- Thursday, April 25, 2024
By: Shubham Ghosh
INDIAN National Congress parliamentarian Rahul Gandhi on Wednesday (14) reportedly walked out of a defence committee meeting along with some of his parliamentary colleagues after they were not allowed to discuss the border issues with China, the northern neighbour with which India has faced serious conflicts in the recent past.
The meeting, according to the sources, was scheduled at 3 pm India time. Gandhi, the former president of India’s main opposition party, and the other party members of the parliament wanted to discuss the border row with China but they were allegedly denied the opportunity. Gandhi then reportedly walked out of the meeting and his colleagues followed him.
In a parliamentary strategy meeting chaired by party chief Sonia Gandhi, the Congress had decided to raise India’s border issue with China in the coming monsoon session of the parliament starting July 19.
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Mallikarjun Kharge, the Leader of the Opposition in the Rajya Sabha, the Upper House of the Parliament, has been asked to coordinate with allies on floor management and strategy inside the parliament, the sources added. The Congress aims to target the Narendra Modi government during the session over issues like fuel-price rise, inflation, shortage of Covid-19 vaccine, unemployment and the Rafale deal controversy, apart from broader issues like border conflicts with China.
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Rahul Gandhi has accused Modi government of ceding territory to China
Rahul Gandhi has long been slamming the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government alleging India has “ceded” territory to China. Troops from India and China clashed in eastern Ladakh’s Galwan Valley in June 2020. In February this year, the militaries of the two nuclear-armed neighbours reached an agreement on disengagement in the northern and southern banks of the Pangong Lake that asks both sides to cease forward deployment of troops in an orderly manner.
The Modi government had said then that India has not “ceded” any territory to China.
On Wednesday, India’s external affairs minister S Jaishankar met his Chinese counterpart Wang Li at the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation foreign ministers’ meeting in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, where they spoke on the border situation.
Jaishankar said he had told his Chinese counterpart that unilateral change of status quo was not acceptable and that the two had agreed on deciding on an early meeting between the senior military commanders of both countries.
