• Manish Tewari, MP

For the Parliament of India, the issues of Defence and National Security are paramount and thus there is no better place than the Parliament of India to hold discussions and debates on these issues. The government is answerable and accountable to the Parliament and I have exemplified enough that whenever there had been a challenge facing India’s national security, the contemporary governments did never try to avoid it. Instead, they clearly placed the circumstances of the time before the Parliament and the Parliament - be it the MPs of the ruling party or the MPs of the opposition - all of them said in unison that India’s unity and integrity, India’s sovereignty will neither be compromised with nor will they let it happen.

What I mean to say is - this is not about the government and the opposition. Conducting a discussion on this will only mean strengthening the government itself. You might remember that in 1994, the Parliament of India had unanimously passed a resolution that ‘The only unfinished business of partition is the reclaim of those territories illegally occupied by Pakistan.’ That resolution was unanimously reiterated in 2012 by the Parliament of India.

So, these have been the traditions of the Parliament of India regarding the national security of India. So that’s why it is a matter of utter surprise that this government wants to avoid discussion, I will not even call it a debate, why does it want to avoid discussion so much?

It has been three years now, since the stand of China on the Line of Actual Control (LAC) commenced in May 2020 and first of all, we would like to place on record our highest appreciation for the Indian Armed Forces which have not only ensured that intrusions from China are checked, but, have also repudiated and repulsed the Chinese on a number of occasions.

However, there are certain fundamental questions, which still remain unanswered and that fundamental question is- how and why did an intrusion or a transgression on such a large scale at multiple points along the Line of Actual Control (LAC) actually take place and the reason why this question becomes germane is because from 1993 till 2013 number of agreements were put in place and an entire architecture was constructed, in order to manage an ‘undemarcated and undelineated’ border with China.

This question also becomes all the more relevant as to why is an intrusion on such a large scale happened because the Prime Minister of India Shri Narendra Modi has interacted with President Xi Jinping since 2014, record nineteen times! He has visited China five times, which is in itself a record because no Prime Minister since 1947 has visited China so often.

Moreover, there have been these informal summits in Wuhan and Mamallapuram and notwithstanding this continues interaction - you had Chumur in 2014, you had Doklam in 2017, you had Galwan in 2020, you had the Yangtze River incident in December, 2022. So, this is one side of the story. On the other side, the Sino-Indian trade relationship seems to be booming.

In the year 2022, the Sino-Indian trade touched 136 billion dollars. India imported from China goods and services worth 119 billion dollars, exported a meagre 17.5 billion dollars and there is a 100-billion-dollar trade deficit in favour of China.

So, the question arises, are we at some level advertently or inadvertently subsidizing the transgressions by China? This becomes even more important because after the unfortunate incident in Galwan in June, 2020, when we lost officers and men of the Indian Army, the Prime Minister went on record in an All-Party meeting to say that there hasn’t been any Chinese transgression in Indian Territory. Now, if that statement is correct, you need to juxtapose it with a paper written by the senior superintendent of police of Leh, a paper presented to the conference of Director Generals of Police and Inspector Generals of Police but obviously not discussed for obvious reasons, in which it is clearly written that India has lost access to 25 of the 65 patrolling points along the Line of Actual Control (LAC).

Now, if this assertion made by a responsible police officer is correct, this is those 2,000 kilometers, which the opposition says- are the areas of Chinese transgressions and obviously, if we are not patrolling it, then we do not have access or control to it.

This becomes even more germane because you have the Bhutan-China boundary negotiations going on. Though the Bhutanese King has assured India that Indian concerns and sensitivities would be taken on board but the questions still remain that whether our sensitivities quo Doklam, which overlooks our Chicken Neck in the Northeast, will be fully taken care of or not.

There have been 18 military-to-military talks between the Indian Army and the People’s Liberation Army. There has been a meeting of the Joint Working Group which manages the border, in the February, 2022but there is a complete opacity. The government is completely unwilling to countenance any discussion on China.

Despite repeated efforts in September 2020, government has stone-walled any discussion in the Parliament on China and it’s been taken to an extent, whereby, even questions asked with regard to the border transgressions are not entertained. Close to 65 questions that I asked between September 2020 and now, have been struck down using the specuous rule.

When the government officials themselves who are related to that area, who are responsible for the civilian security of that area, who are the responsible officers - they have written a proper paper in which they have clearly mentioned the circumstances. So now no opposition is levelling allegations and India’s border is not an issue of allegations and counter-allegations, but if the responsible officers bring something to the notice of the government, then there has to be some fact in it somewhere and that is why we demand this. It has been said that this should be discussed in the Parliament, it should be discussed in detail, it has been the tradition of the Parliament.

I mentioned about 1962. In 1971, when Bangladesh was formed by former Prime Minister late Smt. Indira Gandhi, the winter session of the Parliament was going on and in that winter session war was going on too. So, on one side the winter session was going on and on the other side, the Prime Minister and Babu Jagjivan Ram, the Defense-Minister of the time, used to constantly inform the Parliament about the situation on the border, because both the Western Front and the Eastern Front were open. They constantly informed about what actions were being taken on them. So therefore, this opacity and paranoia is completely unnecessary.

Therefore, under those circumstances, we would like to demand that the government takes the opposition into confidence, convenes the meeting of the senior leaders of the opposition and comprehensively briefs them about the developments as they have evolved over the past 35 months and also appraise them as to what is the status of these military-to-military talks, as well as the negotiations, which currently seems to be playing out between China and India.

Based on Press Briefing by Shri Manish Tiwari, MP on April 5, 2023