With border talks having made no headway and the long winter haul underway in Ladakh, India is steering clear from any further topics of conflict with China.
Referring to reports of China building a dam on its side of the Brahmaputra, Anurag Srivastava, spokesperson for the Ministry of external affairs (MEA), said China has on several occasions reassured India that its hydroelectric projects are run-of-the-river ones—and do not involve diversion of the Brahmaputra waters.
"As a lower riparian state with considerable established user rights to the water of the trans-border rivers, [the] government has consistently conveyed its views and concerns to the Chinese authorities and urged them to ensure that the interests of downstream states are not harmed by any activities in the upstream areas," he said.
"We have taken note of some media reports in this regard. Government carefully monitors all developments on the Brahmaputra river," Srivastava said.
In 2006, India and China established the Expert Level Mechanism to resolve issues relating to trans-border rivers. "We remain engaged with China on the issue of trans-border rivers to safeguard our interests,'' Srivastava said.
The MEA sidestepped requests for a response to a recent report by the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission, which said that China had planned the Galwan Valley clash in June. The response said that it was not a spontaneous breakout of fighting and that China had even factored in the loss of lives.
Srivastava said the core issue remains that "both sides need to strictly follow the various bilateral agreements and protocols in their entirety, including the 1993 and 1996 agreement on maintenance of peace and tranquillity along the LAC...which require that there should not be amassing of troops, each side should strictly abide by and respect the LAC and should not take any unilateral action to alter it.''
He added that both sides had agreed to another round of talks at the senior commanders level. The date for that, however, was not announced.
External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar had earlier spoken to Australian foreign minister Marise Pyne, even as Canberra and Beijing were engaged in a social media war over China's criticism of the killing of innocents in Afghanistan by Australian soldiers. Srivastava deflected a question on the timing of this call with the friction between Australia and China, saying that given the depth of the India-Australia relationship, there is naturally an exchange of views on regional and global developments as well as on current issues of concern. He went on to elaborate the recent intensiveness of the bilateral, with Australia joining the naval exercise Malabar 2020 this year for the first time.
"Australia is an important partner in the implementation of the Indo Pacific Oceans Initiative tabled by India as well as in the post-COVID economic rebalancing through building more resilient supply chains,'' he said.
