Team News Riveting
New Delhi, November 12
Former Congress president Rahul Gandhi on Friday charged that the country’s national security is “unpardonably compromised” as the government does not have a strategy on China.
“Our national security is unpardonably compromised because GOI has no strategy and Mr 56” is scared. My thoughts are with the soldiers risking their lives to guard our borders while GOI churns out lies,” the Congress leader said in a tweet.
He cited a news report in which the Chief of Defence Staff had contested External Affairs Ministry on the China border issue.
Chief of Defence Staff (CDS) Bipin Rawat on Thursday said the controversy about the Chinese coming into the Indian territory and building a new village is “not true”, and that the villages were well within the Chinese side of the Line of Actual Control (LAC). He also asserted that China has not transgressed the Indian “perception” of the LAC.
The US Department of Defence said China built a large village inside disputed territory between its Tibet Autonomous Region and India’s Arunachal Pradesh in the eastern sector of the LAC. Earlier in an official reaction to the US report, the External Affairs Ministry said India had neither accepted China’s “illegal occupation of its territory nor any unjustified Chinese claims”.
Congress leader P Chidambaram said it is time Defence Minister Rajnath Singh drew a line in his ministry and asked the CDS to remain “well within his side of the LAC.”
“MEA said that China is in ‘illegal occupation’ of Indian territory and India will not accept ‘unjustified Chinese claims’. “Within hours, the Chief of Defence Staff (CDS) said that the Chinese ‘have not transgressed anywhere on our perception of the LAC’ and they are ‘well within their side of the LAC’,” Chidambaram said in a series of tweets.
