Jaishankar dismisses China’s claims on Arunachal Pradesh as ‘ludicrous’

Singapore: External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar on Saturday dismissed China’s repeated claims on Arunachal Pradesh as “ludicrous” and asserted that the frontier state was a “natural part of India”. In probably his first public comments on China’s frequent claims on Arunachal Pradesh and its opposition to Indian leaders visiting the state, Jaishankar said it was not a new issue.

“This is not a new issue. I mean China has laid claim, it has expanded its claim. The claims are ludicrous to begin with and remain ludicrous today,” he said in response to a question on the Arunachal issue after delivering a lecture at the prestigious Institute of South Asian Studies (ISAS) of the National University of Singapore (NUS). Responding to another question, Jaishankar said the challenge for India today is how to find the sustainable equilibrium between two rising powers, who also happen to be neighbours, and who have a history and a population, which sets them apart from the rest of the world and who also have capabilities.

Jaishankar said it came as a “great surprise” to India when the Chinese in 2020 “chose to do something on the border, which was completely violative of agreements we had reached”, referring to the Eastern Ladakh border standoff, which erupted on May 5, 2020,