesday evening and they were returned unharmed.

Separately, the Indian Army clarified in a statement that there were “no Indian troops missing in action”, The Hindu said.

In another development, External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar said the Indian troops, who were outnumbered and attacked by the Chinese side, carried arms.

Meanwhile, New Delhi confirmed that External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar would join trilateral talks with Chinese and Russian counterparts on Tuesday.

India’s foreign ministry said on Thursday that Jaishankar would indeed participate in the meeting.

The prospects of the talks have lifted hopes of defusing the month-long crisis on an inhospitable Sino-Indian border. India is scheduled to host a meeting of the heads of governments of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation later this year.

The special meeting of the three-member group was initially called by Russia, to celebrate the 75th anniversary of victory in World War II and the founding of the United Nations.

The virtual conference involving India’s Jaishankar, Sergey Lavrov of Russia and Wang Yi of China was postponed from March following the Covid-19 pandemic.

China says it is enjoying a golden period of relationship with Russia currently, and Russian warships have patrolled in solidarity with China in the South China Sea.

It is worth pondering if that could make India re-think its strategy of aligning with the US-led anti-China quad that Beijing has frowned on.

Indian analysts have described Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s current strategy as one of “standing on two stools”, one stool being the Shanghai club and the other the emerging US-led bid to contain China. Defence hardware that India deploys on the China border comes from both groups.

In the meantime, anti-China protests were staged across India and many have led to calls for boycotting Chinese goods.

But unlike Mahatma Gandhi’s swadeshi campaign to discard British goods, owners of expensive Chinese mobile phones may find it hard to abandon the sets.

A politician aligned with the Bharatiya Janata Party has proposed that Chinese food and Chinese restaurants also should be banned.

Amid calls for stalling Chinese investments, India’s cricket body has emerged as a worried entity. The Board of Cricket for Cricket in India (BCCI) said it was open to reviewing its sponsorship policy for the next cycle but has no plans to end its association with current IPL title sponsor Vivo as the money coming in from the Chinese company is helping India’s cause and not the other way round.

Published in Dawn, June 19th, 2020



from The Dawn News - Home https://ift.tt/2ASFEFt
via IFTTT
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Trump says he urged team to ‘slow’ COVID-19 testing

US President Donald Trump said Saturday he was encouraging health officials in his administration to slow down coronavirus testing, arguing that increased tests lead to more cases being discovered. The president has claimed falsely on several occasions that surges of COVID-19 in several states can be explained by greater numbers of diagnostic tests. At his first rally since the outbreak forced nationwide shutdowns in March, Trump told the crowd in Tulsa, Oklahoma that testing was a “double-edged sword.” The United States — which has more deaths and cases than any other country — has carried out more than 25 million coronavirus tests, placing it outside the top 20 countries in the world, per capita. “Here is the bad part: When you do testing to that extent, you are going to find more people, you will find more cases,” Trump argued. “So I said to my people ‘slow the testing down.’ They test and they test.” It was not clear from Trump’s tone if he was playing to the crowd, who ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Sir Anwer Pervez, richest Pakistani British businessman, loses £432m in pandemic

Sir Anwar Pervez OBE, the founder and chairman of Bestway Cash & Carry has lost £432 million during the coronavirus pandemic to bring him down to No 50 on the richest British people list. The list has 1,000 people and is published by the Sunday Times newspaper . Pervez was at No 42 previously.  The 2020 list of the UK’s richest shows its first fall in wealth in a decade as Britain’s wealthiest people lost tens of billions of pounds in the coronavirus pandemic, the Sunday Times reported in its Rich List 2020. The newspaper, which has produced the respected annual ranking of the country’s 1,000 wealthiest people since 1989, found the past two months had resulted in the super-rich losing £54 billion ($65 billion). More than half of the billionaires in Britain had seen drops in their worth by as much as £6b, a decrease in their collective wealth unprecedented since 2009 and the financial crisis. The Hinduja brothers, who topped last year’s list with a £22b fortune, saw among ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Despite reservations about jury, Pakistan to implement FATF reforms: envoy

WASHINGTON: Despite its reservations about the fairness of the jury which is to determine Pakistan’s performance against terror financing, the government is committed to implementing its action plan for dealing with this issue, says Islamabad’s Washington envoy Asad Majeed Khan. In a conversation with a prominent US scholar George Perkovich, recorded at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington on Monday afternoon, Ambassador Khan said the actions that Pakistan had taken so far to eliminate terror financing were “reflective of the political will”. “We feel that we have done a lot. We are also clear and determined to do more,” said the envoy while responding to a question about a meeting of the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) held in Orlando last week, which asked Pakistan to implement its own action plan for eliminating terror financing by October. Failing to do so could put Pakistan on a blacklist of violators and bring strict economic sanctions too. “But we w...
Post a Comment
Read more