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New Delhi: China’s rhetoric over the Dalai Lama’s recent visit to Arunachal Pradesh continues. Global Times, the Chinese Communist Party-run English daily, in a new article has said that India will ‘pay dearly’ for playing the ‘petty game’ of using ‘the Dalai Lama card’.
The Global Times op-ed, titled ‘India playing Dalai Lama card worsens territorial spats with China’ , also blasted Indian media for its reaction over China recently announcing ‘standardised’ names for six towns in Arunachal Pradesh.
The Chinese move “unsurprisingly set the Indian media ablaze”, the article, written by Ai Jun, reads. The Global Times piece also took offence with the comments of Brahma Chellaney, a professor at the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi.
Quoting Chellaney’s tweet, which read, “SILLY: China claims India’s Arunachal state but didn’t have names for its various counties. Now it invents the names”, the Global Times calls the argument and other such arguments “absurd.”
The Global Times then goes on to assert that South Tibet, which is the name that Beijing uses for Arunachal Pradesh, is a historical part of China and that it is “legitimate for the Chinese government to standardize the names of the places”.
Simla Accord Was Illegal
The article details how “British India and local Tibetan representatives unilaterally signed the illegal “Simla Accord” and created the “McMahon Line”” and how “the illegal deal ceded some 90,000 square kilometers of Chinese territory in South Tibet to British India.”
The piece also blames India for “increased migration” to the region and ‘boosting military construction’ there.
“New Delhi would be too ingenuous to believe that the region belongs to India simply because the Dalai Lama says so,” Ai Jun writes, referencing the Tibetan spiritual leader’s trip to Arunachal Pradesh, a trip New Delhi maintains was apolitical.
“It is time for India to do some serious thinking over why China announced the standardized names in South Tibet at this time. Playing the Dalai Lama card is never a wise choice for New Delhi. If India wants to continue this petty game, it will only end up in paying dearly for it,” the article ends.
Beijing and New Delhi have been involved in a diplomatic tussle ever since the Dalai Lama visited the north-eastern Indian state. An angry China lodged formal protests in New Delhi and Beijing even as India warned against interfering in its internal matters.
Chinese media has been particularly vociferous in voicing its displeasure over the incident, even going to the extent of warning that Beijing may be forced to consider interfering in the Kashmir issue.
