(TibetanReview.net, Jun07’25) – Any move by India to improve its relations with China is easily thwarted by Pakistan towards which the latter feels an overwhelming degree of commitment, Indian National Congress leader Shashi Tharoor has said Jun 5, leading a multi-party parliamentary delegation to the US.
A thaw in relations between Delhi and Beijing over the past few months was “seemingly making good progress” before the recent conflict, PTI news agency Jun 6 cited Tharoor has said. The conflict began with allegedly Pakistan-based and sponsored terrorists gunning down in a most outrageous manner tourists in Pahalgam town of Jammu and Kashmir on Apr 22. It led to India’s retaliatory Operation Sindoor strikes against Pakistan, beginning May 7 and lasting four days, after which an abrupt ceasefire was announced.
“I’m not going to mince my words, but we are aware that China has immense stakes in Pakistan,” Tharoor has said during an interaction with representatives of think tanks organised at the Indian Embassy in Washington, DC.
“China is an absolutely impossible factor to ignore in what has been our confrontation with Pakistan,” Tharoor has said.
He has pointed out that the largest single project under the Belt and Road Initiative is the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, adding that 81% of Pakistani defence equipment is from China.
“Defence may be the wrong word here. Offense in many ways,” he has said.
He has noted that despite the tensions between China and India since the Galwan Valley clashes in Jun 2020, “we had actually begun a thaw with China in September of last year, which was seemingly making good progress before this tragedy occurred.”
He has added that “then we saw a very different China” in terms of its practical support for Pakistan, even on the Security Council.
“We have no illusions about what the challenges are in our neighbourhood, but I want to remind you all that India has consistently chosen a path of keeping open channels of communication, even with our adversaries,” Tharoor has said.
“We have tried as much as possible to focus on development, on growth, on trade. Our trade with China is still at record levels. It’s not that we are adopting a posture of hostility, but we would be naive” not to be aware of these other currents around, he has said.
A UN Security Council press statement on Apr 25 on the ‘terrorist attack in Jammu and Kashmir’ condemned the Pahalgam terrorist attack in “the strongest terms”.
“The members of the Security Council underlined the need to hold perpetrators, organisers, financiers and sponsors of this reprehensible act of terrorism accountable and bring them to justice,” the press statement had said.
However, the press statement did not mention The Resistance Front as the group responsible for the attack after Pakistan managed to get the name removed with the support of China.
Tharoor has also said that when India saw what the Pakistanis were attempting to do during Operation Sindoor, using Chinese technology, for instance, the ‘kill chain’ that the Chinese specialise in, where the radar, GPS, planes and missiles are all linked together and they react instantly, “we simply did things in a different way. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have been able to hit” 11 Pakistani airfields and “we wouldn’t have been able to breach the Chinese-supplied air defences.
“So it’s clear that assessments were taking place while the fighting was happening, and we were recalibrating our strategies in order to end as effectively as we were able to end.”
“We have no illusions about the degree of commitment that China may well be feeling towards Pakistan,” given the enormity of its Belt and Road investments in Pakistan and its supply of arms to that country, he has said.