China tells India it is ‘highly concerned’ about situation in Kashmir
- Indian External Affairs Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar meets Chinese foreign minister and vice-president in Beijing
- Wang Yi says move to strip the region of its special status will ‘trigger regional tension’ and calls for dispute to be settled ‘through peaceful means’
Chinese leaders have expressed heightened concern over India’s decision last week to scrap the special autonomous status of Jammu and Kashmir, a disputed territory claimed by both New Delhi and Islamabad.
They also urged India to avoid provocation and to play a “constructive role” in regional stability.
The message was delivered by Foreign Minister Wang Yi and Vice-President Wang Qishan in separate meetings in Beijing on Monday with Indian External Affairs Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar during his three-day visit to China.
“China is highly concerned about the current situation in Kashmir and the escalated conflict between India and Pakistan,” the foreign minister told Jaishankar, according to official news agency Xinhua.
“The constitutional amendments by India will change the status quo of the Kashmir area and trigger regional tension. China opposes any unilateral action that will complicate the situation. We hope that India and Pakistan can settle the dispute through peaceful means, and together safeguard peace and stability in the region,” he said.
In a separate meeting, Vice-President Wang Qishan said China-India relations were developing with good momentum and that the two countries should work together to lay a “firm foundation” for “sustainable and healthy development of bilateral ties”.
The talks on Monday came after the Chinese foreign minister met his Pakistani counterpart Shah Mehmood Qureshi on Friday, with Wang Yi seeking to reassure Islamabad it had Beijing’s “support and commitment”. During the meeting in Beijing, Wang Yi repeated that Pakistan was an “all-weather strategic partner” for China.
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Jaishankar, the first Indian minister to visit Beijing since Prime Minister Narendra Modi began his second term in late May, was in the city to co-chair a high-level meeting on cultural and other exchanges between India and China on Monday.
He is also expected to meet Chinese officials to map out a planned visit to India by President Xi Jinping later this year.
In his meeting with Wang Qishan on Monday, Jaishankar, who was India’s ambassador to China from 2009 to 2013, said relations between China and India should be a “factor of stability” in a world of uncertainty.
State broadcaster CCTV quoted Jaishankar as saying that China and India should “respect and accommodate” each other’s major concerns and step up communications to properly handle their differences based on the “consensus between the leaders of the two countries”.
The Indian minister was apparently referring to talks between Xi and Modi in Astana, the Kazakh capital, in June 2017 and in April last year in Wuhan, China. The informal summit in the Chinese city was hailed by Beijing and New Delhi as a “milestone” in bilateral relations following a tense military stand-off at the Doklam plateau in the Himalayas in 2017.
Observers in China said the foreign minister’s remarks on Monday were indirect criticism of India that showed Beijing saw New Delhi’s decision on Kashmir as a source of tension in one of the most complex border disputes in the region.
“The decision [to revoke the special constitutional status] goes against regional stability, especially for India’s relationship with Pakistan, as the territory in Kashmir remains disputed and any decision should not be made unilaterally,” said Hu Zhiyong, a research fellow at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences’ Institute of International Relations.
Sun Shihai, from the Institute of South Asian Studies at Sichuan University, noted that the Chinese foreign minister stopped short of condemning New Delhi’s move.
“India may want China to understand its stance, but China already has its own position – that any unilateral decisions on disputed issues do not help stability in the region,” Sun said. “Nevertheless, the tone [of Wang’s remarks] is conciliatory, as that is how China wants to play it, instead of [issuing] some kind of condemnation.”
