External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar on Tuesday lashed out at Congress leader Rahul Gandhi for targeting the government over Chinese aggression on the Line of Actual Control (LAC) in eastern Ladakh. Jaishankar said it was not Rahul Gandhi, but Prime Minister Narendra Modi who sent Army to the LAC to counter the Chinese aggression.
“If I would have to sum up this China thing, please do not buy this narrative that somewhere the government is on the defensive...somewhere we are being accommodative. I ask people who sent the Indian Army to the LAC. Rahul Gandhi did not send them. Narendra Modi sent them. We have today the largest peacetime deployment in our history on the China border. We are keeping troops there at a huge cost with great effort,” the minister said in an interview to news agency ANI.
Claiming that the Modi government increased five times the infrastructure spending on the border, Jaishankar said the opposition party should have the honesty to look at what happened in 1962. Responding to allegations of Congress and other opposition parties that China was building a bridge on the Pangong Lake, the minister said the area had been under illegal occupation of China since the 1962 war.
“The Chinese first came there in 1958 and the Chinese captured it in October 1962. Now you are going to blame the Modi government in 2023 for a bridge which the Chinese captured in 1962,” he said.
