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‘Defence may be the wrong word’: Shashi Tharoor points at ‘China factor’ in Pakistan conflict
Shashi Tharoor pointed out that 81 percent of Pakistani defence equipment is from China and the largest BRI project is the China-Pakistan Economic Coridor.
Congress leader Shashi Tharoor said on Thursday that 81 percent of Pakistan's defence equipment comes from China, making the country an ‘impossible factor' to ignore in the conflict with Islamabad.
Tharoor, who is leading a parliamentary delegation to the US to expose Islamabad's nexus with terror after India’s Operation Sindoor, said that New Delhi-Beijing relations were making good progress till last month’s conflict with Pakistan.
“I'm not going to mince my words, but we are aware that China has immense stakes in Pakistan," PTI quoted Tharoor as telling the representatives of think tanks at the Indian Embassy in Washington DC.
Tharoor pointed out that the largest single project under the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), and that 81 percent of Pakistani defence equipment is from China.
“Defence may be the wrong word here. Offence in many ways……China is an absolutely impossible factor to ignore in what has been our confrontation with Pakistan,” Tharoor said.
Shashi Tharoor told the gathering that India had seen good progress in its relationship with China after tensions since the 2020 Galwan Valley clashes. The Thiruvananthapuram MP added that during Operation Sindoor and the conflict with Pakistan, New Delhi saw a very different China in terms of its support for Islamabad, even on the UN 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. 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 said.
China's help to Pakistan after the Pahalgam terror attack
The UN Security Council, on April 25, issued a press statement on the ‘terrorist attack in Jammu and Kashmir’ after the April 22 Pahalgam attack that killed 26 people, mostly tourists. The statement had condemned the attack in "the strongest terms” but did not mention The Resistance Front as Pakistan, which is a non-permanent member of the council, got it removed with China’s help.
“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.
Shashi Tharoor was asked about the Chinese military equipment that Pakistan used in the conflict during an earlier interaction at the Council on Foreign Relations.
The delegation head said that when India saw what the Pakistanis were attempting to do 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,” Tharoor said.
