PM Modi must withdraw clean chit given to China in view of Pentagon report, demands Congress

A day after the Pentagon released its annual report which revealed that China has been undertaking incremental and tactical actions to press its claims in Arunachal Pradesh, the Congress asserted that Prime Minister Narendra Modi needs to immediately withdraw the ‘clean chit’ given to China and set a deadline for removing the Chinese army from Indian territory.

Addressing a press conference, party spokesperson Pawan Khera said that in June 2020, BJP MP from Arunachal Pradesh Tapir Gao had written to Modi, Defence Minister Rajnath Singh and to Foreign Minister S Jaishankar warning them of the transgressions made by China into Arunachal Pradesh. Though he kept warning them, the government issued a clarification denying any such transgression.

The Pentagon’s annual report, “Military and Security Developments Involving the People’s Republic of China”, had confirmed Gao’s warnings and reports.

The report, presented to U.S. Congress, stated that China had constructed a 100-home civilian village inside the disputed territory between the Tibet Autonomous Region and Arunachal Pradesh last year. The village was on the banks of the Tsari Chu river, which had been under Beijing’s control.

“It has been 17 months since Modi gave a clean chit to China. That is a dark chapter in our history. This clean chit has emboldened China and it has been claiming that it did not transgress into Indian territory,” added Khera.

The report said this particular village is about 4.5 kilometres within Indian territory and has 101 structures, some of them being multi-storey structures.

Since the tension escalated on the Line of Actual Control (LAC), Indo-China business had increased by 67 per cent. “This increase in business comes after the sham of initial months when the Government went around banning the Chinese-run mobile applications,” Khera observed.

This is not the first time China is doing this. Such transgressions have happened not just in Ladakh, Gogra- Hot Springs, Depsang, but also Uttarakhand, where the Chinese army PLA had entered the country and destroyed Indian infrastructure and left., he said.

“Why I am repeating this? I am repeating this because all those news reports that some of our friends in the media kept writing, some of our Army veterans kept talking about has now been confirmed by an annual report by the Pentagon to the US Congress,” added Khera.